Adapted from the Urantia Book original paper here.
The father and son from India that hired Jesus to travel with them to Rome, were named Gonod and Ganid. Jesus learned the basics of their language while he had been in Damascus helping to translate documents from the Greek. Their trip to Rome and around the Mediterranean Sea took almost two years, from April 26, A.D. 22, until December 10, A.D. 23. This period covered Jesus’ twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth years of age.
Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid left Jerusalem and made their way to Rome stopping at Joppa, Caesarea, Alexandria, Lasea in Crete, Carthage, Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Naples, and finally Capua. From where they traveled the Appian way into the heart of the Roman Empire. After their stay in Rome, the travelers made their way to Tarentum, and then sailed to Nicopolis, Corinth, and Athens. From there they went through Troas to Ephesus, and then sailed to Rhodes, Cyprus, and then Antioch. Going overland, they went south to Sidon and Damascus where they hopped a caravan going through Thapsacus and Larissa. They visited Babylon and Ur, before journeying through Susa to finally arrive at Charax, which was where Gonod and Ganid said good-bye to Jesus and returned home to India.
During this trip Jesus spent about half of his day tutoring Ganid and acting as Gonod’s interpreter for his business dealings, and for the rest of the day he’d wander around getting to know the people they met along the way. This two-year journey to and around Rome gave Jesus first-hand experience of the best and worst of the then known world, and from Gonod and Ganid he learned about the cultures in India and China and the far east.
At Joppa
The talk about Jonah
While they were at Joppa, Gonod had a business meeting with Simon, a wealthy tanner. His interpreter was a Philistine named Gadiah. This young man was a truth seeker, and without knowing it he had found in Jesus the actual truth then present on Earth. Gadiah became a believer in Jesus, and years later was a big influence on his boss, Simon, becoming a Christian.
One evening as Jesus and Gadiah were walking by the shore, Gadiah pointed out the spot where legend said that Jonah had set sail on his ill-fated voyage to Tarshish, and he asked Jesus if he thought that Jonah had really gotten swallowed whole by the whale.
Jesus sensed that this story of Jonah and the whale was important to Gadiah, and that it had already taught him that a person can’t run away from their problems. Jesus told Gadiah that in a way, we’re all Jonahs: That each of us has a duty to live God’s will, and in doing so we are influenced by truth and righteousness. But whenever we shirk that duty to God’s will and we try to run away and hide from it by escaping into material pleasures, we are then controlled by forces other than truth and righteousness.
Jesus was saying that our actions, as we work our way through this first life, dictate that type of spiritual influence we’ll receive. Our decision to do or not to do God’s will is the determining factor in whether or not we’re successful in our personal journey to Paradise and eternal life. If our will is to do God’s will, then the forces of truth and righteousness come forth to assist us in knowing what that will of God is, and then assist us in actually doing it. But if we chose to shirk our duty and move away from God, then we are led by our personal demons, that dark side that we all have in our own personalities. In this case, over time we don’t lose the possibility that we may turn around and return to God, we lose the desire to do so.
In other words, if we run away from our duty to embrace God’s will, we are in effect throwing away all of our ability to create truth, beauty, and goodness for the sake of short-term pleasure based in our personal selfishness. And each time we do this, we reinforce that pattern and it’s harder for us to break out of it at the end.
Think of these patterns like a dirt road of cosmic grooves going forward in time: the longer we keep going that direction the deeper our grooves get and the harder it is for us to jump out of them and start making new cosmic grooves in another direction. The whale that swallowed Jonah wasn’t a real whale, it was his own selfishness, and as always it would have led to darkness and death had he not in the end turned his heart to God.
And that is the teaching to know: that no matter how far a person falls, no matter what they’ve done or how down, discouraged, and defeated they are, if they turn back to God and with all of their hearts open themselves to truth and righteousness they’ll be saved and they’ll enter a new life of greater service and potential.
But beware. This is a dangerous and slippery slope to walk: A person, obviously, doesn’t have to wait until they’re in the stomach of the beast to choose God, and it’s best they don’t, because once they are there they may not have the strength to return to God.
The Talk about Good and Evil
Before leaving Joppa, Jesus and Gadiah talked about good and evil. Most people back then, and many still today, believed that God creates both good and evil. Gadiah, like many people over the ages, was confused and he wanted to know why this was. How could a God that is supposed to be only true and good make us suffer evil? Why was there this injustice in the world, he asked?
Jesus told Gadiah that God didn’t create evil. He explained that God is not only absolutely pure truth, beauty, and goodness, but that truth, beauty, and goodness are in fact the only things in creation that are real.
Evil is not a real thing that exists on its own. Instead, it’s the absence of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Evil happens when the web of truth, beauty, and goodness – the fabric of cosmic reality – is torn by an entity that rejects truth, beauty, and goodness, which is in effect, God.
