Are the words in the Bibles we read today the same words that the apostles and prophets wrote back then? Many people assume that the words have been dramatically changed over the centuries, comparing the transmission of Scripture to the Telephone Game. Daniel Wallace answers this challenge, showing how different the two really are:
The implication is that the transmission of the Bible is very much like the telephone game—a parlor game every American knows. It involves a brief narrative that someone whispers to the next person in line who then whispers this to the next person, and so on for several people. Then, the last person recites out loud what he or she heard and everyone has a good laugh for how garbled the story got. But the transmission of scripture is not at all like the telephone game. First, the goal of the telephone game is to see how badly the story can get misrepresented, while the goal of New Testament copying was by and large to produce very careful, accurate copies of the original. Second, in the telephone game there is only one line of transmission, while with the New Testament there are multiple lines of transmission. Third, one is oral, recited once in another’s ear, while the other is written, copied by a faithful scribe who then would check his or her work or have someone else do it. Fourth, in the telephone game only the wording of the last person in the line can be checked, while for the New Testament textual critics have access to many of the earlier texts, some going back very close to the time of the autographs. Fifth, even the ancient scribes had access to earlier texts, and would often check their work against a manuscript that was many generations older than their immediate ancestor. The average papyrus manuscript would last for a century or more. Thus, even a late second-century scribe could have potentially examined the original document he or she was copying. If telephone were played the way New Testament transmission occurred, it would make for a ridiculously boring parlor game!
Thinking to Believe 
December 28, 2014 at 8:46 pm
The argument that the transmission of the biblical texts was something similar to a game of telephone is really one of the stupidest, most ignorant arguments you can make. Anyone who makes such an argument clearly has no knowledge of the process and the manner these texts were written. It really bugs me that such an ignorant argument has become so common. Great call.
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December 29, 2014 at 12:41 pm
The transmission of biblical texts IS like a telephone game, not because the texts are not the same, the texts are the same but it is the interpretation of the biblical texts that makes the bible a most ridiculously boring parlor game! It is laughable.
Jesus interpreted scriptures perfectly because his interpretation was without a supernatural mindset and without using magic tricks of miracles and deceit which made the religious rulers furious because he stepped on their toes repeatedly by accurately interpreting biblical texts. Do you remember what he said in John 7 after the opening sentence? “After these things Jesus walked in Galilee; for He did not want to walk in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill Him.” Then Jesus said to them, in verse 7 “The (religious) world cannot hate you, but it hates Me because I testify of it that its works are evil.”
Today’s interpreters of the Biblical texts use the same boring interpretation that the Scribes and the Pharisees regurgitated with rote; repetitious boring nonsense about nonexistent paranormal that Hollywood and Religion makes a fortune from by stunting the brains of humanity with supernaturalism. Supernaturalism that Jesus debunked at his first reading of Isaiah that opened his campaign to free the captives from the tyranny of religion, after which all the congregation became enraged with him and tried to lure him up the cliff so they could throw him over and that, right from the “get go”. But he gave them the slip. And for the next three years darted and dodged his way through a campaign to make men, men again, using common sense as much as possible because it was nearly impossible to make a dent in the mindset from the indelible design of brainwashing by deceitful clergy rulers who for thousands of years practiced ritual nonsense.
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December 29, 2014 at 4:32 pm
SonofMan,
This post is not about interpretation of the Bible, but the accuracy of its transmission. I wish you would stop changing the subject of what is posted so that you can go on the rant of your liking. Stick to the topic please.
Jason
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December 29, 2014 at 11:25 pm
Jason:
I never changed the topic; I simply expanded on the topic to include the reasons for inaccurate transmission of biblical texts.
The transmission of the Bible is exactly the point of the topic. I am not arguing that the words are not the same today as they were two thousand years ago or 10,000 years ago. It is the transmission of the bible that is inaccurate because of the interpretation of the words, not the words themselves. My first paragraph cites the very topic you are writing about here read it again:
“The transmission of biblical text IS like a telephone game, not because the texts are not the same, the texts are the same but it is the interpretation of the biblical texts that makes the bible a most ridiculously boring parlor game! It is laughable.”
