Non-believers often make the claim that the copying of the original autographs of Scripture contains too many errors so we can no longer know if what we have is the same as the original. One of the metaphors they use to illustrate this is the concept of the game “telephone” where a sentence is whispered into one person’s ear, and then it travels down the line to the last person, where the sentence is drastically altered from the original.
There are several problems with this illustration, however, and as such it has no real bearing on the issue of copyist errors of Scripture. Firstly, in the game, the intent is to have the sentence change. Thus, one of the rules as it is played is that you can only hear the sentence once. Furthermore, you are not allowed to ask anyone else who was previously in the line what they heard.
This is unrealistic when compared to how we get Biblical texts. We have several copies of many different ages, which we can use to compare each other and discover threads of change. Thus, we are not stuck with only one previous version–we can look at any of the existent manuscripts that preceed the most current manuscript that we have.
Secondly, the game of telephone is linear. It’s one person to one person. But Scripture wasn’t copied in that manner. Instead, it branched out like a tree. Thus, several copies were made by a person of one text, and those were copied numerous times too, etc. Thus, not only is it possible for us to look at previous manuscripts to see how the text matches what we currently have, but we are also able to spot if someone intentionally tries to alter the text, since there are so many other copies of the manuscripts around.
The end result is that the metaphor of the game of Telephone is so incompatible with how we actually do textual criticism that it is really nothing more than dishonesty that would compell someone to use it.
