The Desire of Wages

Chapter 13 - Contradicting the Gospels

by Dirk Anderson

Ellen White set the standard herself. In the introduction to The Great Controversy she wrote that “the Spirit was not given—nor can it ever be bestowed—to supersede the Bible,” and that “it is impossible that the teaching of the Spirit should ever be contrary to that of the Word.”¹ SDAs have repeated it ever since. Whatever White wrote, they say, may add to the Bible, but it never contradicts it.

So let us hold The Desire of Ages to her standard. The last six chapters showed where its extra details came from. This chapter asks a simpler question: do those details agree with the four Gospels they claim to expand? Over and over, the answer is no. And over and over, the contradiction sits right next to a quotation of the very verse it contradicts. The staff who assembled the book put the Bible text on the page and did not notice that the story around it said something else.

A Manger in a House

Every Christmas pageant puts the wise men at the manger, kneeling beside the shepherds. Matthew does not. The Desire of Ages follows the pageant, and then quotes Matthew:

At Bethlehem they found no royal guard stationed to protect the newborn King. None of the world’s honored men were in attendance. Jesus was cradled in a manger. His parents, uneducated peasants, were His only guardians. . . . “When they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary His mother, and fell down, and worshiped Him.”²

A manger, then a house, in the space of four sentences. Matthew says the wise men came to a house and found a young child (Matthew 2:11). By The Desire of Ages’s own timeline the visit came after Jesus was presented at the temple at about forty days old, so White has the family still living in a stable more than a month after the birth.³ The commentators on her shelf knew better. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown wrote flatly that the house was “not the stable.”⁴

Two pages later Herod is waiting for the wise men to return:

The unwillingness of the rabbis to point out the Messiah’s birthplace seemed to indicate that they had penetrated his design.⁵

There was no unwillingness. Matthew says that when Herod asked the chief priests and scribes where the Christ would be born, “they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet” (Matthew 2:5). They answered at once and quoted Micah to prove it. White had invented their reluctance in 1877, and twenty years of editing never caught it.⁶

Judas Rewritten

The Gospels are clear about how Judas became an apostle. Jesus chose him. “He called unto him his disciples: and of them he chose twelve” (Luke 6:13). “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70). The Desire of Ages quotes Mark’s version at the head of its chapter on the ordination, “He goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto Him whom He would.”⁷ Three pages later it tells a different story:

While Jesus was preparing the disciples for their ordination, one who had not been summoned urged his presence among them. It was Judas Iscariot. . . . He now came forward, soliciting a place in this inner circle of disciples. With great earnestness and apparent sincerity he declared, “Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest.” . . . Matthew 8:19, 20. . . . The disciples were anxious that Judas should become one of their number. . . . they commended him to Jesus.⁸

“One who had not been summoned.” Jesus said He chose all twelve. And the words White puts in Judas’s mouth are not his. Her own reference, Matthew 8:19, says who spoke them: “a certain scribe.” Luke places the same words on the road, near the end of the ministry, from “a certain man” (Luke 9:57). Neither is Judas, and neither is at the ordination. White took an anonymous scribe’s line, gave it to Judas, and cited the verse that names the real speaker.

Judas fares no better at the end. In The Desire of Ages he bursts into the night trial before Caiaphas:

Suddenly a hoarse voice rang through the hall, sending a thrill of terror to all hearts: He is innocent; spare Him, O Caiaphas! The tall form of Judas was now seen pressing through the startled throng. . . . Rushing to the throne of judgment, he threw down before the high priest the pieces of silver. . . . Judas now cast himself at the feet of Jesus, acknowledging Him to be the Son of God.⁹

Matthew gives the time, the place and the order of events, and every one of them is different:

When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death: And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor. Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. . . . And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:1–5)

After the morning council, not during the night trial. After Jesus had been led away to Pilate, so there was no Jesus in the room for Judas to fall before. In the temple, not before the judgment seat. White even quotes Matthew 27:4 in the middle of her scene, “What is that to us? see thou to that,” and gives the words to the high priest alone, though Matthew says “they said.” This was no slip of the 1890s. The whole scene, down to “Spare him, O Caiaphas!”, was already in her 1878 book.¹⁰