In other words, God doesn’t create evil, we do. It’s the result of our ignorance, immaturity, and the outright rejection of life and light. Our power of choice creates the potential for error, which is evil, and then our deliberate choosing to make that error again after we know it’s not in line with God’s will turns that act into sin.
Both the reality of truth, beauty, and goodness, and the unreality of evil created from our willful acts against God, will exist side by side until the harvest at the end where only truth, beauty, and goodness continue to exist.
At Caesarea
Caesarea was the capital of Palestine and the home of the Roman governor. By the time Jesus, Gonod, and Ganid made it to the port, one of the steering paddles for their boat needed repaired so they ended up staying in Caesarea longer than expected. During the day, Jesus helped fix the big paddle and at night he’d walk with Ganid along the top of the wall surrounding the port. Caesarea was built in a way that the city used the ocean tides to flush the streets and sewers four times a day. It had a huge temple dedicated to the emperor Augustus, and there was an amphitheater that could seat twenty-thousand people. All of this was new to Ganid, and he enjoyed Jesus’ explanations about how everything worked and going with him to watch the plays in the amphitheater.
Jesus met a Taoist merchant from Mongolia who was staying at the same inn as they were. As a Taoist, this man believed in a universal God, and he never forgot Jesus’ belief in living every day in submission to the will of God. When this guy got back to Mongolia, he taught this wisdom to his friends, and as a result his oldest son decided to become a Taoist priest, as well as his son and his grandson after him. Jesus’ mission may have been centered in Palestine, but it was these chance face-to-face meetings with a person who would then take Jesus’ ideas back to their own countries that first spread his teachings around the world.
One day when Jesus was helping to repair the paddle for the boat, a young man working with him spoke up and disagreed when he heard Jesus say that God cared for his children. This guy’s name was Anaxand, and he told Jesus that if God cared for him then why did he have to suffer so much under his work foreman, who he said was cruel and unfair.
Jesus responded and turned the focus back to the young man. He told Anaxand that maybe the work foremen had been put there by God to learn from him. Jesus explained that since Anaxand knew how to be fair and kind, that he could teach the foreman how to be the same by his actions. Jesus said that Anaxand could act like the salt that would make this man more appealing by using the power of goodness that he, Anaxand, had in himself to win over the evil in his foreman. Jesus went on to tell Anaxand that a person’s decision to be a conduit for spiritual light to shine on a person sitting in spiritual darkness is the greatest of mortal adventures. Your responsibility, Jesus said, is to use your blessing of greater truth to meet your work foreman’s need of not having enough truth. In other words, Jesus said, if you’d save a man drowning man’s mortal life from the sea, it’s much more important would it be to save a spiritually drowning man’s soul.
And again, Jesus’ teachings carried on long after this talk. Both Anaxand, a Greek, and his work foreman, a Roman, later became important members of the church that Philip founded right there in Caesarea. Anaxand later became the steward of a Roman centurion named Cornelius, who himself then became a Christian through Peter’s preaching. Anaxand continued to spread Jesus’ message until he was caught up in a Roman slaughter of twenty thousand Jews, where he was killed by accident.
Ganid was a keen student, and he studied how Jesus lived his life. Ganid, like Jesus’ family, couldn’t understand why Jesus spent so much of his time talking to strangers. So one evening he asked Jesus about this.
Jesus’ explanation was simple: he told Ganid that for those people who know God, no one is a stranger. Jesus explained that if God is in your mind, and if God is in my mind, and if God is in the minds of everyone else then that makes us all brothers and sisters - and in a more real way than if we all had the same human parents.
Our job, Jesus said, is to know our human family, and to learn to love them. And doing so, Jesus told Ganid, is one of the highest experiences of living on Earth.
As this night wore on, Ganid changed the subject to the idea of will power. Again, he was confused. Ganid said that there’s the will of God, but that people also have free choice of will. He wanted to know the difference between our will, and God’s will.
Jesus explained to Ganid that God’s will is the big overall force controlling creation that we experience as ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness: it’s the power that is continually influencing everything that has eternal potential to become perfect. God’s will is the base of all being, the realm where all is one and from which all arises. It is the essence of nonduality.
But a person’s will is confined to that person, and it’s conditioned by the ways of the material realm; human free will demonstrates the sum and substance of what a person chooses to be. In other words, if a person makes a deliberate choice do God’s will regardless of other options, that person will experience the growth of becoming more and more like God.
Jesus’s answers only gave Ganid more questions. Earlier that day, Jesus and Ganid had been playing with a really smart shepherd dog. People back then, and still today, held various beliefs about animals having spiritual powers. So Ganid was wondering that if men could use their will to choose to become more and more God like, what about animals? Did that shepherd dog have the will power to choose God’s will, and could it have a soul?
