The Desire of Wages

Chapter 6 - Plagiarism Conceded

by Dirk Anderson

In 1867 Ellen White made a promise about her writings. Critics were saying her health teachings came from other people’s books. She denied it flatly: “My views were written independent of books or of the opinions of others.”¹ For more than a century SDAs believed that the same was true of all her books, and above all of The Desire of Ages. Then, in 1980, the SDA sect hired a scholar to find out.

We begin with a witness no SDA can wave away, because he was a loyal sect member, the sect chose him, paid him and published his findings.

The Sect’s Own Investigator

The trouble began with Walter Rea, an SDA pastor in California, who started showing in 1980 that White’s books—including The Desire of Ages—contained large amounts of material taken from other authors. His book The White Lie appeared in 1982. Under pressure, the General Conference needed an answer, and it turned to Dr. Fred Veltman, chairman of the religion department at the SDA school Pacific Union College. Veltman took over the “Life of Christ Research Project” in the fall of 1980.² He spent eight years on it, at the sect’s expense, with a General Conference committee looking over his shoulder.

Veltman was no critic. He was a loyal SDA scholar, and he finished the study still professing belief in White’s prophetic gift, if not her methods. The White Estate’s secretary, Robert Olson, praised the result without reservation: “I am totally satisfied with this study. No one could have done a better job—no one. He did it as a neutral person would have and not as an apologist.”³

Remember that endorsement. Everything that follows comes from the investigator the White Estate said no one could have bettered.

What He Did

Veltman could not study all 87 chapters in his lifetime, so he chose a random sample of fifteen. He broke them into 2,624 sentences and compared each one with the writings White and her staff had access to. He and his assistants searched more than five hundred books. They found parallels in thirty-two works by twenty-eight authors.⁴

The leading source by far was William Hanna’s Life of Christ, a copy of which sits in White’s office library with her signature in it. Hanna turned up in thirteen of the fifteen chapters, with 321 parallels. After him came Daniel March, John Harris, Frederic Farrar, George Jones, Alfred Edersheim, and a name that should startle every SDA reader: Joseph Holt Ingraham, author of The Prince of the House of David, a novel.⁵ Given all the negative testimonies White unleashed upon novels, this one was the most disturbing of all.

Here is a small taste of what Veltman found. These parallels are from chapter 3, “The Fulness of the Time,” which he rated 45 percent dependent on sources. The source is John Harris’s The Great Teacher, another book in White’s library bearing her signature.

Harris strung together three phrases from three different places in Isaiah, in his own order. The Desire of Ages strings together the same three, in the same order. Harris’s “every hour, of every age” becomes “every age, through every hour”; his “healing flood” becomes a “flood of healing”; his Deity “poured forth on the world” becomes the Deity “pouring upon the world.” Veltman found that in one 1894 White article, twenty-five consecutive sentences corresponded to twenty-three sentences of Harris, in the same order. He called it “a kind of ‘paste and scissors’ act.”¹⁰

What He Found

Veltman’s conclusions are worth consideration because they come from the sect’s own inside man.

Almost a third of the text depends on other writers. “On an average we may say that 31.4 percent of the DA text is dependent to some extent” on literary sources.¹¹ Some chapters ran far higher: 59 per cent for one, 69 per cent for another. It should be noted that this is what his team found. There may be other sources his team was unaware of or passages they simply missed, so this number should be considered a floor and not a ceiling. In fact, in one of the very chapters his team studied, a paragraph they rated as strictly independent Ellen White (the high priest forbidden to rend his garments, DA 708–709) follows the argument of John Cumming’s Sabbath Evening Readings on St. Matthew, a book on Veltman’s own source list.

The content is not original. “The content of Ellen White’s commentary on the life and ministry of Christ, The Desire of Ages, is for the most part derived rather than original.”¹² If there was nothing original, then what did the prophet add to the story of Jesus?

She used fiction. “Ellen White used a minimum of 23 sources of various types of literature, including fiction, in her writings on the life of Christ.”¹³ This from the woman who told SDA youth that fictitious stories “lay the mind open to the bewitching power of Satan” and urged them to “burn the magical books.”¹⁴

The “inspired” details came from books. SDAs have always treated the vivid extra-biblical details of The Desire of Ages as proof of revelation: what Jesus was thinking, what happened on the Emmaus road, how the crowds behaved. Veltman found that these, too, “clearly reveal the influence of other writers.” His warning to SDAs is blunt: “A detail not found in the biblical text may not with certainty be attributed to Ellen White’s visions or special insights of the Holy Spirit. Most of these details noted in the DA text were also found in the literature available to Ellen White.”¹⁵ Out of all the details he checked, he found exactly one he could not find in another writer.

She turned guesses into facts. Where her sources wrote “perhaps” and “it may be,” White wrote as an eyewitness. “Her account reads as a factual record; nothing is supposed.”¹⁶ A Victorian preacher’s speculation went in; a prophet’s certainty came out.

