The British Study Edition of The Urantia Papers is a translation of the Fifth Epochal Revelation (also known as “The Urantia Book”) from American to British English as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English. It has the following main features:
1. The Standard Reference Text (SRT) has been used as a base of this work.
2. All significant changes to the text (present also in SRT) are documented in the critical apparatus, together with a brief explanation of the reason for the change.
3. Study notes have been added.
4. The symbol ¶ marks the first paragraph in the group as in the 1955 first printing, where such groups were delimited by blank lines.
5. All distance and temperature measures have been converted to metric units, except where there was even the slightest potential for error, such as in the use of “Jerusem miles”, which was left intact. The idiomatic expressions like “carry his pack for a mile” were also left intact, obviously.
6. Long and hard to memorise phrases like “three hundred and forty-five thousand” have been converted to a more compact form “345,000”. Likewise, for phrases like “seventy-five per cent”, a more compact form of “75%” was chosen. Likewise, the time designations like “fifteen minutes past four o’clock” now read “16:15”.
7. The designation of the author of each paper (and Foreword) is printed in italics on a line by itself just before the text.
8. SRT paragraph numbering is used both in the superscript and in the paragraph ranges printed in the header of every page.
9. Possible textual corruptions are indicated in the footnotes.
For deriving etymology of the words coined by the revelators, I acknowledge the use of the notes by Dr Chris Halvorson. Many thanks to my friend Mitch Austin for helpful suggestions and comments, some of which have been incorporated into the study notes of the present edition.
Tigran Aivazian, London.