high fidelity

Restless, cross-legged children squirm on colored mats as their teacher attempts to hush them.  He kneels beside one child, cups a hand to her ear, and whispers.  Her eyes brighten with the secret.  She takes a moment to mouth it to herself, nodding with each silent syllable, and then leans to her neighbor to repeat it.  The ritual continues around the circle and she watches, intent, wondering where and how the secret will fall apart.  Finally the last child, with a puzzled look, stands and recites: “Fourteen elephants went to the store to buy a siren?”

Everyone howls!  Then the teacher repeats the original message (“Four score and seven years ago,” it begins), causing twenty-five fingers to point accusingly at everyone else.

The telephone game was one of my favorites in elementary school, right alongside dodgeball and that parachute thing we did in P.E.  Recently, I saw it used as a metaphor for questioning the Bible’s authenticity.

If a roomful of children can’t keep a simple message ungarbled, the logic runs, how could the Scriptures pass intact from generation to generation over thousands of years?

Barring the fact that the Bible was written, not oral, and barring the fact that its transmitters were adults, not children, and barring the fact that its message was vitally important to its preservers, unlike the gibberish of Lincoln’s words to playful second graders – barring all these differences, it’s a clever illustration.  Of course, in every class at least one rascal deliberately twists the message to make the outcome funnier.  But then, given the higher stakes concerning the very Word of God, combined with its vulnerability to the slightest misspelling or nuanced rewording, it could be argued that scribes along the path from Moses to Gutenberg felt even greater temptations to alter passages.

Considering our habit of interpreting texts any way we like, regardless of an author’s intent, it might be wondered why anyone would bother changing the Bible’s words at all.  How unnecessary!  We’re quite able to read our own biases into any phrase, thank you very much.  (As Bill Clinton said, “It depends what the definition of ‘is’ is.”)

But that cynical response, though justified, doesn’t explain the explosion of Bible versions in recent decades.  From the Catholic (Ignatius) to the Jehovah’s Witness (New World) to the secular (New Jerusalem), differing translations have been worded carefully to defend conflicting doctrines.  Multiply such efforts over hundreds of decades, as well as dozens of languages, and a dizzying smorgasbord of Scriptural flavors seems to hopelessly obscure the original message.

This argument, however, fails to account for the historical and cultural factors that worked to maintain the high fidelity of the Bible as it was handed down through the centuries.

Even secular historians agree that those who crafted the painstaking, handwritten copies of the Scriptures did so as an expression of worship, out of devotion to God.  The suggestion that they changed words purposefully or through negligence disregards the degree of motivation behind their efforts – a degree that led to excessive care.  For example, once the Bible was translated into Latin, fear of errors in further translations kept it in that dead language.  The result?  A church that for centuries disenfranchised its worshippers by operating in a language foreign to them.  Moreover, the high cost of manual transcriptions kept the Bible out of the hands of laypersons, further shielding its message from corruption – as opposed to today, when any Joe with a computer can produce his own version.

Our own postmodern society, with its anti-authority pulse, spurns the ideals of correctness and obedience; instead we emphasize creativity, reinterpretation, even deconstruction.  Such was not the case in feudal times, before productive farming technologies and the rule of law.  Famine and barbarism could wipe out entire families.  Allegiance to a feudal lord was a matter of insurance and protection, resulting in a culture that embraced authority with a favorable, almost grateful attitude.  Such a pro-authority bent set the Bible’s transcribers against poetic license in favor of faithful accuracy.  The Scriptures were, after all, the authority that offered ultimate survival: everlasting life rather than condemnation.

Besides, until modern times artists valued imitation, not innovation. Today writers and artists distinguish themselves, even at young ages, through originality.  In the past, however, “imitate the masters” was the goal for all but the most accomplished artists, as recognition came through replicating prior models.  This ideal influenced the Bible’s scribes, the non-masters who operated within the support of religious communities that verified the accuracy of their work.

In an age of minimal technological or scientific knowledge, historical accuracy was the science of the day.  Today we shrug away the past, partly because America rose to prominence by cutting away Europe’s apron strings.  We define our futures through ingenuity and hard work.  Not so our predecessors, for whom the future was determined largely by family lineage.  For that reason historical accounts were tracked meticulously; careful records were kept even on prize horse and dog pedigrees.  That attention to detail carried over into the work of scribes copying the Scriptures they prized most.  Of course, the higher the stakes, the greater the temptations – within a culture that valued the past so strongly, a few mavericks might have changed the Biblical text for their own purposes, just as researchers and journalists today occasionally fake reports to advance their careers.  But the religious establishment would have discovered such shams more often than not, just as scientific and media organizations catch them today.

One reason we suspect past scribes of altering the Bible is because preservation no longer challenges us technically or intellectually.  Modern science has made near-perfect fidelity the norm – we preserve letters, photographs, music, movies, even artwork with an ease and effectiveness unimaginable in the past.  The same CD track can play on repeat for hours.  Miracle on 34th Street appears on TV every Christmas.  Services like Gmail tell us we’ll never have to delete old messages again – just archive them!  The old no longer fades away.  Permanence has become so commonplace, so boring, that we now hunger for the new and reinvented.

Not so in the past, when material decay was the rule for art in all its forms.  Despite the effort required, it was nothing special then to produce new work (another mural, quilt, or scroll) – the sweeping corrosion of time necessitated that new work always be produced.  The real accomplishment was to preserve the old, magically transporting it, unchanged, centuries into the future.  Such was the scribe’s explicit goal for the Scriptures, which in the church’s view had been handed down from the beginning of history itself, and which needed to persist until the end of time.  Any alteration would have meant a permanent and irrecoverable loss of both God’s revelation and the sole record of humanity’s origins – a treasure too valuable to adulterate.

If we impose our 21st-Century mindset on the past, we find it easy to suggest the Scriptures were changed from generation to generation.  A small number of scribes may have managed to introduce some errors unnoticed, but a preponderance of historical and cultural factors made such corruptions the infrequent exception, not the rule.

This is no rosy-colored assertion – it’s been corroborated by the Dead Sea Scrolls, a set of Biblical texts bottled up in pottery since at least the 1st Century AD, if not earlier, and discovered in the 1940’s.  Secular scholars, expecting rich textual variations requiring considerable detective work, were astonished (and perhaps disappointed) to find these early manuscripts matching more recent texts to an uncanny degree – nearly word for word.  The Bible’s incredible veracity over time is an achievement over which all humanity can take pride.

It only makes sense, after all, that God would enable us to preserve His Word so faithfully.  We did not create ourselves, and from the evening news we can tell something is dreadfully, disturbingly wrong with us.  It’s comforting to know that in the middle of our troubles, the God who made us has communicated to us through His Word.  How pathetic it would have been, had God allowed that message of hope to become garbled in a telephone game across the millennia.