The Desire of Wages

Chapter 9 - The Library Shelf

by Dirk Anderson

“Send books, red-covered Jewish Antiquities and the Bible Dictionary. Is Night Scenes of the Bible there? If so, send it.”¹ Ellen White wrote that in 1878 while she was working on her life of Christ. It is a small, ordinary request, the kind any writer makes. But it tells us something SDAs are rarely told: the prophet wrote from books not visions.

By the 1890s the shelf had grown. White’s private and office libraries held the most popular lives of Christ of the day: Daniel March’s Night Scenes in the Bible and Walks and Homes of Jesus, Cunningham Geikie’s two-volume Life and Words of Christ, Frederic Farrar’s Life of Christ, and Alfred Edersheim’s Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah and The Temple.² Marian Davis was choosing books too. In 1887 W. C. White ordered Geikie, Edersheim and others from “a list of books prepared by Sister Davis,” and in 1894 the Echo office sent Davis a copy of Farrar.³

This chapter examines three more books on White's shelf: March, Geikie and Farrar. Each one left its fingerprints on The Desire of Ages, and each one left a mistake.

Daniel March and the Water of the Feast

Daniel March was an American Presbyterian preacher whose books retold Bible scenes in a lush, pictorial style. In Night Scenes in the Bible he painted the Feast of Tabernacles, the scene behind Jesus’ cry in John 7:37, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” White painted the same scene. Here is her version beside his.

Booths on the housetops, palm and myrtle, the chorus, the dawn trumpets, the answering shouts, the steps climbed in time while chanting Psalm 122: one scene, built in the same order from the same parts. And a few lines later, March wrote that “some were ready to say, with the woman of Samaria, ‘Give me of this water, that I thirst not.’” White: “many were ready to exclaim, with the woman of Samaria, ‘Give me this water, that I thirst not.’”¹²

Now look at the one place where White did not follow March. March said the priests brought the water from “the fountain of Siloam.” White says the priest dipped it from “the flowing waters of the Kedron.” March was right. The ancient Jewish rules for the feast say the water was drawn from Siloam.¹³ Every one of White’s sources says Siloam. So where did the Kedron come from?

It came from Hanna. Describing the end of the ceremony, Hanna explained that the water was poured into silver basins with holes beneath, so that it could “flow down into the subterranean reservoir beneath the temple, to run out thence into the Kedron, and down into the Dead sea.” White’s account ends the same way: the contents of both basins “flowed into a pipe which communicated with the Kedron, and was conducted to the Dead Sea.”¹⁴ The procession came from March and the plumbing came from Hanna. In stitching the two together, the drain became the source. A prophet who had been shown the scene would know where the water came from. A writer combining two books had only the words on the page, and she mixed them up.

March supplied more than the feast. In Walks and Homes of Jesus he wrote of the disciples:

Cunningham Geikie and the Open Holy of Holies

Cunningham Geikie was a Scottish-born Anglican clergyman whose Life and Words of Christ (1877) sold enormously. White owned the 1883 edition.¹⁷ Some of what she took from it is small. Geikie wrote that “religion does not lie in selfish or morbid devotion to personal interests”; White wrote that “religion does not consist in selfishness, and that their morbid devotion to personal interest was far from being true godliness.” Geikie: “Every Jew, no matter how poor, was, in addition, required to pay yearly a half-shekel . . . as atonement money for his soul.” White: “Every Jew was required to pay yearly a half shekel as ‘a ransom for his soul.’”¹⁸

Some of it is large. Geikie wrote a vivid page about the Sabbath after the crucifixion, with the temple going on as usual while the veil hung in tatters. The Desire of Ages has the same page. It was not in White’s 1878 book.

Look closely at the last row. Geikie asked a question: was not the Holy of Holies “laid visibly open before every one”? He was guessing, and he tried to argue it from the height of the building. White dropped the question mark: “now it was open to all eyes.” A Victorian scholar’s speculation became the prophet’s statement of fact.

The fact is wrong. The inner veil did not hang out in the open courts. It hung inside the temple building, between the holy place and the most holy place (Hebrews 9:2–3). Only the priests serving inside the holy place could see it. Even Alfred Edersheim, another author on White’s shelf, said that the priests who saw the torn veil “could scarcely have seen” beyond it.²³ The crowds in the courts saw nothing of the kind. White took Geikie’s guess, made it certain, and it was false—proving that angels were not guiding her on what words to steal from others.

Geikie supplied one more “fact.” In 1847 a physician named William Stroud published a theory that Jesus died of a ruptured heart. Geikie adopted it with enthusiasm: “The immediate cause of death appears, beyond question, to have been the rupture of His heart, brought about by mental agony. . . . Jesus died, literally, of a broken heart!”²⁴ White’s 1878 book did not say this. The Desire of Ages does: the loud cry and “the stream of blood and water that flowed from His side, declared that He died of a broken heart. His heart was broken by mental anguish.”²⁵ The Gospels say only that Jesus “cried with a loud voice” and “gave up the ghost” (Mark 15:37). A doctor’s theory, passed through a popular life of Christ, became a revealed cause of death.

Frederic Farrar and the Priests’ City

Frederic Farrar was an Anglican cleric whose Life of Christ (1874) was one of the best-sellers of the century. Fred Veltman found it among White’s major sources, and in her 1897 manuscripts.²⁶ One example he documented: Farrar wrote that the priests were breaking their own rules, “which demanded that every arraigned criminal should be regarded and treated as innocent until his guilt was actually proved.” White: “Their own rules declared that every man should be treated as innocent until proved guilty.”²⁷

Farrar also left a mistake. Describing Jesus’ visit to Jericho, he wrote: “The two most distinctive classes of Jericho were priests and publicans; and, as it was a priestly city, it might naturally have been expected that the King . . . would be received in the house of some descendant of Aaron.”²⁸ White begins her account of the same visit with the same two classes: Jericho had “large numbers of priests,” and the collection of customs “made it the home of many publicans.” But she turned Farrar’s “priestly city,” a city where many priests lived, into something more: “Jericho was one of the cities anciently set apart for the priests.”²⁹

It was not. The Bible lists the cities set apart for the priests, the sons of Aaron, in Joshua 21. Jericho is not among them. Jericho belonged to Benjamin (Joshua 18:21), and Benjamin’s priestly cities were Gibeon, Geba, Anathoth and Almon (Joshua 21:17–18). Farrar’s loose phrase was turned by White into a false claim about the Old Testament.

Guesses into Facts

The three mistakes described in this chapter reveal a pattern. March said Siloam and Hanna mentioned the Kedron drain; White merged them and got the wrong water. Geikie asked whether the most holy place was open to every eye; White said it was. Farrar called Jericho a priestly city; White made it a city set apart for the priests. In each case the source was cautious, careful or simply right, and the error was introduced in the copying.

That is the opposite of what SDAs are taught. They are told that White’s extra details come from what she saw in vision, and that her visions corrected the errors of mere human writers. The evidence shows the reverse. The details came from the human writers, and the errors came from the way they were copied.

There are two more authors on the shelf whose debts deserve their own chapter, because White’s book holds up one of their sentences as a picture of Christ’s originality. Both of their first names are John.