Endtime Issues No. 73
Page 7 of 14
“ELLEN G. WHITE: PROPHET OR PLAGIARIST?”
William Fagal, Director, White Estate Branch Office, Andrews University
About twenty years ago, many Adventists were shaken by claims from a
Seventh-day Adventist pastor that Mrs. White had plagiarized her writings from others. In
a book he later published, the pastor arranged passages from her writings in parallel
columns with the earlier works of others, claiming that she had “copied” their writings and
that therefore her claims to having received her instruction from God were a lie.
The results were devastating to the faith of some. People disposed of their Ellen
White books in yard sales and trash cans. Some left the Seventh-day Adventist church,
while others stayed but took pride in rejecting some of its teachings and practices which
Ellen White had strongly endorsed. Even those who did not give up their faith in her
writings were, in some cases, uneasy and uncertain about the charges. The effects of this
controversy linger to our day.
Not First. Though such claims were new to many twenty years ago, the pastor
who popularized them was not the first to have made them. Just a few years before, in
the 1970s, an Adventist historian had written a book examining Mrs. White’s involvement
in health concerns. He concluded, among other things, that her health counsels were not
new or unique. She had drawn them from others, he said, despite her claims to having
received them in vision. (The Ellen G. White Estate prepared a detailed, almost point-by-
point response to his book.)
Over the years various people inside and outside the church have set forth similar
claims. The most influential of Ellen White’s critics was probably Dudley M. Canright, a
prominent minister and evangelist in our early years. After withdrawing from the ministry
four times in doubt and discouragement and coming back each time, Canright finally left the
ministry and the church in 1887. In 1889 he published a book against Seventh-day
Adventist teaching, and in 1919, the yea