The Melchizedek Missionaries

The Urantia Book; Paper 93, Section 7

^{P1021:5, 93:7.1} Melchizedek continued for some years to instruct his students and to train the Salem missionaries, who penetrated to all the surrounding tribes, especially to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. And as the decades passed, these teachers journeyed farther and farther from Salem, carrying with them Machiventa's gospel of belief and faith in God.

^{P1021:6, 93:7.2} The descendants of Adamson, clustered about the shores of the lake of Van, were willing listeners to the Hittite teachers of the Salem cult. From this onetime Andite center, teachers were dispatched to the remote regions of both Europe and Asia. Salem missionaries penetrated all Europe, even to the British Isles. One group went by way of the Faroes to the Andonites of Iceland, while another traversed China and reached the Japanese of the eastern islands. The lives and experiences of the men and women who ventured forth from Salem, Mesopotamia, and Lake Van to enlighten the tribes of the Eastern Hemisphere present a heroic chapter in the annals of the human race.

^{P1022:1, 93:7.3} But the task was so great and the tribes were so backward that the results were vague and indefinite. From one generation to another the Salem gospel found lodgment here and there, but except in Palestine, never was the idea of one God able to claim the continued allegiance of a whole tribe or race. Long before the coming of Jesus the teachings of the early Salem missionaries had become generally submerged in the older and more universal superstitions and beliefs. The original Melchizedek gospel had been almost wholly absorbed in the beliefs in the Great Mother, the Sun, and other ancient cults.

^{P1022:2, 93:7.4} You who today enjoy the advantages of the art of printing little understand how difficult it was to perpetuate truth during these earlier times; how easy it was to lose sight of a new doctrine from one generation to another. There was always a tendency for the new doctrine to become absorbed into the older body of religious teaching and magical practice. A new revelation is always contaminated by the older evolutionary beliefs.

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