Ellen White’s Historical Research (2022)

McAdams, Donald R. Ellen White and the Historians: A Neglected Problem and a Forgotten Answer. Published by the Author, 2022. 274 pp.

“In March 1974 Donald R. McAdams completed a book-length paper: Ellen G. White and the Protestant Historians: the Evidence from an Unpublished Manuscript on John Huss. This paper presented in three columns the Hussite phase of the Bohemian Reformation from James A. Wylie’s The History of Protestantism; his transcription of Ellen White’s Huss manuscript, which was her first draft for the 1888 Great Controversy; and the final, polished text that appeared in the slightly revised 1911 Great Controversy. The evidence was clear: Ellen White was not just borrowing paragraphs here and there that she had run across in her reading, paragraphs that described what she had already seen in vision; she was selectively abridging Wylie, following his sequence, using his descriptions, copying his words, repeating his historical errors, and giving her literary assistant Marian Davis the freedom to cut huge chunks from her manuscript and add significant additional history directly from Wylie Why, after all these years, publish this paper? The answer is embedded in the Adventist Church’s ongoing struggle to reconcile the evidence from history and science with the belief that Ellen White is authoritative in all matters. This book places McAdams’paper before the public as a document of historical importance for Adventists because it played a role in re-opening this discussion in the 1970s. Also, publication is timely because George Knight’s book, Ellen White’s Afterlife: Delightful Fictions, Troubling Facts, Enlightening Research, and Gilbert Valentine’s book, Ostriches and Canaries: Coping with Change in Adventism 1966-1979, have contributed renewed interest in this paper. This book is more than a close look at how Ellen White wrote history. It also presents a significant slice of 20th-century Adventist history, an account of the church struggling to defend one of its founding myths—not the inspiration of Ellen White, but her authority in all matters. This book is not just about Ellen White and the historians, it is also about a church in transition.”

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