This is where the Judas scene becomes more than a historical mistake. White has Judas interrupting the trial, confessing Christ's innocence, throwing down the silver, and falling at Jesus' feet to acknowledge Him as the Son of God. It is a dramatic scene, perfectly suited to a religious novel. But Matthew says it never happened. By the time Judas returned the money, Jesus had already been taken away to Pilate. There was no nighttime confrontation, no plea to Caiaphas, no confession at Jesus' feet. White has inserted an entire episode into the final hours of Christ's life, complete with dialogue, gestures, and emotional drama, and placed it in the mouth of a prophet. The question is not whether Matthew left out a few details. The question is how a writer claiming divine revelation could put words and actions into the biblical record that the chronology itself rules out. When the prophet's dramatic reconstruction contradicts the Gospel she claims to illuminate, it is not Matthew who needs correcting.

Three Mary's Merged Into One

Luke introduces three women in four chapters, and nowhere tells us they are the same person:

1. An unnamed “woman in the city, which was a sinner,” who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears at the home of a Pharisee in Galilee (Luke 7:36–50).
2. “Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils” (Luke 8:2).
3. Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha, sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to His teaching (Luke 10:39).

John identifies Mary of Bethany as the woman who anointed Jesus at a supper six days before the Passover (John 11:1–2; 12:1–3). Matthew and Mark place that anointing at Bethany, “in the house of Simon the leper” (Matthew 26:6; Mark 14:3). Different women, different settings, different episodes. The Gospels never identify the unnamed sinner as Mary Magdalene, never identify Mary Magdalene as Martha’s sister, and never say that the Galilean dinner and the Bethany anointing were the same event.

The Desire of Ages makes them all one woman. At the Bethany feast, Mary becomes the forgiven sinner: “In His mercy, Jesus had pardoned her sins.”¹¹ She also becomes Mary Magdalene, the woman delivered from seven demons: “Seven times she had heard His rebuke of the demons that controlled her heart and mind.” To complete the merger, White places this same Mary at the crucifixion and the empty tomb: “Mary stood beside the cross. ... Mary was first at the tomb after His resurrection.”¹² Three Gospel women have been compressed into one, and their separate histories stitched together into a single biography.

Combining the women required White to rewrite their history. The dinner in Galilee from Luke 7 is effectively transported to Bethany during the final week of Christ’s life. Simon the leper becomes a Pharisee, like Luke’s host. Jesus tells him the parable of the two debtors from Luke’s earlier account. Simon even thinks the very words Luke attributes to the Pharisee at that earlier dinner: “This Man, if He were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth Him: for she is a sinner.”¹³ The people have been merged, the locations rearranged, and the conversations transplanted. White has not simply supplied missing details. She has taken separate Gospel narratives and rewritten them into a story of her own.

Where did this imaginative reconstruction come from? Not from White's usual sources of inspiration. It was an old Roman Catholic tradition. In AD 591, Pope Gregory the Great famously identified the sinful woman, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany as one person, helping establish the image of the penitent Magdalene that dominated Western Christianity for centuries.¹⁴ By White’s day, numerous Protestant scholars had rejected that identification as unsupported by the Gospel accounts. Yet the supposed prophet of the last days revived the medieval conflation and presented the resulting narrative with the confidence of an eyewitness.

Consider the irony. Ellen White spent her career warning SDAs against the corruptions and traditions of Rome. She portrayed Protestantism as fallen for embracing religious error. Yet when she came to tell the story of Mary, she embraced a tradition popularized by a Roman pope, combined three women whom Scripture never identifies as one, and rearranged the Gospel accounts to make the story fit. The prophet who claimed to expose the errors of Rome ended up perpetuating one of its most infamous traditions. Neither did she present it as a questionable interpretation inherited from centuries of Catholic tradition. She presented it as the history of Jesus Christ. Rome supplied the tradition. White placed her stamp of prophetic authority upon it. Now, SDAs are stuck with it.

The Law She Claimed to Defend

No SDA book should get the Sabbath wrong. Yet The Desire of Ages manages to do so in its very first example of what it calls the rabbis' nonsense:

Especially was the Sabbath hedged in by all manner of senseless restrictions. . . . The scribes and Pharisees had made its observance an intolerable burden. A Jew was not allowed to kindle a fire nor even to light a candle on the Sabbath.¹⁵

There is just one problem. The prohibition against kindling a fire was not invented by the rabbis or the Pharisees. It was written into the law of Moses:

Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day (Exodus 35:3).

