© 2001 Ken Glasziou
© 2001 The Brotherhood of Man Library
This article has been published previously in a paper entitled Science, Archaeology, and Anthropology in The Urantia Book. Its results are given here for those who have not seen the original and also to make it available for perusal on the Fellowship’s web site.
Various skeptics have put forward the names of a number of authors whom they think may have been responsible for writing the Urantia Papers. Among these suggestions are Dr W. Sadler, Wilfred Kellogg, Carl Jung, H.G. Wells, and Robert Millikan.
I first read the book in response to a request to give an opinion on the possibility of it being revelation. My initial attitude was highly skeptical, my reaction being that it must have been written by a group of well-meaning academics on a save-the-world mission.
As I became more familiar with the Papers, I was impressed by the consistency of their content. But at this early stage I was not prepared to suggest that this book was anything other than the work of human beings. Part 4, “The Life of Jesus,” impressed me as being an outstanding exposition. In it, I again met the Jesus I had long known through an intense study of the Gospels.
For the remainder, I had noticed a number of statements, mainly on matters of science, that were remarkably prophetic if made in the mid-1930’s. Some of these would even have been remarkable at the time of first publication of the book in 1955. So to my inquirers, I recommended that they take what they found valuable from its content and keep an open mind about its revelatory status.
About 15 years later I came upon a book entitled The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny that discussed various ways of checking on works in which authorship is in doubt—for example, the various epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament. Some methods depended on the rate of occurrence of unusual words or phrases, others on statistical analysis of the length of sentences, or other characteristics that gave “style” to a particular author. The favored method, where it could be applied, was one used by Mosteller and Wallace that depended, not on unusual words and phrases, but on the way authors use common words to commence sentences or to join clauses and phrases. Such words were classed as “marker” and “function” words and included also, an, by, but, the, and, when, etc. Experience had shown that unusual words were virtually useless for statistical analysis purposes. It is the way authors habitually use frequently occurring words that best distinguishes one author from another.
While reading about the work of Mosteller and Wallace, I realized that the tools were already available to shed light on multiple authorship for the Urantia Papers. These tools were a searchable data base for the book (Folio Views), plus the means of transferring text to a word processor having the facility to provide word counts for individual papers. With these tools, it is relatively easy to obtain statistics on the number of sentences that commence with marker words and to quantify these in terms of word count.
TABLE 1. A COMPARISON OF WRITING STYLES IN DIFFERENT SECTIONS AND PAPERS IN THE UR4NTIA BOOK
| Word | Comparison made | Probability of difference (%) |
|---|---|---|
| How | Part 4 & Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| When | Part 4 & Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| When | Divine Counselor & whole book | 1.0 |
| When | Life carrier & whole book | 1.0 |
| When | Melchizedek & whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Foreword & Divine Counselor | 0.1 |
| And | Foreword & whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Foreword & Part 1 | 1.0 |
| And | Part I & whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Part 2 & whole | 0.1 |
| And | Solitaty Messenget & whole book | 5.0 |
| And | Solitary Messenger & Part 3 | 5.0 |
| And | Part 4 & whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Part 4 & Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| For | Part 4 & Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| For | Life Carrier & Part 3 | 1.0 |
| But | Part 3 & Parts 1,2,4 | 0.1 |
| But | Life Carrier & Parts 1,2,4 | 1.0 |
| But | Melchizedek & Parts 1,2,4 | 5.0 |
| But | Solitary Messenger & Parts 1,2,4 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 & Parts 1,2 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 & Part 1 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 & Part 2 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 & Part 3 | 0.1 |
| This | Foreword & whole book | 1.0 |
| This | Life Carrier & whole book | 0.1 |
| This | Foreword & Divino Counselor | 0.1 |
The first investigation had the limited goal of deciding whether a single author wrote the book. The results (Table 1) were first printed in the Australian newsletter Six-O-Six, Vol. 13 (2), 1992 and indicated that there may have been in excess of nine authors. Later, my son, Paul, who has a Ph.D. in maths and statistics, suggested that a more rigorous investigation could be done for those authors to whom multiple papers were attributed. Such an analysis permitted the inclusion of estimates of variance both within and between authors. Five sets of four or more papers from five authors were chosen in which there was reasonable certainty that each set was attributable to the same author. The results for this investigation were printed in Six-O-Six, Vol 14 (3), 1993, and clearly distinguished between each of the five authors. Besides the data given in Table 2, a global likelihood ratio test in a logical regression analysis showed that for the marker word “And,” the results indicated four or more authors at a probability level of 0.0003. For the marker word “The,” three or more authors were indicated at a probability level of 0.0001.
