Mrs. Clark’s 7th Grade Bible Class Discusses:
The Bible and the Telephone Game
The Variant Reading Myth

When you ask some people about the Bible, some might say, “it’s pretty cool, there’s some good stuff in it, but some of it can’t be true.”
You may ask a teacher about the Bible being a reliable historical record, and they might say, “ No, it’s too unreliable and we don’t know if it is the truth.”
Well, they’re WRONG!
If you look at how they judge all the other books on their reliability, and judge it on the same criteria, you will find that it is the most reliable of them all.
The way they look at other books is how many copies there are, and the amount of time between the original and the first copy. The time between the original copy and the first copy of the New Testament is fifty years, and there have been over 24,000 manuscript copies since! No book has come close, so by all normal standards, the Bible is extremely reliable.
Alex, age 12
This myth talks about how people believe that, like in the telephone game, when the Bible is written over and over that the words can completely change. In the telephone game, the message gets passed down from one person to the next. As this takes place, mistranslations and mistakes change the message.
This is false because of how careful people were in copying it.
Scribes in the old times were so careful in copying Scripture that they looked back and forth to be positive that they didn’t make a mistake.
Throughout the years the Bible has been copied and even today all of the messages told in the Bible have stayed the exact same and not morphed and changed.
The Bible even talks about how it will never change or be gone until all of its purposes have been fulfilled. There are many different translations of the Book, but it all has not changed.
Adam, age 13
“Do your instructors dismiss the writings of the Greek historian Thucydides or the philosopher Aristotle … as being unworthy of serious consideration because of textual problems or variant readings?”
“The New Testament is unquestionably the gold standard for reliability
among documents dating from antiquity.”
(Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door, page 47)
Know what you believe…and why you believe it.
- Does it really matter what you believe, as long as you have faith?
- Are there errors in the Bible?
- Was Jesus just a good teacher?
- Can anyone prove His resurrection?
- What does that have to do with me?
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