The real issue for you Jason and the cliche of Christian righteousness of Absolute Certainty is that you are completely wrong about Jesus and everything Jesus stood for and everything Jesus stood against and refuse to admit that your interpretation of biblical texts is contrary to Jesus’ interpretation of the same words in the bible and it is precisely your interpretation of scripture that makes a mockery of the transmission of the bible, so what do you do? you post a useless piece of information about the telephone parlor game to skirt around the real problem Christians have by dragging Jesus into their own supernatural mindset when the truth of the matter is that Jesus never ever was part of your supernatural scenario. And yet you labor and niggle about fossil records to dispute evolution as though the disputation will prove your ludicrous claim of creationism. That’s the real tragedy Christians have you all wiggle around the bible texts like salted slugs whenever someone shatters your helpless childlike whimpering with ridiculous debate about being off topic. What is off topic talking on a Christian site about Jesus?
You act just like the generation Jesus lamented about when it comes to interpretation over real issues:
Matt 11:15-17 He who has ears to hear, let him hear!
16 “But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their companions, 17 and saying:
‘We played the flute for you,
And you did not dance;
We mourned to you,
And you did not lament.’
Jason, Jesus was talking about you and your generation whimpering about being off topic all the time! are you really so obtuse that you don’t see that? that you can’t hear what he is saying to you down through the corridors of time? Do you think Jesus was simply talking to the religious whimperers of his time only and it doesn’t apply to you?
If you are annoyed with me as your repetitive ‘off topic’ pretense demonstrates how much more were you annoyed with Jesus when he went off topic by explaining to religious zealots what the bible really says.
So you believe in the resurrection of the body; what feather is that in your hat, even the Pharisees believed as much and Jesus called them out as poisonous snakes, deceptive hypocrites like whitewashed tombs full of dead mens’ bones from the inside out. Huh.
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December 29, 2014 at 11:34 pm
SonofMan, the post is about the accuracy of the copies. You changed the topic to the interpretation of the words. Interpretation is not transmission.
Jason
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December 30, 2014 at 1:05 pm
Agreed, the more interesting game would be: were some changes made to the Gospels before the “transmission game” began and what about the other writings from supposedly NT people that didn’t make it to the Bible (ie. were these fakes?).
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December 30, 2014 at 8:59 pm
So can we trust the gospels? Well, as we can see, the answer is, yes, we can actually trust the gospels to a point, but what we can’t trust is the way that they’ve been convoluted and distorted, and taught to us by people who don’t understand what they actually said in the first place.
The present English-language gospels date back effectively to the Authorized Bible, compiled for the Stewart King James I of England in the early 17th century. This was published and set into print no more than 165 years before America’s Declaration of Independence; only a few years before the first Pilgrim Fathers set sail from England.
The gospels of the early Church were originally written in second and third century Greek. Along with the Bible as a whole, they were translated into Latin in the fourth century, but it was then to be more than a thousand years before any English translation was made.
Bible translation was risky then, though. Fourteenth century reformer John Wycliffe was denounced as a heretic for translating the Bible into English. His books were burned. In the early 16th century, William Tyndale was strangled as a form of execution, in Belgium, and then burned, just in case he wasn’t dead, for translating the Bible into English. A little later, Miles Coverdale, a disciple of his, made another translation; and by that time the Church itself had split up quite nicely, so Coverdale’s version was accepted by the Protestant Church-but he was still a heretic in the eyes of Rome.
The problem was that as long as the printed text remained obscure (and it wasn’t just ordinary Latin; this was an horrendous form of Church Latin), as long as only the bishops could understand it, they could teach whatever on Earth they wanted. If it were translated into the languages that other people could understand and maybe read for themselves, this would pose a problem because the Church could be called to question.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_1.htm#Part%201
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December 30, 2014 at 9:00 pm
It was not until the early seventeenth century that the first acceptable English language Bible translation was made-for the Scots King James VI (Stuart), James I of England. This was the Authorized Version, upon which the majority of subsequent English-language Bibles have been based. But even this was not a direct translation from anything; it was mostly translated from the Greek, partly from the Latin, and to some extent from the works of others who’d made other illegitimate translations before.
In their rendering of the New Testament, King James’ translators endeavored to appease both the Protestants and the Catholics. This was the only way to produce a generally acceptable text, but their attempt to appease was not entirely successful. The Catholics thought the translators were siding with the Protestants and tried to blow up King James in the Houses of Parliament, and the Protestants said the translators were in league with the Catholics.
