The Bible Verses A Game of Telephone

What is the Telephone Game?

The telephone game It involves a brief narrative that someone whispers to the next person in line who then whispers this to the next person, and so on for several people. Then, the last person recites out loud what he or she heard, and everyone has a good laugh for how garbled the story got. If a group of similar people in the same context can’t remember and accurately pass on a saying, how can we trust decades or centuries of faulty memory?

The critics say that memory is faulty and cannot be trusted over a long period of time. This means the Bible almost certainly has many errors and embellishments that were introduced during the time gap between Jesus' life and the first writings of the Gospels and what we have today.

But the transmission of scripture is not at all like the telephone game.

First, the goal of the telephone game is to see how badly the story can get misrepresented, or at least the accuracy is unimportant, while the goal of New Testament copying was by and large to produce very careful, accurate copies of the original.

Second, in the telephone game there is only one line of transmission, while with the New Testament there are multiple lines of transmission.

Third, one is oral, recited once in another’s ear, while the other is written, copied by a faithful scribe who then would check his or her work or have someone else do it.

Fourth, in the telephone game, only the wording of the last person in the line can be checked. However, for the New Testament textual critics have access to many of the earlier texts, some going back very close to the time of the autographs.

Fifth, even the ancient scribes had access to earlier texts, and would often check their work against a manuscript that was many generations older than their immediate ancestor. The average papyrus manuscript would last for a century or more. Thus, even a late second-century scribe could have potentially examined the original document he or she was copying.

Bur wasn't the Oral Tradition like the Telephone Game?

Oral tradition has very little in common with the telephone game. 

In the game:

• the message is heard and passed along one person at a time, 

• there are no controls over the message, 

• there is no cost attached to reliable or unreliable transmission.

All of this makes it fundamentally different from the oral transmission of the Gospels:

• The biblical stories were relayed in communities (not one-to-one),

• when the stories were shared in community, many people knew the stories and would correct mistakes relayed in the retelling,

• the people retelling the stories had a strong personal interest in the truthfulness of what they were saying, especially when persecution of the church increased.

• The apostles supervised and corrected the spread of the message.