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is errorless, nor that anything that appears to indicate error must be wrong.
The Forty day problem
In Paper 193, Section 5 we can read that the Master's ascension took place early on Thursday morning, May 18. In the same section (p. 2057), we can read reference to the forty days of Jesus' morontia career. This story continues onto page 2059. Here the book says that at one o'clock on the same day as the ascension, one hundred and twenty believers were engaged in prayer when the Spirit of Truth was bestowed upon them. This was on the day of Pentecost. At the top of page 2060 we read how the apostles had been in hiding for forty days. This refers to the same period as for Jesus' morontia career.
If we turn back to page 1987, we find that Jesus was brought before Pilate on Friday 7th April, the day before the Jewish Passover. The apostles were in hiding from the afternoon of that day until the morning of the ascension on May 18, about forty full days.
The Jewish Passover is reckoned as occurring on the first new moon after the March Equinox. The ancient Jewish feast of Pentecost is celebrated exactly fifty days later--hence the term Pentecost (from the Greek pentekostos meaning fifty days). So how did a fifty day period in the Jewish calendar become forty days in The Urantia Book?
Easter and Pentecost
Reckoning for both of Christianity's Easter and Pentecost celebrations follows the Jewish tradition. How The Urantia Book acquired this set of errors is close to impossible to conceive. It cannot be a simple type setting error or even an error of copy editing as there are too many actual days and dates given in the text to permit that conclusion.
Why is it so?
I also find it impossible to conceive that the Midwayers of all people, could have made this set of errors. Neither can I understand how the errors were overlooked by the large number of people reputed to have read the Papers during and after their receipt. The fact that Dr Sadler and others knew about the forty day error when the book went to press is discussed in "Notes on the Forty Day Error" an addendum to the article "Forty Days and Forty Nights," both of which appear later in this issue.
At enormous risk to life and limb, I'm forced to speculate that since the presence of the error was known before the printing of the book, correction was probably refused by the revelators. Why? Well, perhaps to discourage attempts to attribute infallibility to the book, something that was already then occurring.
Ken Glasziou
References
1. Honderich, T. (Editor) "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy" (Oxford University Press, 1995. Oxford)
2. Rowe, William "The Cosmological Argument" (Princeton, NJ, 1975)
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