The Desire of Wages

Chapter 14 - Defying History, Inventing Legend

by Dirk Anderson

Jesus told a story about a man who fell among thieves on the road to Jericho. A priest passed by, then a Levite, and finally a Samaritan stopped to help (Luke 10:30–37). Luke introduces it simply: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” But The Desire of Ages claims to know something Luke never tells us:

This was no imaginary scene, but an actual occurrence, which was known to be exactly as represented. The priest and the Levite who had passed by on the other side were in the company that listened to Christ’s words.¹

The first claim was not original. Matthew Henry, whose commentary sat on White’s shelf, had suggested almost two centuries earlier that the story was an actual event:

Henry offered a possibility. White turned it into certainty. His cautious “probably” vanished, replaced by an event supposedly “known” to have happened exactly as described.³

But White went further than Henry—or any known commentator. She placed the very priest and Levite from the story in the audience listening to Jesus. Luke says nothing about them being real people, much less that they were standing there. This was an extraordinary detail, and one no historical record could verify.

That is the problem with the extra-biblical details in The Desire of Ages. White does not merely retell what Scripture records; she claims to know what happened beyond the biblical account. When those claims reach into history, however, they can be tested. And that is precisely what this chapter will do.

The Stone the Builders Rejected

When Jesus quoted Psalm 118:22, “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner” (Matthew 21:42), The Desire of Ages again announced a piece of hidden history:

Christ referred to an actual occurrence in the history of Israel. The incident was connected with the building of the first temple. . . . For use in the foundation, one stone of unusual size and peculiar shape had been brought; but the workmen could find no place for it, and would not accept it. . . . Long it remained a rejected stone. But when the builders came to the laying of the corner, they searched for a long time to find a stone of sufficient size and strength. . . . But at last attention was called to the stone so long rejected.⁴

The story goes on for a page. The stone survives sun, frost and tempest. It passes every test. It is hoisted into place and found to be an exact fit.

There is no such incident in the Bible. Kings and Chronicles describe the building of Solomon’s temple in detail (1 Kings 5–7; 2 Chronicles 2–4) and say nothing of a rejected stone. Josephus does not mention it. Jewish tradition read the psalm as a picture of David, the rejected shepherd boy who became king.

There was, however, one place in nineteenth-century America where the story was told often, and told as having happened at the building of Solomon’s temple: the masonic lodge. The Mark Master degree of Freemasonry, standardized by Thomas Smith Webb’s Freemason’s Monitor in 1797, is built around Psalm 118:22 and its Gospel quotations.⁵ In its legend a craftsman at Solomon’s temple cuts a stone of peculiar shape; the overseers reject it as unfit and throw it aside; later the work comes to a halt because the stone needed to complete the building is missing; the rejected stone is searched out, found to be the missing piece, and fitted into place.⁶ In the Masonic version the stone is the keystone of an arch. In White’s it is the cornerstone. The plot is the same.

I have not found the book in which White or her helpers met this story, and it may have come through a sermon rather than straight from a Masonic manual. But wherever it came from, it did not come from the history of Israel. A fraternal-lodge legend about Solomon’s temple was presented to SDA readers as the “actual occurrence” Jesus had in mind.

Charges Against the Dead

Some of the book’s inventions are harmless color. One is not. In the scene at Simon’s house, where the woman anoints Jesus, The Desire of Ages explains why Jesus told Simon the parable of the two debtors:

Simon had led into sin the woman he now despised. She had been deeply wronged by him.⁷

No Gospel says this, hints at it, or leaves room for it. Matthew and Mark name the host only as “Simon the leper” (Matthew 26:6; Mark 14:3). Luke’s Simon, at a different dinner in Galilee, is guilty of pride and of failing to show Jesus ordinary courtesy (Luke 7:44–46). The Desire of Ages charges a named man in the Bible with seducing the woman at his feet, on no evidence at all. If a modern writer did that to a real person, he would be sued.

The Growing Dream of Pilate’s Wife

Matthew gives one verse to Pilate’s wife: “When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him” (Matthew 27:19). Watch what happened to that dream in White’s hands over forty years.

