I wonder if the U Papers in any way address the topic of the separate religion that sprung up from Jesus' life? Does it also underline the importance of Christianity dividing from Judaism?
Yes. More specifically, it talks about the two original branches of teachings which followed the death of Jesus. While some of his apostles began creating a religion about Jesus and the resurrection, which was later further transformed by Paul, Abner had been pushing for a religion that focused more on Christ's teachings.
(1831.6) 166:5.3 The Jews at Jerusalem had always had trouble with the Jews of Philadelphia. And after the death and resurrection of Jesus the Jerusalem church, of which James the Lord’s brother was head, began to have serious difficulties with the Philadelphia congregation of believers. Abner became the head of the Philadelphia church, continuing as such until his death. And this estrangement with Jerusalem explains why nothing is heard of Abner and his work in the Gospel records of the New Testament. This feud between Jerusalem and Philadelphia lasted throughout the lifetimes of James and Abner and continued for some time after the destruction of Jerusalem. Philadelphia was really the headquarters of the early church in the south and east as Antioch was in the north and west.
(1831.7) 166:5.4 It was the apparent misfortune of Abner to be at variance with all of the leaders of the early Christian church. He fell out with Peter and James (Jesus’ brother) over questions of administration and the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem church; he parted company with Paul over differences of philosophy and theology. Abner was more Babylonian than Hellenic in his philosophy, and he stubbornly resisted all attempts of Paul to remake the teachings of Jesus so as to present less that was objectionable, first to the Jews, then to the Greco-Roman believers in the mysteries.
(1832.1) 166:5.5 Thus was Abner compelled to live a life of isolation. He was head of a church which was without standing at Jerusalem. He had dared to defy James the Lord’s brother, who was subsequently supported by Peter. Such conduct effectively separated him from all his former associates. Then he dared to withstand Paul. Although he was wholly sympathetic with Paul in his mission to the gentiles, and though he supported him in his contentions with the church at Jerusalem, he bitterly opposed the version of Jesus’ teachings which Paul elected to preach. In his last years Abner denounced Paul as the “clever corrupter of the life teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of the living God.”
(1832.2) 166:5.6 During the later years of Abner and for some time thereafter, the believers at Philadelphia held more strictly to the religion of Jesus, as he lived and taught, than any other group on earth.
(1832.3) 166:5.7 Abner lived to be 89 years old, dying at Philadelphia on the 21st day of November, A.D. 74. And to the very end he was a faithful believer in, and teacher of, the gospel of the heavenly kingdom.
(1869.2) 171:1.6 Within a short time after the destruction of Jerusalem, Antioch became the headquarters of Pauline Christianity, while Philadelphia remained the center of the Abnerian kingdom of heaven. From Antioch the Pauline version of the teachings of Jesus and about Jesus spread to all the Western world; from Philadelphia the missionaries of the Abnerian version of the kingdom of heaven spread throughout Mesopotamia and Arabia until the later times when these uncompromising emissaries of the teachings of Jesus were overwhelmed by the sudden rise of Islam.
(2071.1) 195:1.1 The Hellenization of Christianity started in earnest on that eventful day when the Apostle Paul stood before the council of the Areopagus in Athens and told the Athenians about “the Unknown God.” There, under the shadow of the Acropolis, this Roman citizen proclaimed to these Greeks his version of the new religion which had taken origin in the Jewish land of Galilee. And there was something strangely alike in Greek philosophy and many of the teachings of Jesus. They had a common goal — both aimed at the emergence of the individual. The Greek, at social and political emergence; Jesus, at moral and spiritual emergence. The Greek taught intellectual liberalism leading to political freedom; Jesus taught spiritual liberalism leading to religious liberty. These two ideas put together constituted a new and mighty charter for human freedom; they presaged man’s social, political, and spiritual liberty.
(2071.2) 195:1.2 Christianity came into existence and triumphed over all contending religions primarily because of two things:
(2071.3) 195:1.3 1. The Greek mind was willing to borrow new and good ideas even from the Jews.
(2071.4) 195:1.4 2. Paul and his successors were willing but shrewd and sagacious compromisers; they were keen theologic traders.
(2071.5) 195:1.5 At the time Paul stood up in Athens preaching “Christ and Him Crucified,” the Greeks were spiritually hungry; they were inquiring, interested, and actually looking for spiritual truth. Never forget that at first the Romans fought Christianity, while the Greeks embraced it, and that it was the Greeks who literally forced the Romans subsequently to accept this new religion, as then modified, as a part of Greek
culture.
(2071.6) 195:1.6 The Greek revered beauty, the Jew holiness, but both peoples loved truth. For centuries the Greek had seriously thought and earnestly debated about all human problems — social, economic, political, and philosophic — except religion. Few Greeks had paid much attention to religion; they did not take even their own religion very seriously. For centuries the Jews had neglected these other fields of thought while they devoted their minds to religion. They took their religion very seriously, too seriously. As illuminated by the content of Jesus’ message, the united product of the centuries of the thought of these two peoples now became the driving power of a new order of human society and, to a certain extent, of a new order of human religious belief and practice.
