Transmission of Scripture: The Telephone Game Analogy

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By Guest Writer: Mary Lou Cornish

When I was in high school, one of my French teachers was off sick a great deal. That left a supply teacher to find ways of amusing us. One such amusement was the telephone game.

It would start with one person relating a story (in French, of course) to another. That student would, in turn, whisper it to the next person in line who would then tell it to the next one and so on. The last person to receive the story would then speak it out loud. Often, what he or she said was a far cry from the story as it was originally stated by the first person in the line.

Many people liken the transmission of the New Testament books to the telephone game, implying that Scripture is full of errors and does not resemble the original accounts at all. However, it is a poor comparison for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, there is the purpose of each exercise. The telephone game is played for fun and no one tries very hard to get the story correct. In fact, the more mistakes there were, the more entertaining it was for us. Given that some of the kids in my French class weren’t scholars who understood or spoke French well, we could count on a lot of mistakes that made us hoot with laughter.

The people who translated and transmitted the Gospels, epistles and other books of the New Testament did so with the goal of getting it right. The care they took was phenomenal because they were dealing with the Word of God and it was too precious to misquote or mistranslate. And they, unlike some of my classmates, were good at what they did.

Secondly, in the telephone game there is only one line of transmission as the story went from person to person. However, there were multiple copies from which the transcribers of Scripture could compare so that, if there were errors, they would be noticeable.

Scholars offer Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in illustration. If you ask 100 students to copy it out, it is unlikely that every single transcription is identical. However, if you spot a variation in one copy, you can compare it with the other 99 to determine what is correct.

The same is true of Biblical manuscripts. There are over 5800 ancient Greek manuscripts, some complete, some in fragments, for scholars to compare. And then there are the copies in other languages such as Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, for example, that can also be used for comparison.

Thirdly, people today don’t understand what it is like to live in an oral culture. In fact, experts say our listening skills are poor in comparison to those of the people in the Ancient Near East. Given that not everyone was able to read and write in those days, listening carefully and memorizing what was said correctly was all-important.

Additionally, these texts were shared orally with many congregations. People who had heard these stories over and over would recognize when an error entered their telling. And, as I stated, preserving Scripture with its correct content was the goal of every person who related or copied it.

So the telephone game does not describe the transmission of Scripture in any way, shape, or form.

© Mary Lou Cornish