Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 1 - An Inspired Book?

by Dirk Anderson

For generations, Seventh-day Adventists have read Patriarchs and Prophets as light from heaven — a divinely revealed account of the biblical past, filled with intriguing details supplied to prophetess Ellen White through visions.

This belief was fostered by Ellen White herself. In 1889, just before the release of Patriarchs and Prophets, she wrote:

I had been, during the forty-five years of experience, shown the lives, the character and history of the patriarchs, and prophets...¹

In 1906, she reaffirmed this supernatural claim:

When I am using my pen, wonderful representations are given me of past, present, and future.²

These and many similar statements led her followers to believe that the narrative in Patriarchs and Prophets was truth streaming directly from the portals of glory.

No Human Mind

Ellen White left no ambiguity about the source of Patriarchs and Prophets. She insisted it came from God, in language that leaves no room for a human collaborator:

God gave me the light contained in Great Controversy and Patriarchs and Prophets... It cannot be denied that these works were not the product of any human mind; they are the voice of God speaking to His people.³

That is about as strong a claim of divine authorship as language allows. Not the product of any human mind. She is not saying God inspired her thoughts and she put those into her own words. She is not saying God's ideas channelled through her and were then polished by book editors. No, it was the actual voice of God — verbal inspiration — addressed to His people, using her hand only as the instrument.

Uriah Smith made his own claim in his introduction to the book. He explained that its purpose was to bring "into stronger light some features that are but briefly mentioned in the Bible" and to reveal the "springs of action" behind the biblical narrative. The value of the book, in other words, was precisely what the Bible itself does not provide, and what an uninspired author could not possibly know: additional details, motives, explanations, and narrative material found nowhere in Genesis. Smith described this as a light "shed upon the Scripture" and concluded that the book "claims to be a manifestation of the gift of prophecy."⁴

That distinction is critical. If Ellen White were merely another nineteenth-century sectarian commentator promoting SDA views on the Old Testament, an investigation like this would be completely unnecessary. Sensible readers would have had a healthy skepticism when reading her writings. However, she claimed to be not only a prophet, but more than a prophet. Therefore, she must be held to the very highest standard of integrity.

White's entire claim to prophetic authority hinges on a single point: the extra-biblical payload she added to Holy Writ. Strip away everything Moses already wrote in Genesis, and what remains? The imagined motives, the theatrical dialogue, the invented scenes, and the extra-biblical lore. That extra material is the sum total of White’s claim to divine revelation. If those additions can be shown to be human inventions, her entire prophetic charade collapses.

Perhaps James White unknowingly described it the best:

If Mrs. White has gathered the facts from a human mind in a single case she has in thousands of cases, and God has not shown her these things which she has written in these personal testimonies.⁵

The Whites, who had much to profit from the sale of her books, continued to insist that Ellen was inspired by God. The claim that White was writing what God showed her in vision was reinforced by W. C. White, her son, literary manager, and counselor, who wrote:

Regarding Mother's writings, I have overwhelming evidence and conviction that they are the description and delineation of what God has revealed to her in vision.⁶

Decades later, her grandson Arthur White described her role in the same terms, comparing her directly to Moses: "just as Moses watched history in advance so did Ellen White in vision watch history develop, both past and future."⁷

Mother, son, and grandson all sang from the exact same hymnal: what appeared on the page had supposedly been shown to her in heavenly vision.

The Evolution of Inspiration

In 1864, White published her first raw attempt at Old Testament narrative in Spiritual Gifts, volume 3 — a modest work written strictly for the edification of her sectarian followers.

Twenty-six years later, she released Patriarchs and Prophets — a volume targeted at the mainstream public, bloated to nearly double its original length and packed with intricate new details. Hundreds of new pages separated the two accounts. Where did this sudden explosion of "history" come from?

