The Desire of Wages

Chapter 8 - Hanna’s Quarry

by Dirk Anderson

In 1979 the White Estate asked two of the SDA sect’s respected Bible scholars, Raymond Cottrell and Walter Specht, to settle a question: how much did Ellen White owe to William Hanna’s Life of Christ? Specht took the second half of The Desire of Ages, chapters 46 to 87. His answer was reassuring. “We concluded,” he wrote, “that there is no evidence that Ellen White in The Desire of Ages copied verbatim from Hanna’s The Life of Christ.” “Whatever borrowings occur,” he added, “are in the nature of words and phrases.” In fact, “it appears doubtful that Ellen White had Hanna’s Life of Christ before her as she wrote.” At most she “may have recalled some of the exact words and phrases Hanna had used in the work she had carefully read.”¹ Cottrell, for the first half, put the “literary correlation” at about 2.6 percent.²

SDAs could relax. The prophet had read a good book, and a few of its words had stuck in her memory and accidently came out when she wrote The Desire of Ages.

Today, no serious scholar believes that white-wash. The evidence proves otherwise.

The Scotsman on Her Shelf

William Hanna (1808–1882) was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, editor of the North British Review, and son-in-law and biographer of the famous preacher Thomas Chalmers. In the 1860s he published a six-part life of Christ, which the American Tract Society issued in a single volume around 1871.³ It was a warm, devotional book, rich in vivid description of the land and the scenes of the Gospels. It was also exactly the kind of book a writer in a hurry could mine.

White owned it. A copy in her office library bears her signature.⁴ When W. C. White ordered library books from Marian Davis’s list in 1887, “one Hanna’s Life of Christ” was on the order.⁵ And when Fred Veltman, the sect’s own investigator, studied fifteen chapters of The Desire of Ages a few years after Specht, Hanna turned out to be the largest single source he found: 321 parallels, in thirteen of the fifteen chapters.⁶

Veltman also found Hanna in White’s own handwriting. Her manuscripts of 1897, written while the book was being finished, show her working from Hanna and Farrar.⁷ So much for the idea of “doubtful that Ellen White had Hanna’s Life of Christ before her as she wrote.”

One more fact about Hanna is worth knowing. When he quoted another writer, he said so. Veltman’s report notes that Hanna “did give proper credit for quotations.”⁸ White gave Hanna no credit at all.

Inside Specht’s Own Chapters

Specht examined chapters 46 through 87. Here is what is in those chapters. Start with Pilate’s judgment hall.

Four copied passages in a row, in the same order, over three pages of each book. “A tenfold frenzy” is not a phrase two writers stumble on independently. Neither is “uncomplaining patience” set beside the same scene, or “beings superior to” in the mind of the same Roman governor.

Follow the procession to Calvary.

John’s Gospel says only that “they filled a spunge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop” (John 19:29). The Gospels do not say that a soldier did it out of pity, or that a stranger was “coming in from the country” and “meets” the procession, or that the darkness was like a pall and not an eclipse. Hanna says those things. So does White, in his words.

Specht actually quoted Hanna on the hyssop and on Simon.²³ He saw the parallels. He still concluded there was “no evidence” of verbatim copying.

Copying the Commentary, Then Getting It Wrong

Copying a good sentence is plagiarism. Copying a sentence and getting its meaning wrong is worse, because it shows the copyist did not see what she claimed to see. Hanna’s book gave White two examples.

The first is the dying thief. Hanna wrote a long meditation on how the thief came to believe, and he contrasted the thief’s faith with the disciples’ failing faith. The disciples, he wrote, would say afterwards, on the road to Emmaus, “We hoped that it had been he that should have redeemed Israel.” Now watch what happens to that word “afterwards.”

Hanna knew when those words were spoken. Cleopas said them on Sunday, walking to Emmaus, two days after the crucifixion (Luke 24:21). White’s Jesus hears them while hanging on the cross on Friday. Hanna’s word “afterwards” was dropped, and the Emmaus lament was moved back two days to Calvary. A prophet who saw the scene would not make that blunder. An uninspired writer paraphrasing Hanna and skipping a word would.

The second example comes after Jesus’ death. Hanna explained why John stressed that he was an eyewitness to the spear wound: it refuted “two strange heresies that sprung up early in the church.”

The two ideas are the same, in the same order, with the same wording at the key points. But Hanna was describing heresies that arose among Christians long after the resurrection. White turned them into lies spread by the priests and rulers right after the resurrection. The Bible tells us what the priests actually said: that the disciples “came by night, and stole him away while we slept” (Matthew 28:13). The idea that Jesus only fainted is the theory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rationalists; the idea that His body was only an appearance belongs to the Docetists of the second century. White put both in the mouths of the Jewish priests. She had this in her 1878 book already, so the mistake was hers, not her editors’.²⁸

More from the Same Quarry

Hanna turns up again and again in the later chapters of The Desire of Ages:

• The rending of the veil. Hanna placed priests “before the inner veil,” a veil “fresh and strong,” renewed “year by year,” torn “as if by two unseen hands,” with “all its mysteries laid open to vulgar gaze.” White’s 1878 account and The Desire of Ages have the veil “torn from top to bottom by an unseen hand, throwing open to the gaze of the multitude” the most holy place.²⁹ The inner veil hung inside the temple building, where no multitude could see it. We will come back to that in Part Three.
• The water of the feast. At the Feast of Tabernacles, Hanna described the water drawn from Siloam and poured into silver basins that drained “into the Kedron, and down into the Dead sea.” White’s account has the priest draw the water from the Kedron itself.³⁰ Hanna’s drain became White’s spring. We will see the rest of that story in the next chapter.

“She May Have Recalled”

Go back to Specht’s explanation: White “may have recalled some of the exact words and phrases Hanna had used in the work she had carefully read.” Memory does not reproduce four copied phrases in a row, in Hanna’s order, across three pages. Memory does not supply “a stranger, Simon a Cyrenian, coming in from the country, meets” word for word. And memory does not explain why Hanna’s small word “afterwards” vanished in a way that moved the Emmaus road to Calvary. That is what happens when someone works from the page and paraphrases too quickly.

The White Estate’s 1979 study told SDAs what they wanted to hear. Ten years later the sect’s own investigator found Hanna in thirteen of fifteen chapters and in White’s own handwriting. And in the very chapters Specht examined, Hanna’s words are still sitting on the page.

Hanna was the biggest quarry, but he was not the only one. Next we turn to the rest of the shelf: Geikie, Farrar, Edersheim and March.