Claim. Because Adam was created on the sixth day, God begins preparation for each Messiah’s coming at the start of a six-period cycle — explaining why Confucius, Buddha, the Upanishads, Zoroaster, and Greek philosophy all emerged around the sixth century BC (Jaspers’ ‘Axial Age’).
Elaboration. Lee proposes a solution to Karl Jaspers’ famous puzzle (F. Law of the Period of the Number Six). Jaspers noticed that ‘remarkable spiritual leaders (founders of religions and philosophies) all appeared at about the same time in different regions of the world, such as China, India, Iran, Palestine, and Greece’ — and called it the Axial Period. ‘Jaspers had no explanation, and he held it to be a historic mystery and an insoluble riddle.’
UT’s answer: the period of the number six, derived from Adam’s creation on the sixth day. ‘In the history of re-creation as well, God began the preparation to receive the Messiah at the start of a period of the number six before the coming of the Messiah, the second Adam.’ This six-century preparation began in the sixth century BC: Babylonian captivity for Israel, Confucius (551-479 BC) in China, Gautama Buddha (563-483 BC) in India, the Upanishads, Zoroastrianism in the Middle East, the flowering of Greek philosophy and art.
All these were ‘preparations to receive the Messiah,’ guiding ‘various peoples on earth in the direction of goodness through the methods appropriate to the people in each region.’ The world-religion founders were archangelic figures — not the Messiah himself — whose teachings were ‘not perfect, but only partial.’ Only the Messiah, the Son of God, can practice true love and preach absolute truth that resolves the unresolved questions of all religions and philosophies.
The same six-period pattern operates for the Second Advent: Reformation and Renaissance starting in the fourteenth century, blooming in the sixteenth, with the Industrial Revolution and modern science as further preparation for a twentieth-century Messiah.
The doctrine has profound implications for comparative religion: it dignifies non-Christian world religions as providential (not demonic), while subordinating them as preparatory to Christian messianism. Critics push: (a) the six-century framework requires forcing dates (Confucius/Buddha were close in time, but Greek philosophy peaked later); (b) why does the law not generate similar phenomena six centuries before Adam, or in centuries beyond the messianic cycles? Still, the proposed solution to the Jaspers puzzle is one of UT’s more rhetorically attractive moves.
See also. messiah-revives-and-unifies-existing-religions, law-of-completion-through-three-stages, law-of-restoration-of-number-four