Test #3: A Prophet Cannot Steal the Writings of OthersTheir Own Scholar's Verdict.

By Dirk Anderson

I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied. ... Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that steal my words every one from his neighbour (Jeremiah 23:25, 30).

This test is not about copyright. It is about counterfeiting.

Jeremiah describes a specific fraud: self-proclaimed prophets who take words from a neighbor and then present them as words from God. The theft is the smaller half of the offense. The larger half is the label attached afterward.

Nobody is charging her with breaking the copyright statutes of 1883. The charge is that she took the words of nineteenth-century authors and told her readers those words came from God.

The Charge Is Not What the Defense Answers

A historian who borrows from other historians is doing normal work. A commentator who leans on earlier commentators is doing what commentators do. If Ellen White had presented herself as a devotional writer compiling the best of Christian literature, there would be no article here.

But that is not what she claimed, and it is not what her readers were told they were buying. They were told these books came from visions. That the scenes were shown to her. That the words carried an authority no ordinary book could carry.

The Scope: This Is Not One Book

The instinct of a member first hearing about this is to assume it concerns one unfortunate volume. It does not. Warren Johns, working for the Ellen G. White Estate itself, described the scope:

Evidence for literary borrowing can be substantiated in virtually all nine volumes of the Testimonies for the Church, in her Review and Herald and Signs of the Times articles, and in all of the books published during her lifetime. The only exception may be Early Writings. At this time I am not aware of any significant literary borrowing in that work, but it would not be surprising if it should come to light.¹

Ponder who wrote that. Not a critic. Not an ex-member with an axe to grind. A researcher for the organization that exists to defend her legacy. He concedes that borrowing runs through virtually every book and article she wrote during her entire life.

And, most surprisingly, even the "I saw" statements were copied. Her readers thought this meant she was seeing this in vision. In reality, she was seeing it on the pages of other books and articles.

The Sect Investigated Itself

What follows is the strongest evidence in this article, and none of it comes from a critic.

In January 1980, Walter Rea, then an SDA pastor in southern California, presented evidence that the borrowing was far more extensive than anyone had admitted. Later that year the Los Angeles Times ran the story under the headline "Plagiarism Found in Prophet Books." Rea published The White Lie in 1982.²

The sect responded by commissioning its own investigation. Dr. Fred Veltman, chairman of the religion department at Pacific Union College, was asked to analyze the charges. He spent eight years examining 15 of the 87 chapters of The Desire of Ages. His report ran to roughly 2,600 pages. Its conclusions were published in Ministry, the sect's own journal for clergy, in 1990.³

This was not a hostile audit. It was a friendly one, funded by the defendant, conducted by one of its own scholars, published in its own magazine. And here is what it found.

Finding One: She Did It Herself

It is of first importance to note that Ellen White herself, not her literary assistants, composed the basic content of the DA text. In doing so she was the one who took literary expressions from the works of other authors without giving them credit as her sources.⁴

This closes the most popular escape route. For decades the suggestion had been that overzealous editorial assistants inserted the borrowed material. Veltman ruled it out. The hand that copied was hers.

Finding Two: She Did It On Purpose

Second, it should be recognized that Ellen White used the writings of others consciously and intentionally. The literary parallels are not the result of accident or photographic memory.⁵

This closes the second escape route. It had long been suggested that she absorbed phrasing unconsciously, or possessed a photographic memory that reproduced text without her knowing. Veltman examined the evidence and rejected both. She knew what she was doing while she did it.

Finding Three: The Content Is Not Original

The content of Ellen White's commentary on the life and ministry of Christ, The Desire of Ages, is for the most part derived rather than original.⁶

Not the wording. The content. Veltman was explicit that dependency runs deeper than matching sentences — the structure, the sequence, and the substance of her commentary trace back to earlier authors even where the wording diverges.

Finding Four: The Numbers Understate It

Veltman's headline statistic is that 31 percent of the sentences in the chapters he examined showed verbal similarity to earlier works. Defenders quote that figure constantly. They rarely quote what he said about it:

...we find that she depended on her sources to a much greater degree than the verbal similarities of the DA text to those sources indicate... the reader must consider our estimate of the level of source dependency in The Desire of Ages as conservative.⁷

Thirty-one percent is the floor, established by the sect's own investigator. And in the earlier manuscripts he sampled, the dependency ran higher still: of 1,180 sentence units reviewed from her pre-Desire of Ages writings, 879 were dependent — roughly three sentences in four.⁸

Finding Five: The Denials

And then Veltman wrote the sentence that matters more than all the statistics:

Implicitly or explicitly, Ellen White and others speaking on her behalf did not admit to and even denied literary dependency on her part... I must admit at the start that in my judgment this is the most serious problem to be faced in connection with Ellen White's literary dependency. It strikes at the heart of her honesty, her integrity, and therefore her trustworthiness.⁹

That is the sect's own commissioned scholar after eight years of painstaking research. Her honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness: all in doubt.