In 1858 an angel was sent to Pilate’s wife and told her in a dream “that it was the Son of God in whose trial Pilate was engaged.”⁸ In 1878 the angel came “at his desire”—at Jesus’ request—and she “was shown the pure life and holy character of the man.”⁹ By 1898 the dream had become a full-length vision of the future:

In answer to Christ’s prayer, the wife of Pilate had been visited by an angel from heaven, and in a dream she had beheld the Saviour and conversed with Him. . . . She saw Pilate give Jesus to the scourging. . . . She saw the cross uplifted on Calvary. She saw the earth wrapped in darkness, and heard the mysterious cry, “It is finished.” Still another scene met her gaze. She saw Christ seated upon the great white cloud, while the earth reeled in space, and His murderers fled from the presence of His glory. With a cry of horror she awoke, and at once wrote to Pilate words of warning.¹⁰

Each edition knows more than the one before. That is not how revelation works; it is how legends grow. The early church went the same way. Later tradition gave Pilate’s wife a name, Claudia Procula, made her a believer, and the Greek Orthodox Church honors her as a saint. The Desire of Ages did not use the name, but it traveled the same road: from one line in Matthew to a woman granted a private preview of the crucifixion and the Second Coming.

Catholic Legends in an SDA Book

SDAs regard the Roman Catholic Church as the power of Revelation 13. It is a strange thing, then, how many Catholic traditions found their way into The Desire of Ages as revealed fact. Chapter 5 showed Jesus falling under the cross three times in White’s 1858 vision, the same three falls as the Catholic Stations of the Cross. Chapter 13 showed the three Marys merged by Pope Gregory the Great. Two more appear at the end of the book.

Peter crucified upside down. John 21:18–19 says only that Peter would “stretch forth” his hands and die in a way that would glorify God. The Desire of Ages knows more:

When at last brought to the cross, he was, at his own request, crucified with his head downward. He thought it too great an honor to suffer in the same way as his Master did.¹¹

The upside-down crucifixion comes from the Acts of Peter, an apocryphal book of the late second century, and was passed on by Origen and Eusebius.¹² The reason given, that Peter felt unworthy to die as his Lord had, comes from Jerome, writing around AD 392.¹³ White’s 1878 version had the request but no reason.¹⁴ The 1898 book supplied Jerome’s.

Pilate’s suicide. The Desire of Ages ends Pilate’s story with a moral:

His honors were stripped from him, he was cast down from his high office, and, stung by remorse and wounded pride, not long after the crucifixion he ended his own life.¹⁵

History tells a different story. Josephus says Pilate was removed from office after he massacred a crowd of Samaritans, and was sent to Rome to answer for it; he arrived after Tiberius had died, in AD 37.¹⁶ That was six years after The Desire of Ages dates the crucifixion, and it had nothing to do with Jesus. The suicide is reported only by Eusebius, three centuries later, on the authority of unnamed “Greek historians.”¹⁷ “Remorse” for condemning Jesus is in no source at all. A late church tradition, with a motive added, became the closing scene of Pilate’s life.

Rome to the Rescue

Read The Desire of Ages from the triumphal entry to the cross and a strange pattern emerges. Wherever Jesus is in danger, decent Roman soldiers appear to protect Him.

• At the triumphal entry, “there were Roman officers in the throng,” who were “silenced and subdued” and turned on the priests instead of arresting Jesus.¹⁸ No Gospel mentions Romans at the triumphal entry.
• At the night trial before Caiaphas, “the Roman soldiers were stationed on the platform below the throne.” Later, “Had it not been for the Roman soldiers, Jesus would not have lived to be nailed to the cross,” and the Roman officers lectured the Sanhedrin that it was “against the Jewish law to condemn a man to death upon his own testimony.”¹⁹ The Gospels put only the high priest’s own servants and officers at that hearing (Mark 14:54, 65; John 18:18, 22), and they record the abuse going unchecked (Matthew 26:67–68; Luke 22:63–65). The point of law about a man’s own testimony came from a footnote in William Hanna’s Life of Christ, which cites a French lawyer’s rebuttal of a book on the trial of Jesus.²⁰ White gave a nineteenth-century lawyer’s argument to a first-century Roman officer.
• At Herod’s court, Roman soldiers rescue Jesus from being “torn in pieces,” though Luke says the soldiers there were Herod’s own “men of war” (Luke 23:11), as Chapter 13 noted.

