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Understanding Ellen White - Contents
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    Chapter Nine - How Ellen White Did Her Writing

    Denis Kaiser

    Ellen White ranks among the most prolific American writers of all time. The sheer quantity of her literary corpus at the time of her death on July 16, 1915, speaks for itself. She bequeathed to the church twenty-six books, about two hundred pamphlets and tracts, over five thousand periodical articles, thirty-five thousand typewritten general manuscript and letter pages and two thousand handwritten letters, diaries, journals, and documents—totaling about one hundred thousand pages of material that she produced during her ministry from 1844 to 1915. In her writings, she addressed a wide spectrum of different subjects, ranging from such religious matters as salvation, Christology, and the battle between good and evil, along with biblical prophecy, children’s ministry, evangelistic methods, homiletics, the role of women in the church, spirituality, and theology to insights on such diverse topics as church-state relationships, education, ethics and morals, family, history, leadership, literature, marriage, medicine, mental hygiene, music, nutrition, philosophy, physiology, public speaking, and social relationships. Additional books and compilations have been produced and published posthumously so that there are more than 126 titles currently available in the English language. The desire to make her writings available to people in other languages has led to many translations, making her presumably one of the most translated author in the history of literature, and the most translated literary female and American author. 1Denis Kaiser and Jerry Moon, “For Jesus and Scripture: The Life of Ellen G. White,” in Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, ed. Jerry Moon and Denis Fortin (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2013), 18-95; Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White: Woman of Vision (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2000), 5; George E. Rice, “Spiritual Gifts” in Handbook of Seventh-day Adventist Theology, ed. Raoul Dederen, Commentary Reference Series, vol. 12 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2000), 636.UEGW 118.1

    Throughout the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church there have been people who raised questions about the compatibility between Ellen White’s claim to divine inspiration and the extent of her use of literary sources and the influence of her literary assistants. Others wondered about the legitimacy of compilations, translations, revisions, adaptations, abridgements, and paraphrases, or, in other words, the ramifications of changing words and phrases in an “inspired text.” Ellen White’s practice of literary borrowing and the critique of this practice by various individuals are discussed more thoroughly in other chapters. The present chapter addresses questions about Ellen White’s process of writing, the influence of her literary assistants on her literary productions, advantages and weaknesses of compilations, as well as the legitimacy of adaptations, translations, and paraphrases.UEGW 119.1

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