Rodan was a distinguished first-century Greek philosopher from Alexandria, Egypt (pictured above) whose name has been lost to history. The world first learned about this ancient teacher from The Urantia Book (1955), a modern revelatory teaching that greatly expands the story of the life of Jesus and his original teachings. At the Institute, we work especially with this thrilling 775-page narration—a massive update to the New Testament. This highly detailed new account of Jesus’s life according to the angelic record and lost human records—including the missing years—can be found in the concluding section of the Urantia Revelation, which now has over one million copies distributed worldwide in all major languages.This new site is under construction, so please sign up below for our updates coming soon.
We take inspiration from the unique story of Rodan, whom we are told met Jesus, recognized his divinity, and embraced the new gospel. The Urantia Book states that Rodan became one of the most influential first-generation Christian thinkers—even though he is not mentioned in the Bible or other historical accounts. So, who exactly is this mysterious figure and why is a first-century philosopher being honored by an new institute focused on the religion of the future?
The UB offers only a few details of Rodan’s personal life. But it singles him out by providing two entire Papers (160 and 161) that summarize his philosophy of living in relation to the original gospel message. This makes Rodan the only other contemporary of Jesus whose teaching is highlighted in the stunning new biography of Jesus comprising the fourth part of the Urantia text. The other three sections of the 2,096-page Urantia revelation cover such topics as the nature of God’s love and mercy, post-Einsteinian evolutionary cosmology, evolution of the soul, spiritual psychology, our planet’s tragic history and pre-history, the nature of angelic and extraterrestial life, and our eternal life and ascension after death. Institute courses, seminars, interviews, and publications cover these aspects of the Urantia text as essential background for understanding the epochal significance of the person and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Rodan is also highly significant because we learn that two of his pupils later evangelized the “Hellenists of Jerusalem,” who went on to carry the gospel to the “uttermost parts of the empire” (194:4.13). Their interpretation of the gospel differed from that of Peter, Paul, Andrew, and the other Jewish apostles, because the Greek rendition of Jesus’s message focused more on his actual teachings, rather than a gospel about the crucified and risen Christ. Much later, this same Greek lineage, probably founded by Rodan and his students, became the source of the Eastern Christian practice of theosis or “deification”—the fervent quest for direct contact (and ultimate fusion) with the Indwelling Spirit of God. This practice, which also incorporates stillness (or hesychia) and the advanced practice of Prayer of the Heart, was elaborated in the Byzantine east during the course of many centuries in response to Jesus’ instruction to “be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matt 5:8), a primary teaching emphasized throughout the Urantia revelation.
In this same spirit, we at Rodan Institute foster this inward quest for theosis and support the advanced comprehension of this new life of Jesus against the backdrop of a modern cosmology—accompanied by a revelatory update of the history of our planet, named Urantia. We now have much more to go on that allows us to build on revered biblical texts and modernize the sacred traditions of the Eastern Church.
The greatest of all methods of problem solving I have learned from Jesus, your Master. I refer to that which he so consistently practices, and which he has so faithfully taught you, the isolation of worshipful meditation.
Deficiencies [in my philosophy] have been abundantly supplied by this new gospel of Jesus. . . . Without doubts and misgivings I can now wholeheartedly enter upon the eternal venture.
Prejudice can be eliminated only by the abandonment of self-seeking and by substituting therefor the quest of the satisfaction of the service of a cause that is not only greater than self, but one that is even greater than all humanity—the search for God, the attainment of divinity.
If something has become a religion in your experience, it is self-evident that you already have become an active evangel of that religion since you deem the supreme concept of your religion as being worthy of the worship of all mankind, all universe intelligences.
“The social characteristics of a true religion consist in the fact that it invariably seeks to convert the individual and to transform the world.”