How Was the Bible Passed Down Through Time?
Many people are under the assumption that the Bible was passed down in a
process that resembles the telephone game. You may recall from your childhood that
the telephone game is a game where you tell something to the person sitting next to you
and they in turn do the same thing, until the message comes full circle, one person at a time.
(Usually, by the end of the game, the message inevitably changes from its original form.)
The distinctive characteristics of the telephone game are 1) a single line of transmission
(i.e. only 1 person at a time) and 2) a line of transmission that is purely linear (i.e. nobody
can go back to a prior person to confirm whether the message they’ve heard is correct). This is
what makes the game fun and often results in the humorous distortion of the original message.
Under this assumption in regards to how the Bible got to us,
most people appeal to this understanding of biblical transmission to suggest that
the Bible in it’s current form (or at any other given point in its history) has most
likely fallen victim to corruption such that we can’t possibly know what it originally said.
The truth, however, is that the process of how the Bible was passed down through time looks almost
nothing like the telephone game. The differences can be summed up in two points: 1) the Bible had
multiple, parallel lines of transmission and 2) the Bible’s transmission was often non-linear.
Contrast these two truths with the premises of the telephone game; those who assert that the Bible
is untrustworthy because of how it was supposedly transmitted are demonstrating that, in fact, they
don’t understand how the Bible was actually passed down to subsequent generations of Christians.
Using the New Testament as our example, it’s important to remember that it did not appear
fully-formed as a single book. Rather, it appeared gradually over the course of 27 individual
books written by different authors in different places at different times in the first century.
If we focus in on one of them – say the Gospel of John – the original
manuscript of this book would have been written by the apostle himself
and would have been in possession of the first congregation to whom he would have delivered it.
To get the word out, scribes (either hired professionals or believing amateurs) would
have made copies of John’s original manuscript to take with them in their travels to other churches.
This illustrates the first point – there was never only 1 single line of transmission
for any book of the New Testament. If, in fact, one (or even multiple) of these copies had an
error in them, any subsequent scribes had a few options at their disposal to make sure
they did not repeat this error: 1) they could cross-examine their copy with other copies,
2) they could disregard the other copies and look at John’s original manuscript and/or
3) they could ask the apostle himself directly what the proper reading of
his gospel was. (Remember that John would have been alive during the first iterations
of the copying & dissemination of his gospel around the Roman world.)
This illustrates the second point – from the start, the transmission of the Bible was never
pigeonholed into a linear fashion. Scribes could always go further back, “up the chain,”
to manuscripts that were older than the copy they possessed or they at least could cross
reference the copy they’d received with others that were contemporary with its production.
In addition, scribes, if motivated, could appeal to important people in the church to confirm what
the manuscript said; in the early days, this meant direct communication with the apostles themselves.
In later generations, it would be their students, the apostolic fathers who could
provide a meaningful witness to a given manuscript’s accuracy.
Once the generations of the apostolic fathers had passed away,
appeal could still be made to them through their writings which quoted scripture at length.
As time went on, this process would repeat itself adding to the collective body of textual sources.
Certain cities achieved notoriety in the history of the Church; places such as Antioch, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Constantinople and Rome. These cities, and others like them, would become repositories
for manuscripts of individual books. Scribes living in these areas would produce manuscripts
which contained multiple books under a single binding. Some popular arrangements would be:
the 4 gospels, the 4 gospels & Acts and all of Paul’s letters. Eventually, these collected
manuscripts would be further assimilated into a greater single-bound manuscript that resembles
what we see in full New Testament. Two of the most prolific examples of this are Codex Sinaiticus and
Codex Vaticanus, both of which contain the entire New Testament under a single binding
in addition to significant portions of the Old Testament. These single-bound manuscripts
would gradually replace the many individual manuscripts of each book in houses of worship
for convenience, eventually leading to the format of the Bible as we have it today – as
a single-bound manuscript containing the 66 books of the Old & New Testaments.
Even today, modern Bibles are produced based upon a conglomeration of all these sources.
Rather than simply appealing to what was on the shelves 100 years ago, Bible translators have
access to many manuscripts written in the original Greek language of the New Testament produced
at various times in the history of Christianity prior to the invention of the printing press. The
sum total of these manuscripts is roughly 6,000, comprised of around 2,000,000 pages. In addition,
we also have access to early translations of the New Testament into other languages such as Latin,
Syriac and Coptic which can help us determine which Greek reading might more likely be original
if we find a discrepancy. Factoring in these sources increases the source count exponentially.
But, what about errors? Errors certainly happened throughout this process. People make
mistakes – especially when we’re talking about a process as tedious as transcribing a volume
as large as the New Testament. Compound this with the fact that many scribes were amateurs who lived
in a time where you couldn’t just pull out an eraser or a clean sheet of paper and start over.
The important thing to know for our purposes is that. The greater context of the manuscript pool
allows us to identify an erroneous manuscript in contrast to other manuscripts in its,
“neighborhood,” or, “family.” All of this means that our ability to produce the Bible is based
upon an abundance of data and resources over and above any other work of antiquity.
The Bible is not the product of the telephone game.
It never had only a single, linear line of transmission down through time.
It always had multiple, parallel lines of transmission taking place and the production
of new manuscript copies always came in the context of the older manuscripts from which they
derived (as well as, often times, the manuscript publishers themselves). This means that the Bible
on your shelf is one of the best-preserved ancient documents you could ever find. The issue is not,
“what did the Bible say then?” The issue is, “do YOU believe what it has always said?”