The assistants did not do the copying. White did. SDA defenders like to suggest that the copied material crept in through her editors. Veltman found the opposite. “Generally the closer one is able to move back through the textual tradition to Ellen White’s own hand, the greater is the degree of literary dependency.”¹⁷ Her own handwritten diaries and manuscripts from 1897, written while the book was being finished, show her working with Farrar, Hanna, Edersheim and March open in front of her. By the time Marian Davis had polished the text, the copying was simply harder to see.

And she never admitted it. “A very serious question that still remains regarding Ellen White’s use of sources is the concern over her non-admission or even denial of dependency.”¹⁸ Veltman had no answer to it.

Put all of this together and the picture is devastating. The book's supposedly inspired details were already sitting in other men's books. Its supposedly original commentary was, for the most part, derived from those same writers. Its historical scenes drew upon fiction. Its authorship was protected by a veil of secrecy, even as its borrowing was denied. And when Veltman traced the material backward through the editorial process, the evidence of literary dependence became stronger, not weaker, as he approached White's own hand. This was not a case of a few stray sentences slipping into an otherwise independent work. It was a method of composition.

Consider what that does to the traditional defense of The Desire of Ages. For generations, SDAs have pointed to its vivid descriptions of Christ's life as evidence that White must have received special insight from God. But Veltman's research turns that argument inside out. The very details held up as evidence of inspiration were, in most cases, available in the books on her shelves. The more closely he investigated those details, the less reason he found to attribute them to visions. Even the one detail his team could not trace to another writer does not establish divine revelation; it establishes only that they could not find its source.

Then comes the question Veltman himself could not resolve: why did White fail to acknowledge her dependence on other writers, and why did she or those defending her deny it? That question goes to the heart of the matter. An author who borrows from other writers can acknowledge it. An editor can explain her contribution. A religious writer can distinguish research from revelation. But White's brand depended on something else entirely: that these books were the product of a prophet receiving divine light. That was what gave her a sales advantage over every other Christian author. She could provide supernatural insight that other offers could not. The evidence Veltman uncovered tells a very different story.

The tragedy is not that The Desire of Ages was researched, edited, or influenced by other writers. There is nothing shameful about any of that so long as it is transparently noted and the real sources are cited. The scandal is that the literary labor and borrowed material were wrapped in the authority of prophecy, while the people who bought the book were left with the impression that they were reading the product of divine revelation.

Veltman's findings should have forced the sect to rethink the entire story it had told about this book. Instead, the evidence sits there, waiting for readers willing to follow it to its unavoidable conclusion: The Desire of Ages looks far less like a revelation from heaven than a literary production assembled on earth to generate royalties for its author.

The P-Word

After all that, Veltman would not use the word. His project, he wrote, “did not treat the question of plagiarism,” and his “personal opinion” was that White “was not a plagiarist.” Yet in the same breath he conceded the facts: “There is no question in my mind that Ellen White used literary sources, even verbatim quotes, without giving credit to her sources.”¹⁹

That is the precise definition of plagiarism!

Veltman’s escape was to claim that it was the accepted practice of the time, that other religious writers of her day did the same. But his own report demolishes that excuse. In an appendix on the authors she used, he admitted: “For the most part, acknowledgments were made, and/or credit was bestowed.” Hanna “did give proper credit for quotations.” Cumming footnoted his debts.²⁰ The men she copied from credited their sources. She did not credit them.

Even the one admission White ever printed, the brief note in the introduction to The Great Controversy about quoting historians, did not satisfy him. He found it “much too limited to answer for all of Ellen White’s use of sources. . . . it minimizes the use of sources; and it does not cover her practice of paraphrasing her sources.”²¹ The Desire of Ages carried no such note at all. While this book was being written, the sect was already feeling pressure to revise The Great Controversy to include proper footnotes. It is inconceivable that White's team was unaware of this. And yet, they published an entire book, largely derived from others authors, without a single footnote. Ellen White stole the words, published them under her name, and banked the proceeds. It may not have been legally prosecutable under nineteenth century laws, but it was ethically and morally repugnant.

What He Left Out

Veltman’s report was a landmark, but it had limits, and they matter for the rest of this book.

• He studied fifteen chapters. Seventy-two were never examined.
• He did not use the letters. He did not examine W. C. White’s letterbooks, the correspondence after 1898, or the accounts of Lacey, Kellogg and Prescott.²²
• He measured wording, not errors. He did not ask what happened when the sources White copied were wrong.

The rest of Part Two picks up where Veltman stopped. Using a screening method tested against Veltman’s own findings, we compared the chapters he left out with the books on White’s shelves. The White Estate’s own investigator has already conceded that The Desire of Ages is “for the most part derived.” The chapters ahead show more of where it was derived from, beginning with the source that should embarrass SDAs most: the novel.