The Bible Is Not a Game of Telephone

In his response to the now infamous Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald attacking the Bible, Dan Wallace succinctly explained why the transmission of the Bible was not like a game of Telephone (bullet point formatting added by me for ease of reading):

The title of Eichenwald’s section that deals with manuscript transmission is “Playing Telephone with the Word of God.” The implication is that the transmission of the Bible is very much like the telephone game—a parlor game every American knows. 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. 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, 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, while 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.

If telephone were played the way New Testament transmission occurred, it would make for a ridiculously boring parlor game! 

Wallace’s piece responds to many other errors in the Newsweek article, as well. You can read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Josh Kelley]

One more key difference: Ancient scribes believed accuracy was a matter of life or death. If we want the "Telephone" analogy to work, we'd have to include loaded guns at the heads of the participants.

[a b]

Josh - this seems like a great point. Do you have any supporting references? (I'm not disagreeing, I'd just like to add as much supporting evidence to the claim, if the need arises use this argument in the future.)

[William West]

There was a movie... Arnold the Gubenator and Danny DeVito... called "Twins". In it there is this line where Danny says to his twin brother .."I love it when you hit people" Why I found that so funny back then I do not know but it is the line that popped into my head while reading Daniel's response to the article. I read the article myself... read being a loose term..I skimmed over it a lot focusing in on a few key things. Mainly because I had read all of these arguments before and I know they have been refuted over and over again. I like to watch Daniel Wallace refute them though. Talk about a person over qualified to answer an article of that caliber. Yet he did it and it was brilliant to read. It is kind of like watching a major league baseball player take on a kid from tee ball. If Eichenwald truly wanted to learn about Biblical transmission or anything about the Bible then why wouldn't you go to the foremost expert in the filed and get his views. He didn't though and I think I know why. Kind of like why many people won't dig for answers... they don't want to find the truth. If they knew the truth then they would feel like they needed to be held responsible for their actions. Who needs that kind of guilt trip... right. Eichenwald will be held accountable one day but until then I hope he reads Daniel's response to him and digs deeper next time.

[Sam Harper]

James White responded to it on his podcast, too, and went into a bit more detail that Dan Wallace.