The Desire of Wages

Chapter 7 - A Novel Gospel

by Dirk Anderson

It is one of the most heartbreaking moments in Ellen White’s account of the crucifixion. The soldiers stretch Jesus on the cross. The hammer and the nails are brought. The disciples carry His mother away “that she might not hear the crashing of the nails, as they were driven through the bone and muscle of his tender hands and feet.”¹ White published those words in 1858, in the little book the White Estate described as the written report of her great controversy vision at Lovett’s Grove. Generations of SDAs have read the scene as something the prophet saw.

Three years earlier, a novelist had already written it.

The Prince of the House of David

Joseph Holt Ingraham was one of the most prolific popular novelists of nineteenth-century America. He went to sea as a youth, wrote for newspapers at twenty, and turned out romance after romance. Even Fred Veltman’s report describes his output as “multitudinous.”² Later in life he became an Episcopal clergyman and turned his pen to Bible stories, writing what Veltman calls “religious romances” in the form of letters.

The most famous of them was The Prince of the House of David, published in 1855. It tells the life of Jesus through the letters of Adina, a fictional young Jewish woman visiting Jerusalem, who writes home to her father in Egypt. Adina invents freely. She has friends among the disciples, a cousin named Mary, and a front-row seat at the trial and crucifixion. Ingraham filled her letters with vivid scenes the Gospels never mention, because that is what novelists do.

White knew Ingraham’s work. Her private library held his sequel, The Throne of David.³ And when Veltman searched his fifteen sample chapters of The Desire of Ages, he found twenty-six parallels with The Prince of the House of David.⁴ But Veltman’s sample did not include the chapters on Herod, Pilate and Calvary. That is where the novel does most of its work.

The Vision and the Novel

Set the three texts side by side: Ingraham’s novel of 1855, White’s “vision” report of 1858, and The Desire of Ages forty years later.

The Bible says nothing of Mary being carried away. In John’s Gospel she is standing by the cross while Jesus speaks to her (John 19:25–27). The scene is Ingraham’s imagination, down to the “crashing of the nails.” It appears in White’s 1858 vision report three years after the novel was published. By 1898 the wording had been polished significantly, but the novelist’s fabricated scene was still there.

This is not a case of an editor copying another author's statement into a the life of Christ manuscript. In 1858 White had no Marian Davis. The novel’s scene entered her writings through her own hand, in the book that SDAs are told records what she saw in vision.

Herod’s Crown of Thorns

In Chapter 5 we saw that White’s 1878 account had Herod order a crown of thorns for Jesus, a detail no Gospel contains, and that her assistants quietly removed it twenty years later because it would cause “no end of trouble, dispute, and criticism.” Now we can see where it came from.

Herod’s idea, a thorny vine twisted into a crown, a cast-off purple robe that had belonged to royalty: the novelist made it all up for entertainment. The prophet presented it as fact. When the error was finally removed from The Desire of Ages, only the crown was taken out. The rest of Ingraham’s Herod scene stayed, and the 1898 text actually added more of his wording: Herod’s command to unbind Jesus because He had been “roughly handled,” Herod’s “Men say thou canst heal the sick,” the maimed brought in to test Him, and the mob rushing on Him like animals on their “prey.”¹⁰ The assistants fixed the detail that contradicted the Bible and kept the rest of the novel.

Pilate’s Apology

Ingraham gave Pilate a speech. So did White.

Matthew says that it was “all the people” who answered, “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). Ingraham put the words in the mouth of Caiaphas first, and the people re-echoed him. White did the same. Pilate’s “judge you, not me, for this day’s deeds” and his plea for forgiveness appear in no Gospel. They appear in the novel, and then in The Desire of Ages.

Judas and the Dogs

The Bible gives two brief notices of Judas’s death: he “went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5), and “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18). Neither says where his body was found, or by whom. Ingraham supplied the rest.

The body on the road to Calvary, the tree, the broken cord, the dogs, the hasty burial: every element of the scene is the novelist’s. White already had it in 1878, and it passed into The Desire of Ages nearly word for word from her earlier book.¹⁵

The Road to Calvary

Those are only the most striking examples. Walk with White from Pilate’s hall to the cross and the novelist walks beside her the whole way:

• The priests’ promise not to molest the disciples if Jesus were handed over, so that all His followers came out to Calvary (Ingraham 444; DA 741).
• Two “companions of Barabbas” crucified with Jesus. In Ingraham they are Barabbas’s “lieutenants” (Ingraham 435, 444; DA 741).
• Jesus fainting under the cross, and the cry that He was dead (Ingraham 445–446; 1878 book, 150; DA 742).
• The Jews refusing to carry the cross “for fear of defilement” (Ingraham 445–446). This one is new in The Desire of Ages: “The Jews themselves could not do this, because the defilement would prevent them from keeping the Passover” (DA 742). The 1890s workshop went back to the novel for more.
• Jesus placed between the thieves as “the greatest criminal of the three” (Ingraham 453; DA 751).
• The thieves struggling while Jesus offered no resistance (Ingraham 448–450, 456; DA 744).
• Lightning falling about the cross and the crowd crying that God was punishing Him (Ingraham 466; DA 754, also new in 1898).
• His last words in “trumpet-tones,” a supernatural light about Him, and His head bowed upon His breast (Ingraham 467; DA 756).
• The earthquake throwing the bodies of the dead out of their tombs (Ingraham 467; DA 756). Matthew says the graves opened and the saints arose after His resurrection (Matthew 27:52–53).

Here is one of the 1898 additions in full:

The Gospels record darkness over the land from the sixth to the ninth hour. They say nothing about lightning bolts hurled at the cross.

Fiction Dressed as Revelation

Ellen White warned SDA young people that fiction would “lay the mind open to the bewitching power of Satan” and told them to “burn the magical books.” Yet her own account of the death of Christ, from the 1858 vision report to the 1898 masterpiece, leans on a novel at almost every step of the road to Calvary.

Consider what this means. SDAs have been taught that the details in White’s Passion narrative, the things not found in the Gospels, are proof that she saw what she described. Mary carried away from the nails, Herod’s thorn crown, Pilate begging forgiveness, Judas and the dogs, lightning striking around the cross: these are exactly the details that are supposed to show she was there in vision. They are the details a novelist invented for a girl named Adina who never existed.

This was not something the assistants slipped in behind her back. Many of these scenes appear in White’s own books of 1858 and 1878, long before Marian Davis was building chapters. Then, in the 1890s, the workshop went back to the same novel and took more. The prophet started it, and her staff finished it.

Ingraham was the most embarrassing source. He was not the biggest. That honor goes to a Scottish minister whose life of Christ supplied more parallels than any other book Veltman found: William Hanna.