For the first investigation, in addition to attempting to demonstrate multiple authorship, an effort was made to throw light on whether Dr Sadler was the single author postulated by others. The only work of Dr Sadler then available to me in Australia was a short essay entitled, “Evolution of the Soul,” in which about half of the text was direct quotation from The Urantia Book. The essay was too short to use the Mosteller and Wallace methods. However, after separating The Urantia Book text from the remainder, the two sections were subjected to a computerized style analysis program that provided scores on the basis of sentence length, sentence structure, and the Flesch Reading Ease Index. Each of these characteristics differentiated two distinct writing styles at statistically significant levels, thus indicating that Dr Sadler was not the author of The Urantia Book quotations from that essay.
| Author | Brilliant Evening Star | Solonia | Chief of Seraphim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solonia | And, P = .025; The, P = .001 A or An, P = .001 |
||
| Chief of Seraphim | And, P = .05; The, P = .001 But, P = .005; A or An, P = .001 |
And, P = .001; The, P = .005 A or An, P = .025; But, P = .05 |
|
| Archangel of Nebadon | And, P = .025; The, P = .005 But, P = .001 |
And, P = .001; The, P = .001 A or An, P = .005; But, P = .05 |
And, P = .005; But, P = .025 This, P = .005 |
| Perfector of Wisdom | And, P = .05; The, P = .005 But, P = .001; A or An, P = .001 |
And, P = .001; A or An, P = .05 As, P = .025 |
The, P = .005; But, P = .01 Many, P = .001 |
Table 2. The probabilities that pairs of authors of multiple Urantia Papers are different individuals as indicated by the frequency of sentences commencing with the marker words And; The; But; A or An; This; Many; Its All five authors are distinguishable from one another. Note: Data for the comparison of Perfector of Wisdom and Archangel of Nebadon have been omitted to allow an increase in font size. These were: And, P = .001; This, P = .001; It, P = .001.
The investigation on the involvement of Dr Sadler in the authorship of The Urantia Papers has come under some criticism on the basis of the small sample size of the essay, “Evolution of the Soul.” In 1996, courtesy of Dr Matt Neibaur, I was provided with “The Mind at Mischief,” a book published by Dr Sadler in 1929 that has permitted a more extensive investigation. I scanned a little more than fifty pages of this book, almost 20,000 words, into my computer, with which to test Dr Sadler’s writing style against the data already accumulated for the Mosteller and Wallace type of investigation on authorship. The Sadler text material was converted into a FolioViews database, then tested against the data for those five Urantia Book authors accredited with multiple papers. From 37 tests, 35 distinguished between Dr Sadler and the Urantia Paper author at odds of 20 to 1 or better, 30 being at 100 to 1 or greater, and 14 being better than 1000 to 1. Only two of the tests failed to attain significance (less than 20 to 1).
The Urantia Book material quoted in Dr Sadler’s aforementioned essay had been drawn from Papers 5, 110, and 111. Again using Mosteller and Wallace methodology, in two tests the Mind at Mischief sample was compared with these Papers and showed significant differences at the 100 to 1 and 1000 to 1 levels. In his book “Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery,” Martin Gardner offered the opinion that Dr Sadler wrote Part 4 of The Urantia Book. To check this suggestion, a further two tests were made of the “Mind at Mischief” material against Papers 195 and 196 from Part 4 of the book with the result that both tests showed significant differences at the 1000 to 1 probability level.
It is a fact that some of the same unusual words and expressions are to be found in both the writings of Dr Sadler and in the Urantia Papers. This is hardly surprising since Sadler admitted to being continuously exposed to the content of the various Urantia Papers, or their precursors, certainly since 1911 and possibly since 1906, long before the final drafts of the Papers were completed.
I have been reading these papers for about twenty years, have an appalling memory for poetry, literature, quotations, etc., yet still find that some of the book’s “peculiar” words and phrases have become my own. Many other readers have had the same experience. While the possibility of a degree of editing cannot be excluded, this statistical evidence rules out extensive authorship of the Papers by Dr Sadler.
The statistical evidence refutes this assumption and shows that any proposal nominating a source for the Urantia Papers must take multiple authorship into account. Matthew Block’s investigations that uncovered some of the human sources used by the authors of the Papers indicate that this quoted material sometimes retains traces of its origin that are then incorporated into the text of the Urantia Book. However the extent of quotation of this material appears to be insufficient to have any marked effect upon the conclusions drawn from the statistical analysis work herein reported.
Martin Gardner’s proposal that the subconscious mind of a sleeping human subject was the original source of the textual material of the Urantia Papers cannot be reconciled with the statistical evidence presented. This evidence demonstrates that many different authors were heavily involved in the writing of the Urantia Papers, probably far more than the minimum of about nine suggested by the investigation. Some editing by Dr Sadler and others cannot be ruled out but no extensive incorporation of Sadler’s work showed up in the papers that were tested.
This work does not rule out the involvement of a substantial committee of well qualified and erudite people as the real authors. But if there were such a committee, it becomes necessary to account for the truly remarkable consistency of this 2000 page work—a work that was written long before powerful computers became available to aid detection of inconsistencies.
Extensive investigations by Gardner and others have also failed to uncover the slightest hint of such involvement. Nor have they offered any explanation on how total secrecy could have been maintained for so long.
The principal conclusion drawn from this analysis is that many unidentified authors were responsible for the writing of the Urantia Papers. Statistical analysis can do nothing to confirm or deny a revelatory origin. Personally I believe I have the aid of the spirit forces so often mentioned in the papers—the indwelling spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Truth—to help me in my decision making. But regardless of the degree of authority we ascribe to the Papers, the fact remains that these Urantia Papers are a truly remarkable contribution to our religious literature. Again stating a personal view, their value far surpasses anything else available to mankind.
One of the most profound statements in the Urantia Papers is: “Jesus lived a life which is a revelation of man submitted to the Father’s will.” (UB 194:2.8)
Those who comprehend the full significance of these words need nothing more.