According to White's own theology, that law came from Jesus Christ Himself. The Desire of Ages explicitly teaches that Christ gave Israel the law through Moses just a few pages later.¹⁶ So let us get this straight. Christ commands Israel not to kindle a fire on the Sabbath, and centuries later His supposed prophet holds up that very command as an example of the "senseless restrictions" invented by the Pharisees. The commandment was God's. The prophet called it nonsense. White was so determined to expose the supposed distortions of the rabbis that she ended up condemning a restriction imposed by the very Christ she claimed to represent.

And the feast of booths exposes the same carelessness on an even grander scale. Describing Israel's annual observance, The Desire of Ages declares:

It was at Christ's direction that for fifteen centuries the Hebrew people had left their homes for one week every year, and had dwelt in booths.¹⁷

Fifteen centuries! An unbroken tradition, supposedly instituted at Christ's direction and faithfully observed by Israel year after year. The only problem is that Scripture destroys the claim. When the returned exiles gathered in Jerusalem under Nehemiah and built booths for the feast, the biblical record makes a clear statement about this very feast: “since the days of Jeshua the son of Nun unto that day had not the children of Israel done so” (Nehemiah 8:17). In other words, the practice White says had continued for fifteen centuries had not been observed since the days of Joshua, approximately one thousand years earlier.

These are not minor slips in an otherwise accurate account. They strike at the very authority White claimed to possess. She takes a commandment God actually gave and condemns it as a human invention. Then she takes a practice that Scripture says Israel had neglected for centuries and transforms it into an unbroken tradition maintained at Christ's direction. In one passage, she makes God's law look like Pharisaical nonsense; in the other, she makes Israel's history say the opposite of what the Bible records. And this is the woman who claimed to be restoring biblical truth.

The Wine at Cana

Ellen White had a theological problem at Cana. Her health teaching demanded that fermented wine be condemned, and she was determined that Jesus could never have served it. But John tells a story that refuses to cooperate. Rather than allow the Gospel to speak for itself, The Desire of Ages announces that the wine Jesus created was not really wine in the ordinary sense at all:

The wine which Christ provided for the feast, and that which He gave to the disciples as a symbol of His own blood, was the pure juice of the grape. . . . And He Himself provided no such beverage. . . . The unfermented wine which He provided for the wedding guests was a wholesome and refreshing drink.¹⁸

Notice what has happened. John says Jesus made wine. White insists He made unfermented grape juice. John describes the steward praising the quality of the beverage. White assures us it was wholesome and refreshing. But where does John say any of this? Nowhere. The Gospel never calls it unfermented, never describes it as grape juice, and never offers the slightest hint that Jesus performed a miracle to produce a large quantity of nonalcoholic fruit punch. Those details come from White's theological convictions, not from the biblical account.

In fact, the steward's reaction points in precisely the opposite direction. After tasting the wine, he calls the bridegroom and remarks:

Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now (John 2:10).

The Greek expression translated “when men have well drunk” is hotan methysthosin, from methysko, a verb used for becoming drunk or intoxicated. It can also describe drinking one's fill or becoming fully satisfied, so the word alone does not settle the question. But the steward's observation makes perfect sense in the context of a wedding feast where alcoholic wine was traditionally served, consumed, and judged by its quality. The ordinary practice was to serve the better wine first, when the guests could best appreciate it, and bring out the inferior wine later. The steward is surprised because the bridegroom has reversed that practice. The best wine has been saved for the end.

Consider the scale of the miracle. John tells us there were six stone waterpots, each holding two or three measures (John 2:6). That amounts to roughly 120 to 180 gallons. Jesus did not quietly produce a few glasses of grape juice to refresh thirsty guests. He transformed an enormous quantity of water into wine at a wedding feast where wine had already been flowing. White's explanation requires us to imagine that Jesus miraculously supplied a vast quantity of unfermented fruit punch—as would be served at an SDA potluck—while the steward praised the bridegroom for saving the best wine until last. To save her nineteenth-century temperance doctrine, White had to rewrite first-century reality, turning an ancient Jewish wedding feast into a Victorian prohibition rally.

