The Desire of Wages
Appendix C - Earlier Versions
by Dirk Anderson
SDAs are taught that The Desire of Ages is the mature form of what Ellen White had been shown about the life of Christ since 1858. If that were so, most of the 1898 book should be found, in some form, in her earlier books on the same subject. This appendix sets out the test behind Chapter 5: how much of The Desire of Ages can be traced to those earlier books, and what changed between them.
The Texts Compared
- Spiritual Gifts, vol. 1 (1858), the first account of the life of Christ, presented as what White “saw.” The working file also included the life-of-Christ chapters of the 1864 volumes.
- The Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 2 (1877), the whole volume.
- The Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 3 (1878), chapters 1–19 (the Passion and resurrection).
- The Desire of Ages (1898), standard edition, pages 19–835.
Two Methods, One Result
Method A: sentence similarity. Each sentence of The Desire of Ages was compared with every sentence of the earlier books and counted as having a counterpart if the two were at least 60 per cent similar. Of 15,376 sentences, 13,180 (85.7 per cent) had no counterpart in the earlier books.
Method B: shared phrases. Bible quotations were masked out. A sentence was then counted as traced if at least half of its four-word phrases occur in the earlier books. This method is more generous, because it catches sentences that were reworded.
| Measure (Method B) | Sentences | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Sentences in The Desire of Ages | 15,459 | 100% |
| Traced to the earlier books (half the phrases) | 1,626 | 10.5% |
| Scripture only | 1,581 | 10.2% |
| Not traced, not Scripture | 12,252 | 79.3% |
| Traced at a looser threshold (30% of phrases) | — | 14.7% |
| Not traced at the looser threshold | — | 75.0% |
By source, at the 50 per cent threshold: Spiritual Gifts 0.2 per cent, The Spirit of Prophecy vol. 2 5.0 per cent, vol. 3 5.3 per cent.
The safest summary is the one used in Chapter 5: only about one sentence in ten of The Desire of Ages, and at most one in seven, can be traced to White’s own life-of-Christ books of 1858–1878.
The chapters differ greatly. “Thy King Cometh,” on the triumphal entry, is 61 per cent traced. Chapters 65, 66, 67 and 80 are about 26 to 28 per cent. The first chapter, “God with Us,” and many others owe the earlier books nothing at all.
What the Numbers Do Not Mean
An untraced sentence is not automatically a copied one. Between 1878 and 1898 White wrote hundreds of periodical articles, letters and manuscripts, and the book also drew on Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing (1896) and on the French La vie de Jésus-Christ (1887–1891), whose arrangement Marian Davis said the new book followed “as nearly as seemed feasible.”1 What the figures do show is that the 1898 book was not an expansion of her earlier visions of Christ’s life. Nine-tenths of it came from somewhere else: from her later writing, assembled by her staff, and from the books on her shelf (Appendix B). Veltman found that her own manuscripts of 1897, written while the book was being finished, were composed with Farrar, Hanna, Edersheim, Dods and March open beside her.2
What Changed Between the Versions
Where the earlier books and The Desire of Ages tell the same scene, the changes are revealing. Some errors were quietly corrected; some admissions were quietly dropped; and some new errors came in with new sources.
| Earlier text | The Desire of Ages (1898) | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Spiritual Gifts 1:57 (1858): Jesus falls under the cross three times; Simon of Cyrene “one of his followers” | DA 742: two falls; Simon “a stranger” | Number of falls reduced; Simon’s faith reversed |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:150 (1878): Jesus “at first pronounced to be dead” after a fall | Dropped | Detail removed |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:138 (1878): Herod has Jesus crowned with thorns | DA 731, 734: Pilate’s soldiers, as in the Gospels | Error from Ingraham silently corrected |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:108–109 (1878): the cock crows three times | DA 711–712: twice, as in Mark | Error silently corrected |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:157 (1878): a note admits moving the comma in Luke 23:43 | DA 751: comma moved, no note | Admission removed |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:166–167 (1878): priests inside, before the veil | DA 756–757: priest at the altar, the crowd watching | Scene moved; error made worse |
| Spirit of Prophecy 2:156–157 (1877): the angel troubling the pool of Bethesda stated as fact (John 5:4) | DA 201: “it was commonly believed” | Disputed verse hedged |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:120 (1878): Caiaphas tears his garments, no comment | DA 708–709: Leviticus 10:6 and a death penalty added | New material from Cumming and the commentaries |
| Spirit of Prophecy 3:141 (1878): Barabbas “the notable robber and murderer”; the custom stated plainly | DA 733: a false messiah; the custom “of pagan invention” | New material from Krummacher and Lange |
Each of these is discussed in Chapters 5, 7, 11 and 12. Together they show the process Chapter 5 described: the “inspired” account was revised as an editor revises a manuscript, by checking it against the Bible and against other books, and not by fresh revelation.
Method Notes
- The earlier texts are those published by the White Estate, with page markers. The working file labelled “1864” contains pages that match Spiritual Gifts, vol. 1 (1858); both were included.
- Scripture was masked using the King James Version, so that a quotation of the same verse was not counted as tracing.
- The periodical articles of 1878–1898 were not included in the comparison. Including them would raise the traced share, but would not change the conclusion, because many of those articles were themselves written with the same library sources at hand.
References and Notes
- Marian Davis to J. E. White, December 22, 1895.
- Fred Veltman, Full Report of the Life of Christ Research Project (General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 1988), Summary and Conclusions, 894–895, 912.