The Desire of Wages

Chapter 10 - Unborrowed, Underived

by Dirk Anderson

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus tells Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life” (John 11:25). The Desire of Ages pauses on those words to make a point about the nature of Christ’s life. It was not received from anyone. It came from no other source. “In Christ is life,” White writes, “original, unborrowed, underived.”¹ This is a famous line within Seventh-day Adventism. It is quoted in sermons and Sabbath school lessons as a classic statement on the deity of Christ.

The line was copied.

Three adjectives, in the same order, attached to the same thought about the same verse from White’s own copy of Cumming’s book on John.⁴ The sentence went first into a Signs of the Times article under her name in April 1897, “Christ the Life Giver,” and from there into the book.⁵ A sentence praising Christ’s life as “unborrowed” was itself taken, without a word of credit, from a preacher who was part of what Ellen White described as "Apostate Protestantism."

The curious irony is that most of White's writings were derived from preachers and authors of so-called Apostate Protestantism. This was her true source of inspiration. While it is impossible to trace any of her "light" in Desire of Ages to visions, much of it can be traced to Christian preachers, two of whom were John Harris and John Cumming. They supplied The Desire of Ages with some of its most admired sentences, including two of the best-known passages in its first chapter.

Two Preachers

John Harris (1804–1856) was an English Congregational minister and theology professor. His book The Great Teacher (1835), a study of the character of Christ’s teaching, was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. White owned it, and her copy bears her signature.⁶ Fred Veltman found Harris among her leading sources: 62 parallels in his fifteen sample chapters of The Desire of Ages, and 131 more in her earlier writings on Christ.⁷

John Cumming (1810–1881) was minister of the Scottish church in Crown Court, Covent Garden, London. In his day, Veltman notes, the sale of his books “had exceeded the sale of the productions of any other theological writer.” His Sabbath Evening Readings took the Gospels a chapter at a time. Unlike White, Cumming gave credit. Veltman points out that in the Sabbath Evening Readings “he provided notes and gave credit for his quotations,” and that when a listener complained that he had not acknowledged his debt to another writer, Cumming answered in print, naming both that writer and the one they had both depended on.⁸

Veltman found Harris and Cumming were copied in the fifteen chapters he studied. The examples below come from chapters Veltman never examined, corroborating his findings.

The Great Teacher Opens the Book

The first chapter of The Desire of Ages, “God with Us,” is the chapter every reader meets first. In Chapter 4 of this book, we saw that it was compiled largely from articles prepared by Maggie Hare. Wherever those articles came from, two of the chapter’s best-known passages came from The Great Teacher. The first is from the introductory essay that Heman Humphrey, president of Amherst College, wrote for the American edition. The second is Harris’s own.

The famous opening of the section, “Nearly two thousand years ago, a voice of mysterious import was heard in heaven,” is Humphrey’s sentence with three words removed. The image of Christ pitching His tent among ours, which SDA preachers have repeated for more than a century, is Harris’s image in Harris’s words.

Harris All the Way Through

The Great Teacher did not stop at chapter 1. Outside Veltman’s sample we found some twenty strong parallels with The Great Teacher, scattered from the incarnation to the Great Commission. A few of them:

Notice what happened in the second row. Harris was writing about the church: the church is “the only fortress” Christ holds in a revolted world. White moved the sentence to the individual soul. And notice the third row. In Chapter 4 we saw that some SDAs credit W. W. Prescott and the 1890s Australian circle with the teaching that the Holy Spirit is “the Third Person of the Godhead.” Whatever the influence of that circle, the sentence that carries the phrase in The Desire of Ages was written by John Harris in 1835, down to its “no modified energy.”

Cumming on John

Cumming’s readings on John’s Gospel supplied more than one famous line. When The Desire of Ages reaches the same chapters of John, Cumming’s sentences appear with them:

None of these is Scripture. John does not say who opened the springs of the earth, or compare the vine with the cedar, the oak and the palm. Cumming did. Then The Desire of Ages did, in his words.

