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Ellen G. White and Her Critics

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    The Extent of Mrs. White’s Borrowings in Her Work on Paul

    The charge asserts that Mrs. White “copied a large part of her book” from Conybeare and Howson. But what are the facts? *In dealing with the question of literary borrowing in The Great Controversy, we had a common point of departure with the critics—the 1911 edition which they willingly admit encloses all of the quotations within quotation marks. But in regard to Mrs. White’s book on Paul, the case is different. We must simply go through the book page by page, comparing it with the Conybeare and Howson work.
        Now, quotations may be verbatim or they may be paraphrases. And paraphrases may shade all the way from being nearly verbatim quoting to being little more than similar in literary construction. No two literary examiners would agree as to where the line divides and genuine similarity disappears. In this particular case the problem is further complicated by the fact that both books follow a common historical sequence, that of the book of Acts, and both often quote, either directly or indirectly, the phrasings of Scripture. Obviously, a critic might find, or at least think that he had found, a larger number of instances of copying, in the area of paraphrase, than other readers might. However, the estimates from which are derived the percentages noted herein have been made on a liberal basis, allowing for even more of the context than the critics’ samples would indicate. Mrs. White has been given the benefit of the doubt where the similarity of wording or construction is easily attributable to the common Biblical source, but whole paragraphs are included which may show duplication of wording in only a few scattered spots, if the connecting material follows the thought so closely as to suggest a paraphrase. This has doubtless resulted in the inclusion of some parallelisms arising from the independent use of similar language by two authors describing the same events. An example of this error is a passage marked, in the initial survey, as somewhat similar to a parallel section in Farrar’s The Life and Work of St. Paul, but afterward discovered to have been taken from one of Mrs. White’s earlier works published in 1878, a year before Farrar’s book came out! Thus the effort to be fair has doubtless raised the percentages somewhat higher than they would be if all the facts could be known. We do not believe that the figures we give would be materially changed by a dispassionate literary examiner.
        The edition of the Conybeare and Howson work used in this examination was published by T. Y. Crowell, 744 Broadway, New York. The edition bears no date.
    Sketches From the Life of Paul might be described as a series of spiritual lessons hung on a framework of historical facts and descriptions. And it is in the framework that the borrowings from Conybeare and Howson are found. Direct quotations of words, phrases, and clauses, plus any accompanying close paraphrase, constitute about 7 per cent of Sketches From the Life of Paul. “Close paraphrases” describes generously the kind of paraphrased matter cited by the critics as exhibits of Mrs. White’s “plagiarism.”
        To be still more generous we should state that an additional 2.5 per cent of her book might be considered loose paraphrases.
    EGWC 424.1

    It is an interesting fact that the Conybeare and Howson work borrowed from other religious writers, and without credit or quotation marks. The second chapter (written by Howson) opens with a comment on what some “modern Jews”—unnamed—have written concerning Christianity. A footnote remarks concerning the works of these Jews: “Some of these works have furnished us with useful suggestions, and in some cases the very words have been adopted.” But nowhere in the nearly fifty pages of that chapter can we discover when Howson is quoting from these Jewish writers. Evidently he did not consider it necessary to give any more credit than this very brief and very vague footnote. (See Conybeare and Howson, The Life and Epistles of St. Paul, vol. 1 [1st ed., 1851], p. 34, footnote.)EGWC 424.2

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