Why Should I Believe the Bible (Part 2) -- The Fallacy of the Telephone Game Argument

Remember the Telephone Game? Kids sit in a circle and repeat a message, one to the next in a whisper until it gets around the circle and the last kid tells everyone what he or she heard and everyone laughs because it's completely different from the original message. Ever heard this used as "evidence" that the Bible we have today can't possibly be anything like how it started off? According to the argument, if a simple message can't be accurately passed between a dozen people over several minutes time then it couldn't possibly be passed accurately over a period of hundreds or thousands of years. The argument may appear logical on the surface but it is far from it. Many people repeat it without ever thinking it over critically. So what's the fallacy?

The kid's game is designed to produce garbled messages:

1. Use unreliable, untrained people to pass the message, the younger the better
2. Instruct them to pass the message on by the least reliable method
• whisper
•  from one person to one other
•  without double-checking that the message was transmitted correctly
3. Give them an incentive to garble the message on purpose -- the kids know it's a game and that it's more fun to garble the message

The transmission of the Bible was designed to preserve the Word of God:

1. Bible copiers were professionals trained to produce accurate copies
2. Bible copiers used strict procedures to ensure a very high degree of accuracy
• in black ink according to a special recipe and copied character by character (not from memory)
• as part of a group devoted to accurately copying the Bible
• copies were double-checked by verifying things like the total number of chapters, total number of verses,total number of words, total number of characters, the book chapter and verse of the middle verse, and the number of chapters in each book.
3. The Bible copiers believed they were copying the Word of God and that it was most important that they not add to or take away from God's Word.

So how did they do? Well, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest known copy of the Old Testament, known as the Masoretic Text, was produced in about 1000 AD, only about 500 years before the invention of the printing press made reproduction of the Bible reliable. The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed our earliest copies back another 1000 years or so. There are some small differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text but none that change the theology in any way. If the average Telephone Game lasts five minutes, then the Old Testament was reliably copied over 100 Million times longer than that!