The Desire of Wages

Chapter 12 - Copied Mistakes

by Dirk Anderson

Every schoolteacher knows the moment. Two students hand in the same right answer, and it proves nothing other than both had studied the subject. Two students hand in the same wrong answer, worded the same peculiar way, and the teacher knows exactly what happened. Scholars who compare ancient manuscripts work by the same rule. Shared truths can be coincidence. Shared mistakes cannot. When two texts make the same error, one was copied from the other.

The previous five chapters have shown The Desire of Ages copying many good sentences from Ingraham, Hanna, March, Geikie, Farrar, Harris, Cumming and the commentators. SDA defenders have an excuse for that. White, they say, saw the scenes in vision and then searched for and used the best words she could find to describe them. That answer collapses the moment the copied words carry a mistake. A vision of the real event would not contain Geikie’s error. Only Geikie’s book would.

This chapter adds three more copied mistakes to the ones already shown, and then lays the whole evidence out for review.

A Son of the Law at Twelve

Luke says that Jesus went up to Jerusalem with His parents “when he was twelve years old” (Luke 2:42). That is all. The Desire of Ages explains why twelve mattered:

Among the Jews the twelfth year was the dividing line between childhood and youth. On completing this year a Hebrew boy was called a son of the law, and also a son of God.¹

None of this is in White’s 1877 account of the same visit.² It came from Cunningham Geikie’s Life and Words of Christ, first published that same year, and on White’s shelf:

The second row is there to settle any doubt about where White was reading. The first row is where the mistake comes in.

A Jewish boy did not become a “son of the law” at twelve. The Mishnah, the earliest source on the subject, sets the age at thirteen: five years old for Scripture, ten for the Mishnah, “thirteen for the commandments.”⁷ Geikie knew this. Fifty pages earlier in the same volume he had written, “At the age of thirteen he became a ‘son of the Law,’ and was bound to practise all its moral and ritual requirements,” and his footnote cited that very passage of the Mishnah. He added that another scholar said twelve, “but this may mean when he has completed that age, and is, consequently, in his thirteenth year.”⁸ Then, when he reached the Passover visit, he wanted Jesus to be a son of the law at twelve, and he stretched the evidence to make Him one.

Geikie had already contradicted himself, but at least he had identified the evidence and acknowledged the uncertainty. White took his incorrect answer, ignored his correct one, and then added a claim of her own. A Jewish boy supposedly became not only a “son of the law” at twelve, but also a “son of God.” Where did that come from? Not from Scripture. Not from the Mishnah. Not from Geikie. Not from any Jewish source. It came from Ellen White. She took a dubious rabbinical tradition, repeated Geikie's convenient version, and then embellished it with a religious title for which there was no historical evidence whatsoever. Luke simply says Jesus was twelve. The rest was manufactured—and published as prophetic insight.

Barabbas, False Messiah

The Gospels describe Barabbas in a few words. He was “a notable prisoner” (Matthew 27:16), one who “had committed murder in the insurrection” (Mark 15:7), “a robber” (John 18:40). In 1878 White called him “the notable robber and murderer, Barabbas,” and left it there.⁹ In 1898 he had become something much more interesting:

The Roman authorities at this time held a prisoner named Barabbas, who was under sentence of death. This man had claimed to be the Messiah. He claimed authority to establish a different order of things, to set the world right. Under satanic delusion he claimed that whatever he could obtain by theft and robbery was his own. He had done wonderful things through satanic agencies, he had gained a following among the people, and had excited sedition against the Roman government.¹⁰

No Gospel says Barabbas claimed to be the Messiah. No Gospel says he worked wonders. Did that insight come from White's twenty years of additional heavenly light she received after 1878? Not exactly. It came from Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher’s The Suffering Saviour, a German devotional book on the Passion that Fred Veltman found among White’s sources.¹¹ Its chapter “Jesus or Barabbas” walks through the scene in the same order The Desire of Ages does:

Look at what happened to Krummacher’s sentence. He wrote that Barabbas had probably played the part of a false Messiah. It was a preacher’s guess, and he labelled it as one. He then moralized that Satan had often used such “caricatures of Christ.” In The Desire of Ages the “probably” is gone, the guess is a fact, and Satan’s caricatures have become “wonderful things through satanic agencies”: miracles that Krummacher never mentioned and no Gospel records.

The custom tells the same story. Krummacher said only that it was “not founded on any divine ordinance.” He believed it was Jewish, “a figurative realization of the deliverance of their forefathers out of Egypt.” White kept his point that it had no divine authority, sharpened it into “not a shadow of justice,” and then, as Chapter 11 showed, made it pagan.