Jesus told Ganid that no, animals don’t have a soul or spiritual power. He explained that humans are moral beings, in other words we can chose God’s will or not. This is because we have the mental power to reflect on what’s happening around us, and then filter through that mess to determine the best choice based on our highest spiritual and eternal values. In other words we have the ability to think, to then determine what is of spiritual value, and to then make a choice.
But animals can only be taught to follow commands. They don’t have the mental power to make this spiritual distinction or to grow into an eternal soul. We, humans, are conscious that we are conscious, in other words we’re superconscious. But animals aren’t; they’re aware that they’re alive, but they’re not conscious of that awareness. Animals can know man, but they can’t know God. And other beliefs like the ability of humans to incarnate into animals or to put their souls into them, are also false.
When Ganid’s father, Gonod, got into the discussion the next day, Jesus was more direct with his explanation on human will and eternal survival.
Jesus told them that people who only use their will to satisfy their material existence will die off eventually. This is because the less their mind is on God, the less they can look to God. What we don’t use, we lose. In time, these people will cease to be of spiritual value, and thus they’ll cease to exist. And this doesn’t happen because they’re being punished, but rather because they didn’t use what they were originally given and it finally faded away.
But on the other side, Jesus went on, those people who base their life decisions on moral and spiritual values will grow in their ability to identify with God. Where with the others each decision removes them from God, here each decision moves us closer to God. Every moral choice we make adds to our power to make even greater moral choices. Eventually, because of the person’s continued decisions to know God, their choices will transform them into an eternal soul.
To sum up the conversation, Jesus said that human free will is that power we have inside ourselves to express our creative desire to become Godlike by bringing forth truth, beauty, and goodness through the decisions we make every day.
At Alexandria
From Caesarea our travelers sailed to Alexandria, Egypt, home of the great lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This was the first lighthouse ever built. It was on an island at the entrance to the harbor, and it was connected to the shore by an underground tunnel.
Just like Palestine was the crossroads for the overland routes connecting the known world, Alexandria was the sea-going center for commerce across Asia, Africa, and Europe. As the three approached this great city and saw its magnificent beacon of lifesaving light, Jesus told Ganid that when he returned to India that he, Ganid, was going to be like this lighthouse. He was going to be a light of life leading all who desire to follow from the darkness of death to the harbor of eternal life and salvation. When he heard this, Ganid squeezed Jesus hand and promised that he’d do so.
Alexandria was a huge city; next to Rome it was the largest one in their world. It was also the home of the largest Jewish synagogue, and the seventy ruling elders of the Alexandrian Sanhedrin. After the travelers got settled in and saw some of the sites, Gonod went to take care of business while Jesus and Ganid made their way to the library.
The library at Alexandria was known as the most magnificent one in the world. It held almost a million writings from Rome, Greece, Palestine, Parthia, India, and even as far away as China and Japan. Our teacher and student spent part of each day exploring the library and talking about all of the different religions in the world. Jesus used his positive form of teaching, and he worked to teach Ganid the truth about God that each of the various faiths contained, rather than what each had wrong about God. And then at the end, Jesus would always add that the Jewish idea of Yahweh as the Lord God of Israel, which came from the actual teachings of Melchizedek and the covenant of Abraham long before, was closer to the truth of the Universal Father than any of the other religions at that time.
Jesus helped Ganid take notes and make a collection of the teachings in the various world religions. They kept the list to just those that recognized the idea of a Universal God over all others. Because of this, they left out the Romans because their idea of religion was just worshiping the emperor. And they left out the Greeks because they decided the Greeks had a lot of philosophy, but no God, at least no personal God. And as for the many different mystery cults, Jesus and Ganid decided that they were just a bunch of confused ideas from ancient religions. It wasn’t until the end of their stay in Rome that Ganid finally got around to organizing these notes, and when he did, he was surprised at how much they all agreed on the existence and character of an eternal God.
The museum at Alexandria was more like a university. It was the most important center of learning in that part of the world, and it was filled with art, science, and literature. The best professors of the time were there to give daily lectures on a wide range of subjects.
After a couple of weeks of translating these talks for Ganid, the young man told Jesus that he, Jesus, knew more than these professors. Ganid went on to say that he was going to arrange with his dad, Gonod, to work it out so that Jesus could lecture here, and teach the professors what he had taught him and his father. Jesus got a kick out of that, but said, no, that these guys wouldn’t appreciate him trying to teach them anything. Jesus explained that when people take too much pride in what they know about material things that have nothing to do with God, that it can result in stopping them from learning more, or at least it stops them from thinking they can learn more.
A real teacher, Jesus told Ganid, was a person that always stayed open to learning no matter how much they already knew.
Okay, folks, that’s it for Son of Man: Urantia, Chapter 9, “On the Way to Rome,” part 1.
Next week we continue with Chapter 9, “On the Way to Rome,” part 2.
Have a fantastic week out there.
Bob