A Course in Miracles was channeled by Helen Schucman and written down by her and William "Bill" Thetford over a seven-year period. It was first published in 1976. Helen and Bill were colleagues and professors of psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, a university hospital in New York. They were middle-aged when the Voice first came to Helen and urged her to take notes. The voice said to Helen:​ “This is a course in miracles, please take notes.” ​The voice had to pester Helen for a long time, repeating the same phrase over and over again, because Helen's mind revolted. She thought she was going crazy. She had never experienced this before; hearing a voice in her head talking to her. She went through a deep inner crisis, and finally confided in tears to her boss, Bill, and lamented in despair. Bill, on the other hand, was calm and pragmatic. He assured Helen that she was not crazy, and suggested to Helen why not do as the Voice says: Take notes. “Then you can show me your notes and no one else needs to know anything. And then I can also type them out.”

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So they did.​ Bill sat behind his typewriter in the office and Helen read from her shorthand pad what she had written down, often shaking with tears. She couldn't understand what was coming through her, and the information was deeply upsetting. Sometimes Bill had to hold the crying Helen with one hand and type with the other. Bill was immediately taken aback by the deep meaning of the words, and he understood that this was no imagination, and that it was definitely not Helen's words. The whole phenomenon was incomprehensible and inexplicable. But they continued their work. After about a month with this working method, both Helen and Bill realized that the Voice belonged to Jesus. At the beginning of this process, Helen often argued with Jesus. At one point she cried and shook in anger and despair and said: “I am a Jewess and an atheist. Why couldn't you have chosen anyone but me; perhaps a devout Christian nun?” And Jesus answered: “Because this works. You hear me and what I want to say, now continue to take notes.”

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​Some are disturbed, deeply concerned or offended by the fact that Jesus makes no secret of the fact that he is the one speaking in the Course. He does this in several places, but perhaps most clearly in the chapter about his own crucifixion. This must be taken as it is. It is quite possible to establish a relationship with the Holy Spirit instead of with Him, and still get the maximum effect from His course. Who you identify as the Voice in the book is the same thing, because as he himself says: there is practically no difference between him and the Holy Spirit, because they say the same thing. Another thing that may bother some, especially women, is that the text adopts a male perspective. It is not a coincidence, and does not rest on arbitrariness. The course is dressed in Christian language clothing for several reasons. The Christian symbols and patriarchal imagery of the sacred; God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, should not be taken for an argument in the debate about the equal right and value of the sexes. The course is not aimed at this, but at correcting your mind until you realize that there is no difference in anything, and therefore everything has equal value. Saying Son of God is thus exactly the same as saying Daughter of God. But the text would have become clumsy and circumstantial if it had had to keep talking about "he/she", or "God's Son/God's Daughter" just to make sure that no one felt left out and offended. This type of consideration would also work against the Course's purpose of freeing the students from ego, when it itself states that only an ego can feel violated. Jesus trusts your intelligence to see beyond the symbols. Then, thirdly, to invent a non-gender specific pronoun exclusively for the sake of the Course, to include all the Children of God, becomes equally strange. That would put Kursen in a literary special position for the wrong reason. Many are also just as annoyed by such made-up words as others are by not having their gender spelled out. So it should already be obvious how unimportant it is to argue about pronouns, and how far away from the course's goal this leads us. A Course in Miracles follows Christian tradition because it was written by Jesus, and because Christianity arose out of Jesus' teaching. To invent something new is to believe the ego's ideas that something other than what exists would be so much better. Christianity serves as a good foundation. There is already enough fighting between the existing religions that it would be pointless to invent a new religion to fight about. Namely, it is not the religions as such that will liberate man, but rather his thoughts about them and his use of them. They all serve the same purpose. Properly practiced, they all lead to God. Jesus wrote the Course to save us from our illusions and to correct the misunderstandings of his teachings found in the Bible that already arose while he was alive. To this end, we thank him and choose to take what he says without twisting it to suit ourselves. We already did that two thousand years ago, and we don't need to make that mistake again.

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