The Origin of Urantia

57:0.1In pre­sent­ing ex­cerpts from the ar­chives of Je­ru­sem for the rec­ords of Uran­tia re­spect­ing its an­tecedents and early his­tory, we are di­rected to reckon time in terms of cur­rent us­age—the pres­ent leap-year cal­en­dar of 365¼ days to the year. As a rule, no at­tempt will be made to give ex­act years, though they are of rec­ord. We will use the near­est whole num­bers as the bet­ter method of pre­sent­ing these his­toric facts.

57:0.2When re­fer­ring to an event as of one or two mil­lions of years ago, we in­tend to date such an oc­cur­rence back that num­ber of years from the early decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury of the Chris­tian era. We will thus de­pict these far-dis­tant events as oc­cur­ring in even pe­ri­ods of thou­sands, mil­lions, and bil­lions of years.