The language Jesus Himself used makes White's position even more difficult to maintain. When defending His conduct against the accusations of His critics, Jesus contrasted Himself with John the Baptist:

For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! (Luke 7:33–34)

The word translated “winebibber” is oinopotes, literally a wine-drinker. The accusation was not that Jesus drank too much grape punch. His critics were portraying Him as someone who participated in ordinary drinking of alcoholic wine, unlike the ascetic John. Their charge was malicious, but Jesus did not defend Himself by claiming He never touched wine. He pointed out the hypocrisy: John abstained, and they condemned him; Jesus ate and drank, and they condemned Him too. The contrast only works because Jesus did not follow John's abstinent lifestyle.

The rest of the New Testament provides no support for White's attempt to redefine wine as harmless grape juice whenever it appears in a favorable setting. Paul rebuked the Corinthians because their Lord's Supper had become so disorderly that one was hungry while another was drunk (1 Corinthians 11:21). The word is methyo, from the same family of Greek words used in the Cana account. Paul was not describing people who had consumed too much grape juice. In 1 Timothy 5:23, he advised Timothy to use a little wine for his stomach's sake. The New Testament plainly recognizes wine as an alcoholic beverage. It does not require us to pretend otherwise every time Jesus or His followers are associated with it.

White's chosen proof text is no rescue. She appeals to Isaiah 65:8: “the new wine is found in the cluster.” But read the passage. Isaiah is describing a cluster of grapes and the juice still contained within it, using the image to illustrate God's preservation of a faithful remnant. He is not describing wine served at a wedding feast, much less explaining the miracle at Cana. The fact that grapes contain juice before fermentation does not establish that every biblical reference to wine means unfermented grape juice. That is not exegesis. It is a theological escape hatch.

That is the real issue at Cana. White had already decided what Jesus could not have done, so she rewrote what John said He did. The steward called it wine. Jesus called it wine. The Gospel describes a wedding feast, guests who had been drinking, and a steward astonished that the best wine had been saved until the end. White comes along two thousand years later and assures her readers that it was grape juice. She does not arrive at that conclusion by following the evidence. She arrives with the conclusion already in hand and forces the evidence to agree with it. White twists the miracle at Cana to suit her health theology by making John say what he never said.

“Disease Is the Result of Violating God's Laws”

Near the end of The Desire of Ages, Ellen White lays out what she claims Jesus taught about the relationship between sin and sickness:

He knew that those who petitioned Him for help had brought disease upon themselves; yet He did not refuse to heal them. . . . To many of the afflicted ones who received healing, Christ said, “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.” John 5:14. Thus He taught that disease is the result of violating God's laws.¹⁹

That is a sweeping claim. White takes one sentence Jesus spoke to one man and turns it into a general explanation for human disease. The man at Bethesda had been crippled for thirty-eight years. After healing him, Jesus later found him in the temple and warned him to sin no more. But White transforms that individual warning into a universal lesson: disease is the result of violating God's laws. It is precisely the kind of sweeping conclusion that demands biblical support. And the very next Gospel passage involving a discussion of the relationship between sin and disease demolishes it.

In John 9, Jesus and His disciples encounter a man who had been blind from birth. The disciples ask the obvious question: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Notice how closely their question resembles White's teaching. They assume that the man's disease must be traced to someone's violation of God's law. Perhaps the man sinned. Perhaps his parents did. Either way, they assume sickness is the consequence of personal wrongdoing. But Jesus gives them an answer that leaves no room for White's generalization:

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him (John 9:3).

There it is. The disciples proposed the very principle White attributes to Jesus, and Jesus rejected it. This man's blindness was not the result of some personal sin or parental wrongdoing. He had been born blind. He had not brought the condition upon himself through a sinful lifestyle. His parents were not being punished through their child's disability. Jesus refused to turn his suffering into an accusation against him or his family.

The irony is almost unbearable: The Desire of Ages itself discusses this blind man on the very same page, using his healing as an example of Christ's method of ministry.²⁰ White has the biblical account in front of her. She knows the story. Yet the book makes Jesus teach that disease results from violating God's laws while simultaneously recounting an episode in which Jesus explicitly rejects that very explanation. The contradiction is not buried in some obscure passage. It is sitting right there in the text.