The Great Controversy Problem

At the 1980 Glendale meeting convened to address the plagiarism crisis, SDA scholar Dr. Don McAdams put the situation in The Great Controversy plainly:

If every paragraph in the book Great Controversy, written by Ellen White, was properly footnoted, then every paragraph would have to be footnoted.¹⁰

Consider what that means for the book's central claim. The Great Controversy presents the history of the church from the apostles to the end of time as scenes shown to her in vision. If the entire narrative can be traced to d'Aubigné, Wylie, and other historians available in any well-stocked library, then the vision was superfluous.

Historian Jonathan Butler framed the result exactly:

Though her inspiration may have benefitted from the perspiration of others, her books were promoted as if the products of God alone.¹¹

Sketches from the Life of Paul

Published in 1883, this book drew heavily on The Life and Epistles of St. Paul by W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson, published some thirty years earlier. The parallels are extensive enough that the two texts can be read side by side.

The book went out of print and has never been restored to the sect's catalog. Its content was later folded into The Acts of the Apostles.

SDA leader A. G. Daniells recalled that the book was withdrawn because of a complaint from the publishers of Conybeare and Howson. The White Estate maintains that Daniells simply misremembered, that no lawsuit was ever threatened, and that the book merely went out of print while she expanded it.¹²

Even if it was true, the White Estate's defense does not change the facts. Whatever the reason for the withdrawal, the borrowing itself is not in dispute — the White Estate concedes the parallels and argues only about motive and legality. A prophetess produced a life of Paul substantially derived from two English clergymen, and her readers were told in the book's preface that it came from heaven.

The Four Defenses

"A Lawyer Cleared Her"

In August 1981, Vincent Ramik — an attorney hired by the SDA sect — delivered a legal opinion concluding that Ellen White "was not a plagiarist, and her works did not constitute copyright infringement/piracy."¹³

No one doubts this finding but it is beside the point.

Ramik was answering a question of nineteenth-century copyright law. His central reasoning was that most of the works she used were uncopyrighted and therefore public property, free for anyone to take.¹⁴ That was nineteenth century American law. It is also irrelevant to Jeremiah 23:30, which is not a statute about literary property and says nothing about copyrights.

God is not objecting that the neighbor's estate lost royalties. He is objecting that words from men were being sold to His people as words from Him. A legal opinion about whether Hanna's heirs could have sued White is missing the point. And perhaps that was the intention.

Two further notes. The opinion was commissioned by the General Conference legal department — a legal opinion procured by the defendant is not an independent audit. And Ramik's own report quotes an estimate that only four percent of the 1911 Great Controversy was borrowed, a figure that cannot be reconciled with the White Estate's own conservative research showing 20% of the book was copied.¹⁵ The defense's own numbers do not agree with each other.

"She Admitted It Openly"

Defenders point to the introduction of the 1911 Great Controversy, where she acknowledges quoting historians, and to her published endorsement of Conybeare and Howson in the Signs of the Times of February 22, 1883, months before her own Paul book appeared.¹⁶

Both are real. Neither helps.

The 1911 acknowledgment arrived after decades of publication and after critics had forced the question. More importantly, an acknowledgment that you consulted historians is a perfectly adequate defense for a history book. It is fatal for a book you have told your readers was shown to you in vision. If she watched the Reformation unfold in a panorama from heaven, why was d'Aubigné's book open on the desk?

As for recommending Conybeare and Howson to her readers: it shows she was not hiding the existence of the book. It does not show she told anyone which sentences of hers were theirs. That is the concealment that matters.

"Everybody Borrowed Back Then"

Largely true, and completely beside the point. Nineteenth-century authors did borrow more freely than modern conventions permit.

But no one is charging her with violating the etiquette of Victorian publishing. Ordinary authors who borrowed did not claim their sentences were dictated by angels. The other writers of her era were competing on the ordinary terms of authorship. She was claiming an authority above all of them, and using it to command obedience within a church. The standard she is measured by is the one she invoked.

"It Was Only 31 Percent, and Mostly Loose Paraphrase"

Veltman himself called that estimate conservative and said the real dependency was greater. But even at face value, consider what the number describes.

Thirty-one percent of a book presented as divine revelation traces to identifiable human authors. Roughly one sentence in three, across a work that hundreds of thousands of people have read as the words of God.

And a prophecy is not graded like an essay. If a third of a message attributed to God came from a library, the question of where the other two-thirds came from does not get more comfortable. It gets considerably less so.

Test #3 — Pass or Fail?

Set every critic aside. Throw out Walter Rea entirely. Ignore this website. Judge the question using only documents produced by the SDA sect and its own paid researchers.

The White Estate's own researcher concedes borrowing throughout virtually her entire writings. The sect's own scholar says every paragraph of The Great Controversy would need a footnote. The sect's own eight-year investigation concluded that she took the words herself, that she did it consciously and intentionally, that the content is mostly derived rather than original, and that his 31 percent figure should be read as a floor.

And the sect's own investigator, having spent eight years inside the evidence, wrote that the denials strike at the heart of her honesty, her integrity, and her trustworthiness.

God's complaint in Jeremiah is against prophets who steal His words every one from his neighbour. The neighbors here have names: Hanna. March. Farrar. Harris. Melvill. Winslow. Edersheim. Conybeare. Howson. d'Aubigné. Wylie. Coles. Milton.

They wrote the words. She received the royalties.

Verdict on Test #3: FAIL.