Bible Scholar Daniel Wallace Explains Why the "Telephone Game" Analogy Fails and Why the "The Gospel of Snoopy" Succeeds
The telephone game analogy is often trodded out by skeptics to argue that you cannot trust the text of the New Testament. Apologist Lee Strobel explains:
"Some people have likened textual criticism to the children's game of telephone, in which a short message is communicated to an individual by whispering in that person's ear. That person then whispers in the next person's ear and so on for several people. Then the last individual says the message out loud, and inevitably it has become terribly garbled by the time it goes all the way down the chain. The implication is that because textual criticism is like this, people simply can't trust what the New Testament says today. In short, we can't have any confidence that it accurately represents the original."1
In his book The Case for the Real Jesus, Strobel offered this objection to New Testament Scholar Daniel Wallace, who proceeded to thoroughly explained why it fails:
"'First of all...rather than having one stream of transmission, we have multiple streams. Now suppose you were to interrogate the last person in, say, three lines. All of them repeat the message they heard in their own line, and the message ultimately goes back to one source. There would certainly be differences in the resultant message, but there also would be similarities. By a little detective work, you could figure out much of what the original message was by comparing the three different reports of it. Of course, you still would have a lot of doubt as to whether you got it right.
A second difference with the telephone game...is that rather than dealing with an oral tradition, textual criticism deals with a written tradition. Now, if each person in the line wrote down what he heard from the person in front of him, the chances for garbling the message would be remote - and you'd have a pretty boring game!
A third difference is that the textual critic - the person trying to reconstruct what the original message was - does not have to rely on that last person in the chain. He can interrogate several folks who are closer to the original source...[p]utting all this together, the cross-checks among the various streams of transmission, the examination of early generations of copies - often exceedingly early - and the written records rather than oral tradition, make textual criticism quite a bit more exacting and precise than the game of telephone..."2
After explaining to Strobel why the "telephone game" fails to properly represent the discipline of textual criticism, Wallace goes on to offer another game that succeeds in demonstrating the effectiveness of textual criticism. This game is called "The Gospel According to Snoopy" and he has used it successfully for 30+ years. Professor Wallace explains:
"In the game, numerous people severe as 'scribes,' who copy out an ancient text on Friday night...[t]here are six generations of copies. The scribes all make mistakes, intentionally or unintentionally. In fact, the resultant copies are actually significantly more corrupt than the manuscript copies of the New Testament...[f]or a fifty-word document, they are able to produce hundreds of textual variants...[t]hen the next morning the rest of the folks at the seminar get to work as textual critics, with the scribes as silent onlookers. But they don't have all the manuscripts to work with. The earliest copies were destroyed or lost. And there are many breaks in the chain. But the textual critics do the best they can with the materials they have...[a]fter about two hours of work, they come up with what they think the original text said. There are some doubts at almost every turn. But remarkably, even with the doubts, the core idea is hardly changed. Sometimes the doubts have to do with 'too' versus 'also,' or 'shall' versus 'will.' Then, I show the group the original text and we compare the two texts, line by line, word by word."3
Wallace continues by explaining the results of the game:
"Altogether, I've conducted this seminar over fifty times in churches, colleges, and seminaries - and we have never missed reconstructing the original text by more than three words. In fact, we were off by three words only once. Often, the group has gotten the original wording exactly right - and the essential message of the original wording exactly right - and the essential message of the original is always intact. Sometimes people break out in spontaneous applause at the end!"4
Wallace concludes:
"If people who know nothing about textual criticism can reconstruct a text that has become terribly corrupted, then isn't it likely that those who are trained in textual criticism can do the same with the New Testament?"5
Courage and Godspeed,
Chad
Footnote:
1. Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ, p. 80.
2. Ibid., p. 81.
3. Ibid., p. 81-82.
4. Ibid., p. 82.
5. Ibid.
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