(2071.7) 195:1.7 The influence of Greek culture had already penetrated the lands of the western Mediterranean when Alexander spread Hellenistic civilization over the near-Eastern world. The Greeks did very well with their religion and their politics as long as they lived in small city-states, but when the Macedonian king dared to expand Greece into an empire, stretching from the Adriatic to the Indus, trouble began. The art
and philosophy of Greece were fully equal to the task of imperial expansion, but not so with Greek political administration or religion. After the city-states of Greece had expanded into empire, their rather parochial gods seemed a little queer. The Greeks were really searching for one God, a greater and better God, when the Christianized version of the older Jewish religion came to them.
(2072.1) 195:1.8 The Hellenistic Empire, as such, could not endure. Its cultural sway continued on, but it endured only after securing from the West the Roman political genius for empire administration and after obtaining from the East a religion whose one God possessed empire dignity.
(2072.2) 195:1.9 In the first century after Christ, Hellenistic culture had already attained its highest levels; its retrogression had begun; learning was advancing but genius was declining. It was at this very time that the ideas and ideals of Jesus, which were partially embodied in Christianity, became a part of the salvage of Greek culture and learning.
(2072.3) 195:1.10 Alexander had charged on the East with the cultural gift of the civilization of Greece; Paul assaulted the West with the Christian version of the gospel of Jesus. And wherever the Greek culture prevailed throughout the West, there Hellenized Christianity took root.
(2072.4) 195:1.11 The Eastern version of the message of Jesus, notwithstanding that it remained more true to his teachings, continued to follow the uncompromising attitude of Abner. It never progressed as did the Hellenized version and was eventually lost in the Islamic movement.
In other words, the book holds Jesus in the same esteem as do the Christian faiths, or gives him greater import than other prophets or other divergent faith traditions.
Yes, except that Christians view Jesus as God the Son from the Trinity, which is impossible as the Trinity cannot directly leave Paradise. They also think Jesus died for their sins, which is also false.
I have always enjoyed the idea of the Ascended Masters and Teachers (Jesus is considered one of them), in which all of the various world prophets are regarded as visiting disparate areas of the earth to deliver one underlying message repeatedly throughout the ages, each inspired or guided by God. Just as we often hear that "It's the message that matters, not the messenger," this is what confuses me about such emphasis in placing one prophet above all others. Do the Urantia Papers address that thought at all?
Jesus was the last bestowal of our local Creator Son, he was both human and divine. All of the other prophets were human, unless you include Machiventa Melchizedek. While you may analyze the messages of the Prophets, we are meant to analyze Christ's actions. It was through his actions which others learned the love of the Father. He was not just a messenger, but an example. He was also the only human I know of to perform miracles, and the UB talks about each one. Most simply relied on the Creator Son's ability to abrogate time.
(1517.1) 136:5.5 Thus did Jesus become apprised of the working out of his decision to go on living as a man among men. He had by a single decision excluded all of his attendant universe hosts of varied intelligences from participating in his ensuing public ministry except in such matters as concerned time only. It therefore becomes evident that any possible supernatural or supposedly superhuman accompaniments of Jesus’ ministry pertained wholly to the elimination of time unless the Father in heaven specifically ruled otherwise. No miracle, ministry of mercy, or any other possible event occurring in connection with Jesus’ remaining earth labors could possibly be of the nature or character of an act transcending the natural laws established and regularly working in the affairs of man as he lives on Urantia except in this expressly stated matter of time. No limits, of course, could be placed upon the manifestations of “the Father’s will.” The elimination of time in connection with the expressed desire of this potential Sovereign of a universe could only be avoided by the direct and explicit act of the will of this God-man to the effect that time, as related to the act or event in question, should not be shortened or eliminated. In order to prevent the appearance of apparent time miracles, it was necessary for Jesus to remain constantly time conscious. Any lapse of time consciousness on his part, in connection with the entertainment of definite desire, was equivalent to the enactment of the thing conceived in the mind of this Creator Son, and without the intervention of time.
The U Papers not only grew up out of only one mind (with only one or two witnesses) but they are very recent, not ancient tradition at all, and that is why I ask you how you find an ability to place such emphasis on them, as they are not age-old wisdom, but quite new and non-encompassing by comparison to say, Sacred Geometry, which has been revered throughout the ages by divergent cultures as Divine.
A good number of people were involved with the book, and several personalities beyond the veil acted as the authors. First read
https://app.box.com/s/78slfxf8gqdhazssuh7x, and then read
https://app.box.com/s/ahk8obarjnrcrdmo5yba (mainly just the first five pages, although you're free to continue).
In the works I read, however, it was the many areas where those claims ran counter to accepted science that were emphasized. (The formation of the solar system; the age of the universe; the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy from Earth; the erroneous date of a prophesied solar eclipse and so on; the list was lengthy.) It also said that any area where the science was off so happened to be aligned with the scientific wisdom at that time, which later was revised or corrected.
This is covered in the ubastronomy link. There are actually two presentations, but the one I linked is more important.