The Gospels and the "Telephone Game"

One of the most widespread arguments regarding the Bible is regarding the proper dating and authorship of the New Testament Gospels.  The earlier those books are dated, the stronger their claim is to accuracy and reliability.  So there is a lot at stake.

A while ago I made a post in which I presented some arguments for the early and genuine authorship of the Gospels.  But today I wanted to look at an alternative perspective.  I call it the "Telephone Game" theory.

This hypothesis holds that the Gospels were composed late in the first century - (after the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70AD) - and do not reflect the original narrative of Christ's life and deeds.  Instead they reflect a gradual mythologizing of the preacher from Nazareth.

The argument typically sounds like this:

"We've all played the children's game where we stand in a line and whisper a message from person to person.  Each time the message is passed there are subtle changes.  When it arrives at the other side of the line, the final message is completely different from the original.   

Something like that surely happened with the Jesus story.  His legend grew bigger and bigger until he became God incarnate.  That's what we see in the Gospels."

How do we respond to this?

Diverse Expectations:

Let’s suppose that IS what happened. What would we expect to see?  And does it match up with what actually happened?

Well, this took place in a world before telecommunications.  It would have been difficult to coordinate the rapidly evolving Jesus story.  So if people are embellishing the narrative as it travels outward, we can expect each geographic region to come up with its own unique traditions regarding Jesus.

One community might regard him as a human sage.  Another would say he came back from the dead.  A third might say he joined the Egyptian pantheon.  The result would be different schools of Christianity which have their own traditions about the life and nature of Christ.

A good comparison might be something we’ve seen in Islam.

In addition to the Koran, Islam also has what are called the "Hadiths".  The Hadiths are traditions regarding the life and deeds of Mohammad.  There are thousands of them.  And different schools of Islam accept different ones ... even down to the present day.

That is likely what Christianity would look like if a Telephone Game had occurred… but that isn’t what happened.  As I noted in my essay on the canon, the Gospels were accepted universally.  Everyone agreed that those books reflected the beliefs of their community.

So that’s the first reason to doubt the Telephone Game hypothesis.  If people were really free to exaggerate the story of Jesus until he became the resurrected God of the Jews, we wouldn’t expect to see everyone doing it.  A global consensus would come as a surprise.  We'd expect the emergence of multiple competing narratives.


This Is No Game!

Now, in the above section we granted that the "Telephone Game" occurred before the writing of the Gospels.  However, you don't have to grant that assumption.  Here is why....

The Telephone Game works because of the structure of the game and how the message is passed.  It has the following qualities:

• No supervision: The originator of the message has no control after the game starts.
• Private: The message is passed along one person at a time in secret.
• Many Iterations: There are usually a dozen kids or more.
• No practice: Each person has no practice before passing on the message.
• Low-Stakes: There are usually no rewards or punishments for changing the message.

Well, suppose you could make another game.  In this one a man has to pass down a poem through multiple groups of 20 people.  If the third group can recite the poem properly, everyone gets their college loans and mortgages paid off.  

So he practices the poem with the first group for a week.  Then the second group is incorporated into the first group.  They practice together for another week.  The first group (and the originator) are then removed.  The second group mixes in with a third group - and now they practice for a week.

Do you suppose the poem will recited accurately by this third "generation"?  You bet it will.  Those people had tons of practice, opportunities for correction, and are highly motivated to get it right.

And THAT is the spread of the Gospel was like.

As I wrote about [here] and [here], all the historical evidence tells us the early Christians retained the Jewish practice of liturgical worship.  They had rituals, creeds, hymns, and common prayers which everyone in the congregation would know.  They passed down the Christian faith as a group from one generation to another with long periods of overlap.  And the stakes at hand was the eternal salvation of their souls.

So do we really expect the early Christians to completely corrupt the story in the space of two generations?  That element of the Telephone Game seems highly unlikely.


Bad Assumptions:

Here's the last thing.

Up until now we have granted the premise that the Gospels were written toward the end of the first century AD.  And indeed, this is (supposedly) the majority view among historians. Armed with this consensus, skeptical folks will present the late authorship of the Gospels as if it is a proven fact.

But we don't have to grant them that.  You have to ask:

Why do these scholars think the Gospels were written late in the first century?  Do they have good reasons for thinking that?

The answer is; The experts say this because they know the Gospels contain accurate predictions about the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred in 70AD.   From there those experts say something like:

"These predictions are presented to us as prophecies made by Jesus in the year 30AD.  But we all know prophecies are impossible and don't happen in the real world.  Therefore the Gospels had to be written after the invasion of Jerusalem and the authors presented it as a prophecy to fool people into thinking Jesus knew the future."

Thus the Wikipedia article on Matthew's Gospel says:

"The majority view among scholars is that Matthew was a product of the last quarter of the 1st century. This makes it a work of the second generation of Christians, for whom the defining event was the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE in the course of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE)" - Gospel of Matthew, Wikipedia

So the reason for the supposed consensus is because the "experts" approach the text assuming history proceeds as if God is not there.  This means the prospect of genuine prophecy is ruled out from the start and dismissed without consideration.

But they haven't proven that assumption.  In fact, you have good reasons to believe in God.  That means things like prophecies and miracles are a possibility.  It also means you can dismiss the consensus of scholars because their conclusions are dependent on an assumption you know to be false.


Back to the Evidence:

Let's wrap this up.

The "Telephone Game" theory proposes that the real message of Jesus was exaggerated and mythologized prior to the writing of the Gospels in the late first century.  This means the story which appears in the text is not a reliable historical witness.

However, this theory does not account for the unity of the Christian world around that exaggerated Christ.  It doesn't reflect the mode of transmission of the Christian tradition.  And it is based on naturalistic assumptions which we don't agree with anyway.

All of this can be combined with what was presented last time to reassert the early publication and reliability of the Gospels.  They are the testimony of honest men.

[Still more could be said by drawing on the letters of Paul, but we'll do that another time.]