Anyway, the Bible survived but the translators tried as well for something called “political correctness”. We know about it today; it applied then. Good examples of this are found in many instances-one in particular where the direct translation referred to a group of people called “heavenly soldiers”. They didn’t like this very much, so it’s actually crossed out, and underneath it says “heavenly army”. But somebody else came along and said, “No, this is still not good enough; it denotes an armed unit here; this is not politically correct,” and so it was crossed out again, and they resurrected an old word that had not been written in the English language for centuries. They called it “the heavenly host”. Nobody knows what the heavenly host is. In fact it’s quite astounding how many obscure, old and obsolete words were brought back into use to provide political correctness for the King James Bible, but which nobody could understand. At the same time, William Shakespeare was doing likewise in his plays.
If we look at the reference books that existed prior to James and Shakespeare and at those that existed just after James and Shakespeare, we see that the English-language vocabulary was increased by more than fifty per cent as a result of words invented or brought back from obscurity by the writers of the era. The problem was that nobody, let alone the dictionary compilers, knew what most of these words meant. But they had somehow to be defined, and “heavenly host” emerged, quite ambiguously, as “a heavenly lot of people”!
So although eminently poetic, the language of the Authorized English Bible is quite unlike any language ever spoken by anyone in England or anywhere else. It bears no relation to the Greek or Latin from which it was translated. It was certainly not the language spoken by God, as some priests once told me (sic). But from this approved canonical interpretation, all other English language Bibles have emerged in their various forms. Despite that, for all of its faults, despite its beautiful verse patterns and the new words, it still remains the closest of all English language translations from the original Greek manuscripts. All other versions, the Standard versions, the New versions, the Revised versions, the Modern English versions, have been significantly corrupted and they’re quite unsuitable for serious study by anyone because they have their own specific agenda.
We can cite an extreme version of how this works in practice. We can look at a Bible currently issued today in Pacific Papua New Guinea where there are tribes who experience familiarity on a daily basis with no other animal but the pig. In the current edition of their Bible, every animal mentioned in the text, whether originally an ox, lion, ass, sheep or whatever, is now a pig! Even Jesus, the traditional “Lamb of God”, in this Bible is “the Pig of God”!
So, to facilitate the best possible trust in the Gospels, we must go back to the original Greek manuscripts with their often-used Hebrew and Aramaic words and phrases. And in so doing we discover that, just as with the Nativity story, a good deal of relevant content has been misrepresented, misunderstood, mistranslated or simply just lost in the telling. Sometimes this has happened because original words have no direct counterpart in other languages.
We’ve all been taught that Jesus’ father Joseph was a carpenter. “Why not? It says so in the Gospels.” But it didn’t say that in the original Gospels. By the best translation, it actually said that Joseph was a Master of the Craft. The word “carpenter” was simply a translator’s concept of a craftsman. Anyone associated with modern Freemasonry will recognize the term “the Craft”. It’s got nothing whatever to do with woodwork. The text simply denoted that Joseph was a masterly, learned and scholarly man.
Another example is the concept of the Virgin Birth. Our English-language Gospels tell us that Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin; they keep telling us that she was a virgin. Well, let’s consider the word “virgin”. We understand the word; it tells us that this was a woman with no experience of sexual union. But this was translated not from the Greek initially but from the Latin. That was easy because the Latin called her virgo; Mary was a virgo. It didn’t mean the same thing at all! Virgo in Latin meant nothing more than “a young woman”. To have meant the same thing as “virgin” does to us today, the Latin would have been virgo intacta, that is to say, “a young woman intact”.
Let’s look back beyond the Latin text; let’s see why they called her virgo, a young woman. Maybe they actually got something right which we’ve got wrong later on. We discover that the word translated to mean virgo, a young woman, was the old Hebrew word almah which meant “a young woman”. It had no sexual connotation whatever. Had Mary actually been physically virgo intacta, the Hebrew word used would have been bethula, not almah.
So, have we been completely misguided by the Gospels? No; we’ve been misguided by the English language translations of the Gospels. We’ve also been misguided by a Church establishment that has done everything in its power to deny women any normal lifestyle in the Gospel story. The New Testament’s key women are virgins or whores or sometimes widows-never everyday girlfriends, wives or mothers, and certainly not ever priestesses or holy sisters.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_2.htm
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