During a panel discussion yesterday of Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet (Oxford University Press, 2014), a book that he, Terrie Dopp Aamodt and Gary Land edited, some may have understood Ronald L. Numbers to have said that the Loma Linda University Division of Religion helped finance Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (1st edition: Harper and Row, 1976; 3rd edition: William B. Eerdmans, 2008).
I think that Numbers would agree that what actually happened was more complicated and much more interesting than this brief remark conveys.
Yesterday's panel was organized and moderated by Jim Walters, a professor in the Loma Linda Univeristy School of Religion where, among other things, he is the Director of its Division of Humanities. Other panelists included Jonathan Butler, independent historian, Jon Paulien, Dean of the LLU School of Religion, Terrie Dopp Aamodt, a professor of history and literature at Walla Walla University, Ted Levterov, Director of the LLU Ellen White Research Center and Ronald Numbers himself. Eager members of the audience filled the large Damazo Amphitheater on the LLU campus.
Sometime in the mid 1970s, Loma Linda University hired Numbers who had recently earned a PhD in the history of science at the University of California at Berkeley, to teach this subject in its School of Medicine. Not long thereafter, LLU granted him a block of time to do research. Because no formally trained historian had already done so, he focused on Ellen G. White.
In the course of his research, Numbers discovered that she had utilized significant amounts of material that had written by others without giving them credit. Much consternation and controversy erupted in SDA circles when he conclusively demonstrated this in Prophet of Health by placing her writings and their's in side-by-side columns.
Some might say that LLU helped finance Prophetess of Health because it hired Numbers in the first place and because it supported him as he did his research. Yet I have never heard anyone make this charge. This is because the dots that connected what the university did and what he found and published were so faint as to be non-existent. Besides, no one knew precisely what he would find before Numbers started looking. Not even he knew.
We should say exactly the same thing about the frequent charge that A. Graham Maxwell helped finance the publication of Prophetess of Health with money from what was then called the LLU Division of Religion. This was related to the claim that Maxwell had met with Numbers in Chicago about how to destroy Ellen White's reputation and that while he was there Maxwell had spent huge sums of money on women of ill repute.
Elders Robert Pierson and Neal Wilson, two of the denomination's top administrators at the time, took these charges seriously enough to launch an investigation. Although I wasn't present at every minute of its work, I have a first-hand knowledge of the overall process because Maxwell had been given permission to have me accompany him. He said he wanted he wanted me to be "a witness to history."
As Dean of the LLU Division of Religion, Maxwell had hired Vern Carner and he had supported Carner in his energetic and successful collection of materials that would have made LLU a major center for what we now call "Adventist Studies." Carner and Numbers were good friends and collaborators in historical research and they still are. A number of us were friends of both Numbers and Carner and we remain so to this day. Sometime subsequently I co-authored one chapter in one book with Numbers.
We were not strangers and no one has made that claim. Yet, to repeat, when Numbers began his research no one knew exactly what he would find. Not even Numbers knew this. Thus, even though various forms of support flowed from the Division of Religion to Ron Numbers through Vern Carner, this did not equate "helping to finance Prophetess of Health."
This was the conclusion of Elder Wilson's investigation. Also, the investigation found did not find Maxwell guilty of consorting with harlots at Chicago or anywhere else.
Most importantly from my point of view, although they wanted as little said about as possible, the investigators were concerned that those who had been trying to build a case against Maxwell had pilfered some expense reports and perhaps other things from the LLU Acounting Department with the help of someone who worked there.
Soon after Prophetess of Health was published, both Carner and Numbers were invited to serve elsewhere and both did. Carner has been a successful entrepreuneur and Numbers has had a successful academic and publishing career at the University of Wisconsin. A. Graham Maxwell is now deceased.
Meanwhile, I believe that the best way to help Ellen White live in the twenty-first century is to situate her in the 19th.