Ellen White’s Random Borrowing
by Ron Graybill | 18 May 2023 |
Those who are familiar with Ellen White’s writings and who have spent time identifying sources from which she borrowed, sometimes run across passages which seem so uniquely colorful or eloquent that one suspects she borrowed the wording from some earlier source.
By searching “Google Books,” or scanning PDF’s of books that were in her library, one can sometimes find a single source for the passage. However, sometimes a single source is impossible to find.
That seems to have happened in the example charted below. Ellen White, while reading, came across isolated phrases here and there which were in common use when authors of her time wrote upon similar subjects. These phrases lodged in her memory so that when she set about to create her own comments on the topic, the phrases naturally came to mind.
This graphic is not meant to suggest that Ellen White drew on any of the particular sources shown here. The graphic simply illustrates that Ellen White used phrases in common use by writers of her time on the topics she was writing about.
Ronald Graybill’s early scholarship earned him an invitation to the Ellen G. White Estate to assist Arthur L. White in writing a six-volume biography of his grandmother. During his 13 years at the White Estate, Ron completed his doctorate in American religious history at Johns Hopkins University, then taught for a decade at La Sierra University. He spent another decade preparing annual community health reports for Loma Linda University Medical Center and leading grassroots community health projects.
