I’ve Heard the Transmission of the Bible Was Like Playing “Telephone”

Ah, telephone. The game elementary teachers think will be a blast, waste time, and challenge kids to keep a secret all the way to the end. Obviously, the goal quickly becomes who can scramble the message the quickest and the most ridiculous. For someone like me, who had a pretty good memory and who loved to follow the rules, this became pretty boring fairly soon. 

Nevertheless, the argument still arises among scholars, those dabbling in biblical studies, and just plain skeptics alike. The Bible (particularly the NT) can’t be reliable because the newer copies are nothing like the originals. In fact, we don’t have the original manuscripts, and the thousands of manuscripts we currently have contain hundreds of thousands of errors. Whether the scribes followed the rules of transmission or were rather careless, how can we possible have confidence that the “true text” survived all these generations of copying?

That wretched game of telephone haunts us again on a cataclysmic scale.

I can see how the game is similar to the transmission process. One person passing a text down to the next, then to the next, compounding errors along the way.

However, there are several key differences between the game and the reality of textual transmission that provides more confidence in our text.

1. Instead of one line of kids passing a message from beginning to end, imagine three or four. This is overly simplified, but in text criticism conversations, we would call these text types. We have three or four major groups of texts that are similar among themselves (and somewhat geographically located). So when we get to the end of the line(s), we can compare three or four messages vs. just one.

2. In most versions of telephone, the message is spoken from one person to the next. Texts are much more beneficial. We can go back through the process of transmission, and see where the errors arose. If a scribe in the 2nd century made a silly spelling error or skipped over a word, we don’t have to worry about several manuscripts after that having the same error(s), because they are probably copying his mistake. (In fact, it’s probably a good thing they have the same errors. That means they are being faithful scribes. If they were to correct errors, then we don’t know where else they changed the manuscripts and created other potential variants.)

And don’t forget, we don’t only have the one line of manuscripts, but three to four text types. Therefore, we can go back each types’ line of transmission and see where errors surface. We don’t have to wait until the end and guess which scribe (“little kid”) ruined the message for everyone.

3. We have so many manuscripts, we can group them into families. So whereas in telephone, we have one kid at each point in the process, picture a group of kids handing a message to another group of kids. This continues until the end of the line. Then we can go back and compare any and all points of transmission (for all three-four teams that are playing). 

This is not a perfect analogy, and there are still places in the NT where scholars debate the precise wording, but we can have confidence in the transmission process. 

Translation is another animal…and a different post. Rarely does it have anything to do with deleting verses or playing loose with God’s Word. Every translation is interpretation. Translators have extremely difficult choices to make. Bottom line…learn Greek and Hebrew. Of course, then the debates are only beginning.