The same book cannot even decide who built the temple. In one place it gets it right: “A king appointed by the Romans had united with the Jews to rebuild and embellish it.”²¹ That king was Herod the Great. A hundred and thirty pages later it gets it wrong: “The Romans had engaged in rebuilding and embellishing the temple, and they took great pride in it.”²² The Romans did no such thing. Josephus describes Herod’s rebuilding at length.²³ A prophet who saw the scenes would not need to be corrected by her own earlier chapter.

Details Nobody Could Check

Some of the book’s inventions are small, but they show how freely it supplied facts the Gospels did not give.

A hundred soldiers at the tomb. “A guard of one hundred soldiers was then stationed around the sepulcher.”²⁴ Matthew says only that Pilate told the priests, “Ye have a watch,” and that they “made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch” (Matthew 27:65–66). No number is given. When Herod Agrippa wanted to make certain of one prisoner, Peter, he used “four quaternions of soldiers” (Acts 12:4), sixteen men in shifts of four. A whole century of a hundred men for one sealed tomb is a number from nowhere. It was already in White’s 1878 account, which pictures “the remainder of the detachment of one hundred soldiers” asleep on the ground.²⁵

The eastern gate. Returning from Emmaus on the evening of the resurrection, “the two disciples enter at the eastern gate, which is open at night on festal occasions.”²⁶ Every site ever proposed for Emmaus lies west or north-west of Jerusalem. Travelers from there would not walk around the city to come in by the eastern gate, which faced the Kidron valley and the Mount of Olives. And no ancient source says any gate stood open at night on feast days. The sentence is copied, nearly word for word, from White’s 1878 book.²⁷

The knife and the lamb. Chapter 11 traced almost every detail of the temple scene at Jesus’ death to Matthew Henry and John Cumming. The one detail no source supplied was the climax: the knife dropping from the priest’s “nerveless hand” and “the lamb escapes.”²⁸ It is a vivid touch. It is also pure invention, presented as what happened.

“This Generation”

One historical claim in The Desire of Ages was a prediction, and history has already ruled on it. Explaining Jesus’ words on the Mount of Olives, the book says:

At the close of the great papal persecution, Christ declared, the sun should be darkened, and the moon should not give her light. Next, the stars should fall from heaven. . . . He says of those who see these signs, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” These signs have appeared. Now we know of a surety that the Lord’s coming is at hand.²⁹

The signs, in White’s teaching, were the Dark Day of May 19, 1780, and the meteor shower of November 13, 1833.³⁰ “This generation,” then, meant the people who saw them. Every one of those people has been dead for well over a century. The coming that SDAs were told to expect “of a surety” did not arrive within their lifetime, or their children’s, or their grandchildren’s.

The passage has a second problem. Jesus said the sun would be darkened “immediately after the tribulation of those days” (Matthew 24:29). By SDA reckoning the papal persecution ended in 1798. The Dark Day came in 1780, eighteen years before the persecution it was supposed to follow.

Legend Wearing the Robes of Revelation

A commentator’s “probably” about a parable turned into “an actual occurrence,” with the priest and Levite planted in the audience. A Masonic legend presented as the history of Solomon’s temple. A named man in the Bible accused of seduction. A dream that grew with every edition. Catholic martyr stories and late church traditions told as fact. Friendly Romans who are not in the Gospels, and Romans credited with a temple that Herod built. A hundred-man guard, a gate on the wrong side of the city, a lamb that ran away, and a generation that passed away without seeing the end.

Many of these were not added by the staff in the 1890s. The angel and Pilate’s wife go back to 1858. The hundred soldiers, the eastern gate and Peter’s upside-down cross were in White’s own book of 1878. The bookmakers of the 1890s did not remove them. They polished them, added to them, and sold them again as light from heaven.

This ends the case against the content of The Desire of Ages. Its words were copied, its mistakes were copied, and where it did not copy, it contradicted the Gospels or invented what it could not find. Part Four turns to the question this book has been asking since its first page: if the product was not what it claimed to be, who profited from it?