Patriarchs and Profits
Chapter 12 - The Book in Andrews' Library
by Dirk Anderson
In 1853, thirty-seven years before Patriarchs and Prophets and eleven years before its predecessor Spiritual Gifts, a small book was printed in Rochester, New York — the very town where the Adventist press and its founders were then gathered. Its title was The World: As It Was, Is and Will Be, and its author was an Adventist known only as A. C. Judson. A copy sat in the library of J. N. Andrews, one of the movement's pioneers.1 Not only was the book possessed by Andrews, but he was known to have lent Ellen White at least one other book whose ideas crept into her Spiritual Gifts: John Milton's Paradise Lost.2
Judson offers curious extra-biblical details that seemed to have found their way into White's Creation and Flood chapters.
1. No Swamps in Eden?
Genesis says nothing about swamps in the unfallen earth. Judson supplied it — and so, in similar words, did White.
| A. C. Judson, The World: As It Was3 | Patriarchs and Prophets4 |
|---|---|
| “Beauty and utility crowned every portion of God's sublime creation. We find no account of poisonous weeds or pestilential swamps. But there were trees of every variety, that were 'pleasant to the sight and good for food,' covered with luxuriant foliage — Fields, adorned with the richest verdure... There too was the choice vine and fragrant flowers.” | “It was exceedingly beautiful...produced a luxuriant growth of verdure. There were no loathsome swamps or barren deserts. Graceful shrubs and delicate flowers greeted the eye at every turn. The heights were crowned with trees more majestic than any that now exist.” |
Judson's imagination of a world without “pestilential swamps” becomes White's vision of a world without “loathsome swamps.” The idea that the unfallen earth contained no swamps at all is a curious, specific claim — not drawn from Scripture, and not the sort of detail one would expect two writers would independently invent.
Describing pre-Fall wetlands or marshes as "loathsome swamps" reflects a nineteenth-century Victorian cultural bias rather than an accurate biblical perspective. In modern ecology, wetlands are among the most essential, biodiverse, and life-supporting ecosystems on Earth, not "loathsome" defects caused by sin.
2. The Continual Degeneration of the Race
Judson's book contains the same doctrine that would later draw fire when White published it: that humanity has been physically shrinking since Eden.
| A. C. Judson, The World: As It Was | Spiritual Gifts, vol. 3 / 4a |
|---|---|
| “he has been continually degenerating… a continual degeneration also in the size and strength of the human family. We read of the giants of ancient times… races that were exceedingly 'tall and strong'… But the majority of mankind now existing are of a diminutive stature and comparatively feeble.”5 | “Those who lived before the flood… were more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth… The generations after the flood were less in stature. There was a continual decrease through successive generations, down to the last that lived upon the earth.”6 |
| “the seeds of disease and death were introduced into the human system, which have been transmitted to every successive generation… disease and deformity have been transmitted through each successive generation, and have marred his original beauty.”7 | “Wickedness and disease have increased with every successive generation… Many marvel that the human race have so degenerated, physically, mentally, and morally… it is the violation of God's constitution and laws, and the violation of the laws of health, that has produced this sad degeneracy.”8 |
The doctrine is identical: a primeval race of great stature, followed by a steady, generation-by-generation shrinking down to the feeble men of the present. When White published this in 1864, it was promptly attacked. Uriah Smith rose to defend her in the Review, claiming to have seen reports of ancient of giants.9 When Patriarchs and Prophets was published in 1890, White softened her unconventional teaching of Adam being "more than twice as tall" to: "Adam’s height was much greater than that of men who now inhabit the earth."10 Regardless of the accuracy of White's statement, it was not a unique revelation.
3. Probationary Immortality
Genesis never says Adam was created mortal, nor that immortality depended upon repeatedly eating from the tree of life. Yet both Judson and Ellen White build their entire Eden narrative on precisely that theological framework. It is one of the defining doctrines of Adventism: conditional immortality.
| The extra-biblical idea | A. C. Judson, The World: As It Was | Patriarchs and Prophets / Spiritual Gifts |
|---|---|---|
| The tree of life provided a conditional or probationary existence. If obedient, man could retain life be eating from the tree of life. | “Man was not made to die. Although not immortal in his first constitution which would of course have rendered him incapable of dying, the seeds of death were not in him. He was a probationer for immortality, and had he been obedient, would no doubt have eaten of the tree of life from which he was afterwards excluded, and lived forever.”11 | “The dwellers in Eden had been placed upon probation; their happy estate could be retained only on condition of fidelity to the Creator’s law. They could obey and live, or disobey and perish... Immortality was promised them on condition of obedience; by transgression they would forfeit eternal life. ... In order to possess an endless existence, man must continue to partake of the tree of life.”12 |
This is a shared theological system. Probation, conditional immortality, obedience as the condition of continued life, and the tree of life as the means by which immortality was sustained are not isolated ideas—they are the structural framework of both accounts. Genesis supplies only the tree. The rest is theological construction.
Conclusion
Whether Judson was Ellen White's direct source for this developing Adventist theology can be debated. Other Adventist writers were already discussing Adam's probationary status in the 1850s.13 But that actually strengthens the larger point. The architecture of White's Eden narrative is not found in Genesis, nor did it suddenly appear with her visions. The ideas were already circulating in the theological world around her.
Genesis supplies the garden. Early Adventist writers supplied the theology. Ellen White presented it as revelation.
References and Notes
- A. C. Judson, The World: As It Was, Is and Will Be (Rochester, N.Y.: Darrow, 1853). A copy was held in the library of J. N. Andrews.
- Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White: Messenger to the Remnant (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1969), 16.
- Judson, The World: As It Was, 11.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 44.
- Judson, The World: As It Was, 21, 39.
- Spiritual Gifts, vol. 3, 84.
- Judson, The World: As It Was, 21, 39.
- Spiritual Gifts, vol. 4a (1864), 123.
- Uriah Smith, "The Visions--Objections Answered," Review and Herald, vol. 28, no. 3 (July 3, 1866): 34. Without citing any sources, Smith wrote about the "discovery of organic remains, sufficient to show beyond a sane doubt, that at some period in the past, there existed on this earth a class of gigantic men and animals, in comparison with which the present species are but pygmies."
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 45.
- Judson, The World: As It Was, 23.
- Patriarchs and Prophets, 53, 60.
- Uriah Smith, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 13, 1858, 204: "The question is often asked. Was Adam created mortal or immortal? And this reasoning has been adopted on the subject: If he was immortal he could not have died; so the sentence of death would have been a nullity. But if he was mortal he would have died necessarily; so the sentence would have involved no change of condition. Therefore it is concluded that he was neither, but on a probationary ground, just between mortality and immortality." See also, James. M. Stephenson, The Atonement (1854), 90; John Norton Loughborough, An Examination of the Scripture Testimony (1855), 36.