The Desire of Wages

Chapter 11 - The Commentators

by Dirk Anderson

Ellen White owned multiple Bible commentaries. The catalogue of her private and office libraries lists Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes on the Gospels, Matthew Henry, the one-volume Portable Commentary of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Bengel, Lange, and Henry Alford’s New Testament for English Readers.¹ Seven commentaries covering the four Gospels.

Bible commentators often express caution when they are not entirely sure about a point. They report what “the Jews say,” what Josephus says, what “is probable.” They weigh one opinion against another and share the strengths and weaknesses of differing opinions. A good commentator tells the reader when he is guessing.

White never did. When the commentators’ notes passed into The Desire of Ages, the “probably” disappeared, the “it was said” disappeared, and what was left was stated as plain fact, in the voice of a prophet who claimed to have seen it. Some of those “facts” were wrong. This chapter follows White's mistakes back to the commentators where they originated.

The Hour of the Evening Sacrifice

The death of Christ in The Desire of Ages ends in one of the most famous scenes in the book. As Jesus cries “It is finished,” the camera cuts to the temple:

When the loud cry, “It is finished,” came from the lips of Christ, the priests were officiating in the temple. It was the hour of the evening sacrifice. The lamb representing Christ had been brought to be slain. Clothed in his significant and beautiful dress, the priest stood with lifted knife, as did Abraham when he was about to slay his son. With intense interest the people were looking on. But the earth trembles and quakes; for the Lord Himself draws near. With a rending noise the inner veil of the temple is torn from top to bottom by an unseen hand, throwing open to the gaze of the multitude a place once filled with the presence of God.²

SDAs read this as a window into heaven’s record. In reality, it is a window into Matthew Henry. In his note on Matthew 27:51, the Nonconformist minister set the scene almost two centuries before White did:

The same moment, the same hour, the same priests, the same seven words in a row, and Henry’s “invisible power” turned into an “unseen hand.”

What Henry did not supply, John Cumming did. Chapter 10 showed how Cumming’s readings on Matthew gave White her argument about Caiaphas’s torn robes. The same two pages describe the veil, and the rest of White’s scene is there:

Notice where the two sources put their caution. Henry says the priests “might” have been eyewitnesses. Cumming says they “must” have been startled and that it is “not improbable” that Annas or Caiaphas was on duty.⁹ Both men knew they were imagining the scene. In The Desire of Ages the imagining becomes reporting: the priest stands with his knife raised, the people watch “with intense interest,” and the holy of holies lies open to the crowd. Chapter 9 has already shown that the crowd could not have seen it.

The scene was built in layers. White’s 1878 version had only Hanna’s priests “ministering in the temple before the vail” and a veil torn by “the same bloodless hand that wrote the words of doom upon the walls of Belshazzar’s palace.”¹⁰ Henry’s officiating priests and evening sacrifice, and Cumming’s high priest, mercy seat and end of all sacrifices, were added for the 1898 book. Only one detail could not be found in any book on her shelf: the knife dropping from the priest’s “nerveless hand” and the lamb running away. That part, so far as I can find, really was original.

A Stain That Outlived Its Temple

In Matthew 23:35 Jesus speaks of “the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.” The murder is told in 2 Chronicles 24:20–22: King Joash had the prophet Zechariah stoned “in the court of the house of the LORD.” That is all the Bible says. White says much more:

His blood had imprinted itself upon the very stones of the temple court, and could not be erased; it remained to bear testimony against apostate Israel. As long as the temple should stand, there would be the stain of that righteous blood, crying to God to be avenged.¹¹

The indelible bloodstain is not in the Bible. It is in the Talmud, and White found it in her commentary. Henry Alford, on the same verse, explains that Zacharias the son of Jehoiada was the prophet “of whose blood the Jews had a saying, that it never was washed away till the temple was burnt at the captivity.”¹²

The wording is White’s. The legend is not, and she got it wrong twice.

First, Alford labels it a Jewish “saying.” White states it as fact. A prophet’s blood that would not wash off stone is a rabbinic folk tale. In The Desire of Ages it is history, and the scribes listening to Jesus “knew” it was true.

Second, look at when the stain ended. In the legend, as Alford and the other commentators report it, the blood stopped crying out when Nebuchadnezzar’s general burned Solomon’s temple in 586 BC.¹³ The stones it soaked into were destroyed with that temple. The temple Jesus stood in was Herod’s, rebuilt from the foundations five centuries later. White kept the bloodstain alive on stones that no longer existed, “as long as the temple should stand.” She even improved on the folk tale.

This one was not added by her staff. The bloodstain is already in The Spirit of Prophecy in 1878, almost word for word.¹⁴ White was mining the commentaries for inspiration long before Marian Davis arrived.

A Wall That Never Was

Leaving the temple for the last time, the disciples point out its buildings to Jesus, and He predicts that not one stone will be left on another (Mark 13:1–2). The Desire of Ages stops to describe the stones:

The stones of the temple were of the purest marble, of perfect whiteness, and some of them of almost fabulous size. A portion of the wall had withstood the siege by Nebuchadnezzar’s army. In its perfect masonry it appeared like one solid stone dug entire from the quarry. How those mighty walls could be overthrown the disciples could not comprehend.¹⁵

Now read the note on Mark 13:1 in Jamieson, Fausset and Brown:

The last row gives the game away. JFB guessed at what the disciple was thinking: “wondering probably, how so massive a pile could be overthrown.” White dropped the “probably” and kept the sentence.

The middle row is worse. JFB, quoting Josephus, wrote about a siege in which six days of battering made no impression on the walls. He was writing of the Roman siege under Titus in AD 70. Then, as a separate thought, he guessed that some of the foundations were “probably as old as the first temple.” White fused the two sentences into one fact: a wall that had withstood the siege of Nebuchadnezzar.

