Papers & Sections

The Urantia Book is structured as 197 papers organized into 4 parts, with the Foreword as Paper 0. Each paper contains numbered sections, and each section contains numbered paragraphs.

Structure

Level	Count	Description
Parts	4	Major divisions of the book
Papers	197	Individual papers (0 = Foreword)
Sections	1,626	Subdivisions within papers
Paragraphs	14,500+	Atomic content units

Get the full hierarchical structure in a single call:

curl https://api.urantia.dev/toc

Returns all parts with their papers nested inside — useful for building navigation.

List all papers

curl https://api.urantia.dev/papers

Returns metadata for all 197 papers including title, part, and section count. Add ?include=topEntities to attach a per-paper aggregate of the most-cited named entities. Sorted by paragraph citation count descending; ties break so beings, places, and concepts rank above orders, races, and religions (and finally alphabetical):

curl 'https://api.urantia.dev/papers?include=topEntities' | jq '.data[1].topEntities'
# [
#   { "id": "universal-father", "name": "Universal Father", "type": "being", "count": 74 },
#   { "id": "personality",      "name": "personality",      "type": "concept", "count": 66 },
#   { "id": "god",              "name": "God",              "type": "being", "count": 46 },
#   ...
# ]

Read a paper

# Get Paper 1 — The Universal Father
curl https://api.urantia.dev/papers/1

Returns the full paper with all paragraphs. Each paragraph includes text, htmlText, standardReferenceId, audio URLs, and optional entity mentions. Add ?include=entities to get entity annotations on every paragraph and the paper-level topEntities aggregate:

curl https://api.urantia.dev/papers/1?include=entities

Prefer a lighter payload? Request just the paper-level aggregate without per-paragraph mentions:

curl 'https://api.urantia.dev/papers/1?include=topEntities' | jq '.data.paper.topEntities'

Or request both explicitly:

curl 'https://api.urantia.dev/papers/1?include=entities,topEntities'

Get sections

# Get sections for Paper 1
curl https://api.urantia.dev/papers/1/sections

Returns the section breakdown for a paper — useful for building section-level navigation.

The 4 parts

Part	Papers	Topic
I	1–31	The Central and Superuniverses
II	32–56	The Local Universe
III	57–119	The History of Urantia
IV	120–196	The Life and Teachings of Jesus

API Reference — Papers

See the full endpoint documentation with interactive examples.

Getting Started

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Structure

Table of contents

List all papers

Read a paper

Get sections

The 4 parts

API Reference — Papers

​Structure

​Table of contents

​List all papers

​Read a paper

​Get sections

​The 4 parts

API Reference — Papers

Structure

Table of contents

List all papers

Read a paper

Get sections

The 4 parts