The Paragraph Veltman Missed

One Cumming passage deserves special attention, because it sits inside one of the very chapters Veltman studied, and his team marked it as White’s own.

In chapter 75, when Caiaphas tears his robes at Jesus’ trial, The Desire of Ages stops to explain why the act was so serious. A high priest, it says, was forbidden to tear his garments, on pain of death. The tearing of Caiaphas’s robe, it goes on, was answered by the tearing of the temple veil when Jesus died, and from then on the high priest’s robes meant nothing. Veltman rated this whole passage “strictly independent,” meaning he found no literary source for it.²⁹ But Cumming had made the same argument, in the same order, in his readings on Matthew, a book on Veltman’s own list of sources.³⁰

This is not word-for-word copying. Rather, it is the same chain of argument, step by step, with the key phrases carried over. The reference to Leviticus 10:6 came from the Bible commentaries: Adam Clarke wrote that the high priest’s act was “expressly contrary to the law, Leviticus 10:6,” and The Desire of Ages says, “Express command had been given by Christ to Moses concerning this. Leviticus 10:6.”³⁵ Veltman’s list rates Clarke and Barnes only as “possible” and “probable” sources that his team never tested.³⁶ And the passage is already in White’s handwritten manuscript of 1897, so it entered the book through her own hand.³⁷

That is a passage the sect’s own investigator counted as Ellen White’s original work. It is one more reason to treat his figure of 31.4 percent as a floor and not a ceiling.

The Life That Was Not Borrowed - But the Words Were

Return to the sentence that opened this chapter: “In Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived.” It is a magnificent statement about Christ. It is also a magnificent irony when found in a book whose own language was borrowed. The entire chapter contains identifiable passages, with distinctive language and arguments carried from one book into another.

Our comparisons confirm that the copying did not stop where Veltman's study stopped. They run through the book and supplies some of the most meaningful passages that SDAs have quoted, preached, and treasured as evidence of prophetic inspiration. The words that made The Desire of Ages sound so extraordinary were not revelations at all. In many cases, they were the words of uninspired Christian preachers whose books Ellen White owned and used.

There is an especially revealing contrast here. John Cumming quoted other writers and acknowledged his sources. His readers could see who was speaking and where the material came from. But when his prose appeared in The Desire of Ages, his name disappeared. The copied words emerged under the authority of a prophet. The reader was not told that a celebrated sentence about Christ's unborrowed life had appeared in Cumming's book decades earlier, or that the opening picture of the incarnation had already been written by Harris. It was made to appear as if this came from White. That is deception.

The Spirit of Hypocrisy

This chapter has exposed an irony that is impossible to ignore. Some of the most admired expressions in The Desire of Ages did not come from a vision of heaven. They came from preachers of what Ellen White called Apostate Protestantism—the very ministers she accused of "falsely interpreting the word of God."³⁸ For decades, she denounced the teachings of other denominations, portrayed their ministers as purveyors of religious error, and warned her followers against their influence. Yet when it came time to write about Christ, she repeatedly turned to those same men for language, illustrations, and theological insights. The preachers she publicly discredited became, in private, literary authorities. Their words were good enough to publish as prophetic light, even if their names were not good enough to acknowledge.

Now, the opening sentence takes on an irony of its own. "In Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived." But the sentence itself was borrowed—from one of those supposedly fallen Protestant preachers. Perhaps this helps explain why White could not afford to be candid about her sources. To acknowledge how much she owed these men would have exposed a contradiction at the heart of her prophetic claims. How could she warn SDAs that these ministers were falsely interpreting God's Word, while quietly mining their books for the very material she presented as divine light? She could condemn their theology from the pulpit, but borrow their words in secret. Their influence was indispensable to the success of her book, but acknowledging them would destroy the sectarian brand she was building. So the sources disappeared, leaving the false impression that the light had come through her.

That was as wrong as wrong gets. However, it was better for sales. In the end, that is all that mattered to White.