No such wall existed. Nebuchadnezzar’s army was not impeded by the temple wall; they destroyed it:

And he burnt the house of the LORD, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man’s house burnt he with fire. And all the army of the Chaldees, that were with the captain of the guard, brake down the walls of Jerusalem round about. (2 Kings 25:9–10)

The walls the disciples admired were Herod’s, begun about 20 BC.¹⁸ A commentator’s “probably” about some old foundations, joined to the wrong siege, became a wall that defied the Babylonians.

Again, the mistake came first from White’s own pen. In 1878 she wrote of “massive stones—some of which had borne the devastation of Nebuchadnezzar’s army.”¹⁹ The marble, the whiteness, the “one stone” and JFB’s question about how the walls could be overthrown were added in 1898. The same commentary note fed the prophet in 1878 and the bookmakers twenty years later.

The Custom Lange Rejected

When Pilate offers the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, the Gospels mention a custom of releasing a prisoner at the feast. John puts it in Pilate’s mouth as a Jewish custom: “But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover” (John 18:39). Where the custom came from, nobody knows. In 1878 White simply said that “it was customary at this feast.”²⁰ By 1898 she knew a great deal more:

It was customary at this feast to release some one prisoner whom the people might choose. This custom was of pagan invention; there was not a shadow of justice in it, but it was greatly prized by the Jews.²¹

The new information is in the Luke volume of Lange’s commentary series, a series listed in her library. The note on Luke 23:17 says that the origin of the usage “is veiled in obscurity.” It mentions the theory of a heathen origin, comparing Roman and Greek festivals, and then rejects it: “To us everything appears to favor the opinion that this had grown up rather on Jewish than on heathen soil.” Pilate’s words in John 18:39, the note adds, point the same way. Then it explains “why the people attached so great a value to this is their prerogative.”²² Adam Clarke, also on her shelf, offered a different guess: the custom was “probably” introduced by the Romans.²³

So the commentators said the origin was unknown, offered guesses, and in Lange’s case rejected the heathen theory on the strength of the Bible itself. White took the theory Lange threw out, kept his remark about the value the people placed on the custom, and pronounced the question settled: “of pagan invention.” The words are not Lange’s, but the information is, and it reached the book by the same route as everything else in this chapter: a commentator’s cautious discussion, turned into a prophet’s confident assertion.

Which of the Ten Precepts?

In Matthew 22, a lawyer asks Jesus a question:

Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. (Matthew 22:36–39)

“The law” to a Jewish lawyer was the whole Law of Moses, 613 commandments by the rabbis’ later count. Jesus answered from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Neither verse is one of the Ten Commandments. White rewrote the whole question. In her version the scribe was sent “to question Jesus as to which of the ten precepts of the law was of the greatest importance,” because “the Pharisees had exalted the first four commandments . . . as of far greater consequence than the other six,” and Jesus had been “charged with exalting the last six commandments above the first four.”²⁴ No Gospel records either the Pharisees’ ranking or the charge against Jesus.

The decalogue framing came from John Cumming, who told his readers that in answering the lawyer, “Jesus then summed up the whole decalogue.” Here is the rest of Cumming’s sentence next to White’s:

The “first four” and “last six” were in White’s 1878 account, so this, too, began with her.²⁷ The 1898 sentence, with Cumming’s “summed up” and his two quotations cut at the same points, is closer to Cumming than the 1878 one was. And the framing that made the question about the Ten Commandments was Cumming’s from the start. A Scottish preacher’s summary of Jesus’ answer became, in White’s hands, the lawyer’s question, complete with a Pharisee party line and an accusation against Jesus that the Gospels never mention.

It is easy to see why the idea appealed to her. A sect that keeps the seventh-day Sabbath wants the Ten Commandments in the middle of every Gospel argument. Cumming had put them there, and White wrote them into the story.

The Same Garments Again

Chapter 10 showed that the explanation of Caiaphas’s torn robes came from Cumming. The Bible reference that goes with it came from the commentaries. On Matthew 26:65, Adam Clarke wrote that the high priest’s act was “expressly contrary to the law, Leviticus 10:6,” and Albert Barnes, on the same verse, wrote that “it was not lawful for the high priest” to tear his robes, citing the same verse.²⁸ The Desire of Ages: “Express command had been given by Christ to Moses concerning this. Leviticus 10:6.”²⁹ Two commentaries on her shelf, the same verse, and Clarke’s “expressly” turned into “Express command.”

“Probably” Becomes “It Was”

Set the commentators’ words beside White’s and the pattern is plain:

This is the opposite of what a prophet does. If White had really been shown these scenes, her visions should have corrected the commentators: told her which guesses were right and which were wrong, which siege the walls survived, where the custom came from. Instead she inherited their guesses, dropped their warnings, and made their mistakes worse. Where a commentator wrote “probably,” she wrote “it was.” Where he reported a legend, she reported a fact. Where he rejected a theory, she adopted it.

Henry, Clarke, Barnes, Jamieson, Fausset, Brown, Alford, and Lange never claimed to have visions of heaven. They never pretended that God had revealed the hidden details of Christ's life to them. They consulted sources, weighed evidence, offered possibilities, and admitted when they did not know. But Ellen White took their cautious guesses, their disputed theories, and even their mistakes, stripped away the qualifications, and published them with the authority of divine revelation. Think about that. The men who openly admitted the limits of their knowledge were more careful with the truth than the woman who claimed supernatural insight. Her supposed visions did not correct their errors; they inherited them, and sometimes magnified them.

The commentators said, "probably." The prophet said, "God showed me." And when the dust settled, the prophet was the one who got it wrong.