Every Qualification Cut

Chapter 10 traced White’s argument about Caiaphas’s torn robes to John Cumming, and Chapter 11 traced her Bible reference to Adam Clarke. What those chapters did not do is test the argument itself. Here it is:

A high priest was not to rend his garments. By the Levitical law, this was prohibited under sentence of death. Under no circumstances, on no occasion, was the priest to rend his robe. It was the custom among the Jews for the garments to be rent at the death of friends, but this custom the priests were not to observe. Express command had been given by Christ to Moses concerning this. Leviticus 10:6. . . . By rending his garments, Caiaphas made of no effect the law of God, to follow the tradition of men. A man-made law provided that in case of blasphemy a priest might rend his garments in horror at the sin, and be guiltless. Thus the law of God was made void by the laws of men.¹⁵

Three of White’s sources discussed this law. Every one of them qualified it. The Desire of Ages kept their claim and threw away their qualifications.

Adam Clarke wrote that Caiaphas’s act was “expressly contrary to the law, Leviticus 10:6; Leviticus 21:10.” White copied that much. Clarke’s very next sentences say that rending the clothes was “a common method of expressing violent grief” and “horror at what was deemed blasphemous,” and he gives the Bible references: 2 Kings 18:37, 2 Kings 19:1 and Acts 14:14.¹⁶ Those are the verses where Hezekiah’s officials, then Hezekiah himself, tore their clothes at the Assyrian’s blasphemy, and where Paul and Barnabas tore theirs when the crowd at Lystra tried to worship them. White took Clarke’s “horror” and called the practice “a man-made law.” Clarke had just shown it was in Scripture.

Albert Barnes agreed that the high priest was not to tear his clothes, but added: “By that was probably intended the robes of his priestly office. The garment which he now tore was probably his ordinary garment.”¹⁷ Matthew says Caiaphas “rent his clothes” (Matthew 26:65). This was a hastily called night meeting in a private house, not a temple service. The Desire of Ages has him tear “his priestly robes,” and builds a whole paragraph on the “beautiful official garments” that represented the character of Christ.

Cunningham Geikie wrote, in one place, that the high priest “must not rend his garments... whatever befell him or his.”¹⁸ That is the absolute version, and it is the one White used: “Under no circumstances, on no occasion.” But Geikie’s own footnote in the same volume explained that the rule was about mourning for the dead, and that the Talmud allowed the high priest to tear the lower part of his garment. “This explains,” Geikie wrote, “how Caiaphas could rend his clothes (Matt. xxvi. 65).”¹⁹

Now read the law itself. Leviticus 10:6 is Moses’ order to Aaron and his sons on one particular day, after the death of Nadab and Abihu: “Uncover not your heads, neither rend your clothes; lest ye die.” The context implies that they were not to tear their clothing as an act of mourning for the disobedient priests. Leviticus 21:10–11 is the standing rule, and it too is about mourning. The high priest “shall not uncover his head, nor rend his clothes; neither shall he go in to any dead body.” Both verses are targeted at tearing the clothes during mourning. Neither verse says “under no circumstances, on no occasion.” Neither forbids tearing one’s clothes at blasphemy, which the Bible itself records with approval.

Clarke gave White the verses that refuted her. Barnes gave her the distinction that refuted her. Geikie gave her the explanation that refuted her. She used all three books and none of their caution. The result was a doctrine about the Levitical law that contradicts the Bible, delivered with the certainty of a prophet, and built entirely out of other men’s notes.

The Ledger of Copied Mistakes

Here are all the known mistakes in The Desire of Ages and its 1878 forerunner that this book has traced to a source on White’s library shelf:

Twenty mistakes, traced to eleven authors. Some are small. Some are not. They show the same pattern again and again. The source hedged; The Desire of Ages did not. The source said “probably,” “the Jews say,” “afterwards,” or gave a careful answer alongside a careless one; The Desire of Ages kept the claim and dropped the caution.

What a Shared Mistake Proves

A shared mistake proves two things at once.

It proves copying. No one can seriously argue that White and Geikie independently got the age of a son of the law wrong in the same words, or that she and Krummacher independently decided that Barabbas was a false messiah. The mistake is the fingerprint.

Furthermore, it proves there was no vision behind the copying. SDA defenders say White used other writers’ words to describe what God had shown her. But God did not show Ellen White a twelve-year-old son of the law, because there was no such thing. He did not show her a wall that had survived Nebuchadnezzar, because Nebuchadnezzar burned the temple to the ground. He did not show her Jesus hearing Cleopas on the cross, because Cleopas had not yet spoken. Those things existed in only one place: the books on her shelf. That is where she found them, and that is where the readers who paid for The Desire of Ages as inspired truth were really getting their information, at second hand and with the warnings removed.

The next two chapters turn to the mistakes that have not yet been traced to any source: places where The Desire of Ages contradicts the Gospels themselves, and places where it defies the historical record or passes off legend as revelation. Some of those may yet turn up in a book on White’s shelf. The rest she will have to answer for herself.