The Times of Michael’s Bestowal

121:1.1Je­sus did not come to this world dur­ing an age of spir­i­tual deca­dence; at the time of his birth Uran­tia was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing such a re­vival of spir­i­tual think­ing and re­li­gious liv­ing as it had not known in all its pre­vi­ous post-Adamic his­tory nor has ex­pe­ri­enced in any era since. When Mi­chael in­car­nated on Uran­tia, the world pre­sented the most fa­vor­able con­di­tion for the Cre­ator Son’s be­stowal that had ever pre­vi­ously pre­vailed or has since ob­tained. In the cen­turies just prior to these times Greek cul­ture and the Greek lan­guage had spread over Oc­ci­dent and near Ori­ent, and the Jews, be­ing a Lev­an­tine race, in na­ture part Oc­ci­den­tal and part Ori­en­tal, were em­i­nently fit­ted to uti­lize such cul­tural and lin­guis­tic set­tings for the ef­fec­tive spread of a new re­li­gion to both East and West. These most fa­vor­able cir­cum­stances were fur­ther en­hanced by the tol­er­ant po­lit­i­cal rule of the Med­i­ter­ra­nean world by the Ro­mans.

121:1.2This en­tire com­bi­na­tion of world in­flu­ences is well il­lus­trated by the ac­tiv­i­ties of Paul, who, be­ing in re­li­gious cul­ture a He­brew of the He­brews, pro­claimed the gospel of a Jew­ish Mes­siah in the Greek tongue, while he him­self was a Ro­man cit­i­zen.

121:1.3Noth­ing like the civ­i­liza­tion of the times of Je­sus has been seen in the Oc­ci­dent be­fore or since those days. Eu­ro­pean civ­i­liza­tion was uni­fied and co-or­di­nated un­der an ex­traor­di­nary three­fold in­flu­ence:

121:1.41. The Ro­man po­lit­i­cal and so­cial sys­tems.

121:1.52. The Gre­cian lan­guage and cul­ture—and phi­los­o­phy to a cer­tain ex­tent.

121:1.63. The rapidly spread­ing in­flu­ence of Jew­ish re­li­gious and moral teach­ings.

121:1.7When Je­sus was born, the en­tire Med­i­ter­ra­nean world was a uni­fied em­pire. Good roads, for the first time in the world’s his­tory, in­ter­con­nected many ma­jor cen­ters. The seas were cleared of pi­rates, and a great era of trade and travel was rapidly ad­vanc­ing. Eu­rope did not again en­joy an­other such pe­riod of travel and trade un­til the nine­teenth cen­tury af­ter Christ.

121:1.8Not­with­stand­ing the in­ter­nal peace and su­per­fi­cial pros­per­ity of the Greco-Ro­man world, a ma­jor­ity of the in­hab­i­tants of the em­pire lan­guished in squalor and pov­erty. The small up­per class was rich; a mis­er­able and im­pov­er­ished lower class em­braced the rank and file of hu­man­ity. There was no happy and pros­per­ous mid­dle class in those days; it had just be­gun to make its ap­pear­ance in Ro­man so­ci­ety.

121:1.9The first strug­gles be­tween the ex­pand­ing Ro­man and Parthian states had been con­cluded in the then re­cent past, leav­ing Syria in the hands of the Ro­mans. In the times of Je­sus, Pales­tine and Syria were en­joy­ing a pe­riod of pros­per­ity, rel­a­tive peace, and ex­ten­sive com­mer­cial in­ter­course with the lands to both the East and the West.