Think about the damage this teaching can do. If disease is the result of violating God's laws, then every sufferer becomes a suspect. A child born with a disability? Someone must have violated God's laws. A faithful Christian struck with cancer? Somewhere, somehow, a transgression must be responsible. A person born with a genetic disorder has to live not only with the disease, but with the insinuation that it is the consequence of someone's disobedience. That is the logic of the disciples, and Jesus refused to endorse it. He did not interrogate the blind man about his sins. He did not blame his parents. He healed him.

There is an especially poignant historical irony here. Marian Davis, a follower of Ellen White's health laws, and the woman who did so much of the editorial work that brought The Desire of Ages into its final form, including this very passage, eventually died of tuberculosis. Her disease should never be treated as evidence of personal wrongdoing, and neither should anyone else's. Yet that is precisely why the distinction Jesus made matters so much. Sickness is not a reliable measure of a person's obedience, and suffering is not a license to assign blame. The Jesus of John 9 knew that. The disciples did not. And the teaching in The Desire of Ages blurs the very distinction Christ took pains to establish.

White claims that Jesus taught disease is the result of violating God's laws. But when the disciples proposed that same explanation, Jesus said, in effect, No. That is the answer the Gospel gives. And no amount of health reform rhetoric can turn Christ's rejection of the disciples' accusation into an endorsement of it.

Contradicts Herself

Sometimes The Desire of Ages does not need the Gospels to contradict it. It manages quite nicely on its own. While describing Satan's temptation in the wilderness, White lays down an astonishingly absolute rule:

Neither here nor at any subsequent time in His earthly life did He work a miracle in His own behalf.²¹

Neither here nor at any subsequent time. There is no qualification, no exception, no room for debate. Jesus never once worked a miracle in His own behalf. But apparently the author forgot her own declaration when she reached Matthew 17. There, Peter is confronted with the question of whether Jesus pays the temple tax. Jesus tells him to go fishing, promising that the first fish he catches will have a coin in its mouth. Peter is to take that money and pay the tax “for Me and thee” (Matthew 17:27).

This was a miracle that provided the money to discharge Jesus' own financial obligation. In fact, Jesus had just explained that, as the Son of God, He was exempt from the tax: “Then the sons are free” (Matthew 17:26). Nevertheless, He chose to pay it rather than create an unnecessary offense. How did The Desire of Ages describe the event? As a miracle in which Christ “revealed His glory.”²²

To be clear, Jesus was not using divine power to indulge Himself or escape some hardship. He was meeting an obligation and avoiding needless controversy. But that distinction does not rescue White's statement. The money paid His tax. The miracle was performed, at least in part, in His own behalf. The book declares that Jesus never worked such a miracle, then turns around and recounts one.

The problem is the word never. White made an absolute claim that the very book bearing her name disproves.

The Smaller Ones

The examples above are the strongest. They are not the only ones. Below is a short list, each with the verse White ignored:

• The Pharisees and John’s baptism. “Many of the scribes and Pharisees came confessing their sins, and asking for baptism.”²³ Luke: “the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him” (Luke 7:30).
• The angel and the Assyrians. The angels (plural) “slew of the Assyrian army in one night one hundred and eighty-five thousand men.”²⁴ Scripture: “the angel of the LORD went out, and smote” them (2 Kings 19:35). One angel.
• Roman soldiers at Herod’s court. White quotes Luke, “Herod with his men of war set Him at nought,” and in the next sentence adds, “The Roman soldiers joined in this abuse.”²⁵ Luke says Herod’s men, not Rome’s (Luke 23:11). Herod Antipas had his own troops.
• “His blood be on us.” “Caiaphas answered defiantly, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’” The next sentence quotes Matthew: “The whole multitude answered and said.”²⁶ Matthew: “Then answered all the people” (Matthew 27:25). Caiaphas is not named.
• Judas at the Lord’s Supper. The Desire of Ages has Jesus give the bread and cup first, with Judas receiving them, and only afterwards announce “one of you shall betray Me.”²⁷ Matthew and Mark give the reverse order: the announcement first, then “as they were eating, Jesus took bread” (Matthew 26:21–26; Mark 14:18–22). White moves Matthew’s own verses so that Judas can be shown taking the emblems.

Tested by Her Own Standard

White declared that the Spirit of God never contradicts the Word of God. That is the standard she set. By that standard, these passages fail. They cannot be the product of the Spirit she and her followers claimed was guiding her in writing her books.

The Desire of Ages contradicts the very Scriptures it claims to illuminate.