2021
By June, several new members joined the team: Lourdes, Mairam and Chichi from Peru, Juan from Canada, and Jim from the United States.
We had a lively discussion about: branding, community building, fundraising and our positioning within the UB community (minutes here, pp. 7-14).
During 2021, Jim English and I had many weekly meetings where we would muse about various topics, not limited to our dream of creating a cinematic version of Jesus’ life and teachings based on the Urantia Papers.
On July 30th, I had a weird morning. I got up and had an urgent urge to open the recording app on my phone and speak. The ideas that poured forward had to do with writing original scripts for short films and crowdsourcing the films from young truthseekers around the world by sharing a version of Jesus they didn’t know.
In August, Ben Bowler joined the Advisory Board. I value his wisdom and counsel and we have regular meetings to discuss various topics related to these projects. Thank you so much, Ben!
On Aug 20th, the Jesus Metaverse was born. Jim mentioned he heard the name Metaverse already circulating in the media and he made the connection to an extended concept for our “virtual center”. Jim’s insight had to do with the concept of a “clearinghouse of information” about Jesus’ life and teachings.
During August I wrote an article for the Tidings publication of Urantia Association. It already mentions the Jesus Metaverse, but still not the Jesus Museum. We decided to officially rename the “physical center” and the “virtual center” on our September Advisory Board meeting.
Jim planted a seed, which started to work in my mind. By September 5th, I could start to articulate it (see this video). The first iteration of the Jesus Metaverse app was centered around a timeline, a map and cinematic presentations. The conceptual design is described here.
The image above is the home page Gary Tonge designed (later this year).
How can we create “a clearinghouse of the life and teachings of Jesus?
I started to search for the right technology and process. Someone I talked to mentioned a database called Neo4j. When I started researching, it very quickly became apparent that this was the solution.
One of the key innovations of the Jesus Metaverse is the idea to create a knowledge graph representing the life and teachings of Jesus according to the Urantia Papers.
So, I started thinking on how to create this knowledge graph. What are the key entity types that would describe the life and teachings of Jesus?
These are the ones that came to mind. I was reading one of the Jesus Papers and asked myself what are the most important pieces of information.
I decided to note:
- Every Person mentioned in the Jesus Papers
- Every Relationship (between two Persons)
- Every Group (three or more Persons)
- Every Event (something that happened at a particular Time and Location)
- Every Time (a date)
- Every Location (a place, such as that would appear on a map)
- Every Object (something big, like the Library of Alexandria, The Temple at Jerusalem or the house of Joseph and Mary in Nazareth).
- Every Topic of interest (something we can write an essay about)
This is what I created with Neo4j:
Once this knowledge graph emerged, I had to find the right tool to collect (“curate”) all these “nodes” (the circles in the graph) and the “connections” (the lines in the graph).
Adam Collette introduced me to the Airtable, and I immediately fell in love with it. I started building the knowledge graph in an Airtable (the mode is alive, it keeps updating, and you can see the latest version here).
The next step was to look for the qualified software engineers who can produce a prototype version of the app (Proof of Concept, or POC). I went on Fiverr to look for a Neo4j expert and found Brad Patterson. Brad suggested his friend Craig Mann could work on the front-end. I hired them both to work on the POC, and Gary and I directed the work. More on that to come…
All the while, Jim and I kept talking about creating a series of original short films based on fictional stories inspired by the Urantia Papers. We decided to set up a Writer’s room and experiment with writing short scripts. To that end, I talked to Rex Deverell and Errol Strider and they both decided to join us in exploration. We had our first meeting in September. That was the first iteration of the Cinematic Jesus project.
To be continued….
