author
Joseph Bates
1792–1872
A retired sea captain who became one of the key early voices of Sabbatarian Adventism, he helped shape a movement that grew into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. His life moved from ocean voyages and wartime hardship to reform preaching, pamphlet writing, and energetic religious leadership.
4 Audiobooks
A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath and the Commandments of God With a Further History of God's Peculiar People from 1847-1848
by Joseph Bates
The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign, from the Beginning to the Entering into the Gates of the Holy City, According to the Commandment
by Joseph Bates
The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign 1847 edition
by Joseph Bates
About the author
Born in Massachusetts in 1792, Joseph Bates went to sea as a teenager and spent many years as a sailor and ship captain. Accounts of his early life note that he experienced shipwreck, capture, and imprisonment during the War of 1812, experiences that gave his later writing and preaching a practical, disciplined tone.
After leaving the sea, he became active in religious revival work and social reform. He was especially known for promoting health-minded habits and for throwing his energy behind the Advent movement in the 1840s. Bates became one of the strongest early advocates for observing the seventh-day Sabbath, and his pamphlets helped spread that belief among fellow Adventists.
He is remembered as one of the founders of the movement that later became the Seventh-day Adventist Church, alongside James and Ellen White. More than simply an organizer, he was a forceful pamphleteer and evangelist whose seafaring past made him a memorable and unusual religious pioneer.