For over a century, the White Estate has repeated the exact same party line: the extra material descended directly from heaven. "Many repeated visions opened before the author more detailed information," the Trustees alleged, insisting the massive additions were "presented to Mrs. White in many revelations."⁸

Strip away the pious spin, and the White Estate’s defense is staggering: it requires us to believe Almighty God supplied heavenly visions for the sole purpose of fattening up a thin sectarian booklet into a high-margin commercial product that could be sold to thousands. How convenient that the Lord flooded her mind with "new revelations" at the exact moment the SDA publishing empire needed a thick, expensive subscription book to sell to the general public. Divine revelation, it turns out, was perfectly attuned with commercial opportunity.

Mass Book Sales

It all started with George King, a young Canadian SDA who immigrated to Battle Creek, Michigan, in early 1879. Wanting to be a preacher but lacking public-speaking talent, James White encouraged King to conduct house-to-house visitations instead. In doing so, King helped prove the potential of selling SDA books directly to the public.

In 1880, King had significant success in canvassing Dr. J.H. Kellogg’s Home Hand Book of Domestic Hygiene and Rational Medicine, a book designed to appeal broadly to the public. As book sales began climbing into the tens of thousands, Ellen White and SDA corporate leaders took notice. Seizing the opportunity, Ellen White wrote an article in the Review calling for "canvassers and colporteurs" of both sexes to engage in the work and encouraged "every member" of the sect to be "deeply interested in sending forth publications." She concluded: "Let the leaflets and tracts, the papers and books, go in every direction."⁹

In October of 1880, she wrote to her son Willie letting him know that they had every intention of getting plugged into this money machine:

We are now deciding to spend this winter and next summer in preparing books. ... Volume Four [of Spirit of Prophecy]... Life of Christ, both books [Spirit of Prophecy, Volume 2 (1877) and Volume 3 (1878)], the most sharp and interesting matter in one large book for canvassers to use for public sale. ... Our time now must be in production of books before we get unable to use the pen. Write at once.¹⁰

In 1881, as the Whites rushed to build an editorial staff that could generate new books for public consumption, King persuaded the Review and Herald publishing house to issue Uriah Smith’s Thoughts on Daniel and Revelation as a single, attractive volume designed for door-to-door sales. His immediate commercial success helped convince leaders that literature evangelism could be highly profitable.

By the early 1880s, the canvassing effort was picking up steam. The sect found it could market its doctrines to the general public while generating substantial revenue. During the 1880s, the sect recruited dedicated canvassing agents and established training institutes. By 1884, some canvassers were apparently making a reasonable income because Mrs. White wrote privately to Willie:

If you can get out the books so that they can be had at the camp meetings, I would engage to sell all I could myself, and these large sums paid to canvassers, I could have myself.¹¹

White understood the lucrative nature of this business and wanted her piece of it. She envisioned replacing her aging Spirit of Prophecy series and creating the Conflict of the Ages series — a set of five large books designed for public consumption — and big profits. The first release of this new series would be called Great Controversy (1888) to be followed up with Patriarchs and Prophets — the replacement for volume one of Spirit of Prophecy.

This would require major revision work. Her earlier works were ill-suited for a non-SDA audience for three reasons.

First, contentious passages — such as her controversial statements regarding the amalgamation of man and beast — had to be purged.

Secondly, the existing material was far too brief for a subscription volume. When Patriarchs and Prophets was finally released in 1890, it had expanded to a whopping 764 pages.

Finally, the literary quality required significant elevation. To compete with popular Christian authors of the era, a team of literary assistants and editors was assembled to polish, embellish, and expand White's earlier works into commercial products that the public would be willing to purchase.

Thus, an organized publishing apparatus was established to take White’s earlier writings, refine them, and market them on a worldwide scale. In doing so, Ellen White operated unlike any biblical prophet before her:

• No biblical prophet built a commercial publishing empire.
• No biblical prophet sold their revelations and collected royalties on them.
• No biblical prophet revised their visions to enhance market appeal.
• No biblical prophet employed editorial teams to sanitize and embellish their writings.
• No biblical prophet systematically plagiarized the literary works of contemporaries into their own revelations while claiming not to do so.

Was God behind all of this?