Scripture Part 2: The Telephone Game Fallacy

Ever play the telephone game? This is a game that shows how gossip can change a story in the telling, often with humorous results. You need a large group to be effective, at least ten and preferably fifteen or more. Everyone sits in a circle. A person at the beginning has something to share with the others. They whisper it in the ear of the person next to them. Then that one whispers it to the next person, and so on around the room. Errors creep in as people reword, misremember, or deliberately alter the story. By the time it reaches the end of the circle it has completely changed. This simulates people talking to each other one on one to gossip. And it accurately illustrates how gossip results in exaggerations and lies. That is one of the reasons why Paul warned against gossip.

However, people who want to tear down the scripture falsely equate the telephone game with oral teaching and oral traditions. This is not just an exaggeration, but a deliberate lie by those who don't want to be governed by God's word. Worse, some of these claim to be Christians. It is not true. In an oral tradition teaching and history isn't whispered from one person to another, but spoken aloud for all to hear. Errors are instantly corrected by others who know the subject. Error wasn't allowed to creep in as accuracy was highly valued and practiced at a level not matched by our written and data traditions today.

One of the arguments against oral tradition is the fallibility of memory. However, our own experience is in a written tradition culture, or in our electronic data culture. So our experience is completely different. And the difference is even greater because of the common usage of the smartphone. So it is nearly impossible to even imagine how things would really be under an oral tradition. However, there is a useful recent example. Before smartphones and even cell phones, we had printed lists of phone numbers in phone books, club lists, youth group lists, and personal contact books referred to in clichés as a "little black book." Despite having all those available written sources, most of us still had dozens of phone numbers memorized. So I could call my friends, family, and important organizations from memory. Now my smartphone takes care of that for me. So I barely know my own cell number and the number of the cell phone I carry at work.

Because of the importance of being able to read from the Torah in the synagogue, Israel was almost universally literate thousands of years before western culture did it. In Jesus' time it was common for people to have large sections of scripture memorized. When Jesus was on the cross, He quoted the beginning of Psalm 21 to say that this was the fulfillment of that prophetic psalm as they didn't have chapter and verse markings back then. All the Jews around got the reference, and some of the Roman soldiers as well. There were a few scholars then that were famous for having the entire TaNaK, (the Old Testament,) memorized. All scholars had large sections memorized, usually several books, as well as the most important passages from the Torah and prophets. And nearly all Jews had the fundamental passages memorized, and many knew large passages by heart. They could recognize when someone was contradicting it. Errors in recitation from memory would be corrected by others present. This was not the telephone game, or anything even remotely like it. Today there is little to no error checking, especially of people who are deliberately trying to mislead others. We still have a lot of information in our brains today. But we don't have to exercise this level of memorization, and are actually prevented from developing it by the phones in our pockets. However, there were people who were deliberately trying to distort the gospel message. So the New Testament writers were motivated to write things down so there was an indisputable record after all the eyewitnesses had passed away. Combatting deliberate error and heresy is also why church leaders wrote creeds.

In addition to the false telephone game argument, anti-scripture people falsely claim late dates for the writing of the gospels and other New Testament scripture. The argument is that the gospels were written more than 200 years later, and therefore are unreliable because doing the telephone game for 200 years would make a mess of it. Even if this were true, which it is not, the gospels would still be closer to the events they record than almost all historical accounts these same people accept without question. The two histories of Alexander the Great were written 400 years after his death, with the mythical exaggerations not appearing until about 800 years after his death.

Regardless, the evidence shows the gospels were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, with 1 Corinthians being written only five years after Jesus' crucifixion which confirms many points of doctrine in the gospels. An example of the evidence for an early writing of the gospels is the Rylands Papyrus P52 containing John 18:31-33 on the front, and 37-39 on the back. It dates to 100-150 AD, and was found with other scraps in an Egyptian garbage dump from that time. So the gospel of John was written in Ephesus, copied, carried to Egypt, copied again, and this copy was used until it wore out and was discarded. (It is likely that there were multiple stops where copies were made on the way.) This did not happen quickly. Clearly the gospel of John was written during the lifetime of eyewitnesses to the events who would have spoken out if there were any errors. Instead, it was accepted by the early church and written references can be found as early as 150 AD. While academia has been slow to accept an early date for it's authorship, the evidence seems to point to a date between 50 and 60 AD. However, it could be earlier, and it is almost certainly prior to the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. This is closer to the date of the events than almost every historical record other than the Revolutionary War period of America.

Regardless of the date John and the other Gospels were written, the oral record prior to their writing was reliable. And they were written by eyewitnesses or those who got the information directly from eyewitnesses. The evidence is overwhelming. To reject scripture on these bogus grounds is to reject all history prior to the American Revolutionary War. Nothing historical can be accepted by this false standard. For more detailed information on the reliability of scripture I highly recommend you check out the books in the Recommended Reading section of the website.