© 1992 Ken Glasziou
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
by Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Queensland
We have been led to believe that, following the completion of the plates for the first printing of The URANTIA Book, orders were given for the original URANTIA Papers to be destroyed. Hence the text for that first printing is the most authentic one now available, and is the text that future translators and scholars will need for their work.
The number of corrections made since the first printing is in excess of one hundred. Apparently some changes were made to correct the grammatical errors of the revelators. Then there are a number of textual changes that appear to have been made in attempt to correct what were perceived as errors made by the revelators.
For example, on page 477 , para 1 , the first printing stated:
“Each atom is a trifle over 1/100,000,000th of an inch in diameter, while an electron weighs a little more than 1/2,000th of the smallest atom, hydrogen. The positive proton, characteristic of the atomic nucleus, while it may be no larger than a negative electron, weighs almost two thousand times more.” UB 42:6.7
In the second and subsequent printings the wording was changed to “an electron weighs a little more than 1/2000th…” and “weighs almost two thousand times more.”
In my opinion there can only be one edition of the U.B.
Nobody could make a proofing error such as that. My correspondence with a former trustee contains these words, “I had only one experience with a textual change being made between printings. This was due to the diligence of a high school science teacher who had a B.S. in science and had read in a scientific journal that a specific figure given in The URANTIA Book expressing the relationship between the mass of the nucleus and the planetary electron had changed by one digit. He was able to persuade the people at 533 to change it in the second printing… I raised quite a ruckus about the matter and it was returned to its original status in the very next printing…In my opinion there can only be one edition of the U.B., the first…” It appears that the change back demanded by this ex-trustee was never made.
There are at least eleven textual changes that seem to have been attempts to correct what were thought to be mistakes by the revelators.
These are:
UB 0:1.24, “other” deleted from “all other manifestations”
UB 37:8.3, “secondary” changed to “tertiary”
UB 41:4.4, “sixty” changed to “forty”
UB 42:6.7, “less” changed to “more”
UB 42:6.7, “from two to three” changed to “almost”
UB 42:7.7, “well-nigh” added before “instantaneous”
UB 53:7.8, “681,227” changed to “ 681,217 ” (to agree with p. 581 — 13 plus 681,204 ‘Adams’)
UB 79:5.2, “west” changed to “east”
UB 119:7.6, “in the manger” deleted from “newborn child in the manger”
UB 168:3.4, “day” changed to “week”
UB 179:5.2, “twelve” changed to “apostles”
In agreement with my retired-trustee friend, I believe that it is imperative that all of these changes be returned to the original text. If they are genuine mistakes by the revelators then so be it. The revelators made no claim to infallibility. Neither can I conceive of any valid reason to correct supposed grammatical errors attributable to the revelators.
Many of the punctuation and spelling changes are probably real errors in proofing. When this is not in doubt, then perhaps changes are warranted, but even those should be listed in an appendix. Personally, I would prefer to stick to the unaltered text of the first printing.
I will leave it to readers to reconcile my comments with the following statement from the November 1991 issue of the Foundation’s publication, ‘URANTIAN News’: “From time to time the Trustees have authorized changes which corrected spelling, grammatical, or printing errors. The current trustees are also aware of a few changes to the text undertaken in the second printing. These were corrections made necessary because of incomplete proofing of the first printing.” Few of the textual changes enumerated above appear to even resemble the normal kind of proofing error and most, if not all, appear to be attempts to rectify what were conceived to be errors by the revelators.
