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!

Why should I believe the Bible? (Part 1)

First of all, is this an important question? Does it matter whether we believe the Bible? I don't like to argue over unimportant questions. I've heard people say that they believe in God but not in the Bible. Well, if there is a God (and I do believe there is), then there is one truth about him. He is either loving or not loving, merciful or not merciful, all-knowing or not all-knowing, all-powerful or limited, eternal or mortal, etc. How would we know these things about Him? Either we would have to observe those things about Him directly, be told by someone who had observed Him directly, or be told those things by God himself. If you don't know God personally, then the only way you can know anything about Him is if there is a record of His words and the words of people who knew Him personally, i.e., the Bible. If you don't know Jesus personally and you throw out the Bible, then you don't know enough about Him to even form an opinion. Now that we've established that the question is worth exploring, let's look at the question itself.

In order to believe the Bible, we must establish the following:

1. The authors knew the truth
2. The authors wrote the truth
3. Nothing important was excluded
4. Today's Bible is essentially unchanged from the original
   

We'll cover each of these in separate entries over the coming weeks.

What do I mean by truth? The purpose of the Bible is to describe God and how we can have a personal relationship with him so the accuracy of those types of facts are crucial. If a date, or number of horses, for example, is incorrect, that does not affect the truth of the important points. Of course, factual errors like that could cause us to doubt that the writer really knew what he was talking about. We'll explore those questions too.

Doubting Thomas -- The inspiration for this blog

John 20:24-29 -- ²⁴Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord!"
      But he said to them, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it."
 ²⁶A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."
 ²⁸Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!"
 ²⁹Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

 Thomas is my favorite disciple because he's most like me -- he needs to see the evidence for himself before believing something. Thomas has gotten a lot of bad publicity. His name has become synonymous with skepticism. He's thought of as the disciple who lacked faith. But was he really unique among the disciples in experiencing doubt?

Other examples of doubt in the Bible:
Let's look at scripture:

• Luke 24:36-43 describes the meeting referred to in John 20:24. Read it. The other disciples were obviously experiencing doubt too.
• Peter denied Jesus in John 18:25-27. Read it. Why did Peter deny Jesus? Because he was scared that he would be arrested also, of course. But wait, Peter knew Jesus was God, he had said so previously, and he later died for this belief. Now read Matthew 16:15-17. Peter knew Jesus was the anointed one and the Son of God and not only that, he had received this revelation directly from the Father. Why would someone who was confident of who Jesus was fear anything? Because he was no longer confident in that knowledge. Because he was experiencing doubt. Peter knew that Jesus was God and could do all things and he expected Him to take control politically and save the Jews. When it seemed to Peter that Jesus was losing the battle, he realized that some part of his beliefs were wrong. The crazy thing was that he seems to have chosen to doubt his revelation from the Father rather than what he had learned from society about what they expected the Messiah to be. I think this gives us doubters some hope as Peter was a man of great faith and his faith continued to grow.
• Peter first walked on the water through faith and then sunk because of doubt in Matthew 14:30.

We doubters have a lot of good company!

Was Thomas wrong to test what he doubted?
Lets look back at John 20:29. That verse is often taken as a rebuke of Thomas but was it really? Why would Thomas be singled out for criticism and not Peter or the others? I think Jesus was giving notice that he wouldn't always present people with undeniable miracles like he did often in the Gospel accounts -- that they would have to make the effort to find the truth and take a stand. I also have this idea that Jesus was saying "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." (Luke 12:48b). Thomas was given a great gift of certainty in Jesus and, in return, was expected to do a lot of work for Him. Church tradition says that Thomas later spread the Gospel to Iraq, Iran, and India! The Mar Thoma, or St. Thomas, church still exists in India and has 1 million members today.

How should we respond to our doubts?

• Pray -- Read Mark 9:20-24. The boy's father seems to contradict himself by first saying that he believes and then asking for help with his unbelief. I think this is a recognition that we can have faith and still have doubts from time to time and the first thing we should do is pray for help! Now let's read a bit further ahead, verses 28-29. This verse has always puzzled me a bit. Weren't the disciples already praying? If they weren't, would they have been able to heal anyone? I think perhaps what Jesus meant was not that they needed to pray for healing, as it seems they must have already done, but that there was doubt in the mind of the father and perhaps the disciples too and they needed to pray for belief.
• Confront your doubt -- A week elapsed between when Thomas expressed his doubt and when Jesus appeared to him. He certainly had time to give up his faith and go back home but he didn't. But neither did he try to hide his doubt from the other disciples -- he said straight out "Unless I see ... I will not believe it". As soon as he was given the opportunity, he tested his belief by touching Jesus wounds. And as soon as he had done that he immediately recognized Jesus as God and submitted to Him, his faith strengthened. I believe this is a model for how we should behave -- if we have doubts, we should confront them so our faith can become stronger.

I started out adult life as a critic of the Christian faith. Then I became more of an agnostic -- in other words I realized I didn't know whether there was a god or who he might be but I didn't feel the need to look into it for myself. Once I learned a little about the Bible I had been criticizing, I became a skeptic, but a searching skeptic. After a lot more exploration, I gave my heart to Jesus ... but my mind was still the mind of a skeptic and I was plagued with doubts. At times, I doubted I was really a Christian. How could a true believer have such doubts? My doubts came from all these so called "facts" that crowded my head, things like: "The Bible was written hundreds of years after the events.", or "God didn't create the world", or "Jesus didn't really die and rise again", or "evangelical Christianity is just one interpretation of the Bible". For a while, I tried to force my doubts under the surface, to hide them away. It's kind of funny if you think about it -- learning led to my faith but I didn't at first turn to further learning to erase some of those remaining doubts and strengthen my faith. Looking back, the answer seems rather obvious. I still read the Bible and did learn a lot, but I was avoiding the questions that pertained to my doubts. Perhaps I was afraid that, if I looked too closely, I would disprove my faith. At some point, I started confronting my doubts and do you know what? I didn't find what I feared. My faith was strengthened every step of the way.

I want to encourage you to confront your doubts. This blog is one way you can do that. Click the link in the right sidebar to submit a question you would like answered. I'll do my best to answer it.