A Response to the Video:
Seventh-day Adventism, the Spirit Behind the Church

by Bob Pickle

Answers to Questions Raised by:
Mark Martin, Sydney Cleveland
Dale Ratzlaff, The White Lie
. . . and Others

Discern Fact from Fiction

Jehovah's Witnesses, Cont.; Plagiarism

#110 & #111: "Yet the Seventh-day Adventist hierarchy has been unable to respond to the challenge to prove that even 20% of her writings were original."—Narrator.

#110: They're unable to respond even after twenty years. The truth is that the "hierarchy" responded 31 years before Mr. Rea's book was even published.

As brought out under #103, F. D. Nichol's 1951 book stated that, including loose paraphrasing, 15.35% of Sketches from the Life of Paul, a book which was "plagiarized in its entirety," was taken from two other books. That means that around 84.65% was Mrs. White's own work.

How about other books by Mrs. White that were not "plagiarized in" their "entirety"? Obviously, they should have an even higher percentage of original material. [p. 78]

A lot of this video's problems could have been avoided if its researchers had simply read F. D. Nichol's book Ellen G. White and Her Critics.

#111: Prove that 20% of her writings are original. Does this kind of challenge even make sense? How could one ever prove such a thing? You would have to have infinite knowledge of every book that Mrs. White could possibly have read, and would have to compare these books to every word she ever wrote.

A much easier task would be for the critics to prove that 80% of her writings were not her own. Yet that would be such a time-consuming task, they would not likely attempt it.

Another way to put it is, Would it be more appropriate to say, "Prove that 20% of the Gospel of Luke is original," or more appropriate to say, "Prove that 80% of the Gospel of Luke is not original." The latter approach would be more appropriate, because the former would be impossible to prove.

Here's a different sort of challenge for Jeremiah Films: Prove that 20% of the information contained in this video is both accurate and relevant. Try to respond within twenty years. Since it's going on three years since this writer contacted you, you still have seventeen to go.

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