Telephone Bible

My nieces are really into playing the game of telephone these days. It will start with a somewhat serious and normal sentence and by the time it goes around the circle through your siblings, ants and cousins, the sentence is complete nonsense and often hilarious. A sentence that always leaves you wondering what on earth the original speaker was thinking and what they meant.

And so it is with the Bible.

We don’t have any audio or video of what Jesus said. Nor do we have any of the original copies of what the actual authors of the Bible said who were claiming to be quoting Jesus, albeit decades later.

But we do have copies of copies of copies of copies and most of these copies weren’t passed on in immediately like you do in the game telephone. They were made centuries after the original story was written down. And the copies disagree with each other because they were each written by different scribes, humans, who made mistakes or had agendas of their own.

In fact there are far more mistakes in the earliest copies of the manuscripts. In other words, the first people in the circle in the game of telephone made the most mistakes and interpreting the message.

All of the surviving manuscripts, which are often fragments of copies that were produced centuries after the time of Jesus, disagree with one another in big and small ways.

For me, this is not a threat to my ability to believe in God or the stories about Jesus. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to learn more about the context and why the Bible as we know it today says compared to what the intention might have been from the original authors.

Stay curious. Stay open.