Telephones

So i was talking about christianity with this philosopher at NYU (yeah, i know--pretty cool, huh?) and he mentioned offhandlike that he didn't see how any reasonable person could put much confidence in scriptures, knowing where they came from. "What do you mean by that?" i asked. I mean, "where they come from" could be getting at all sorts of different issues, some of which have some real merits. But i was shocked by the naivete of his answer. The basis for this smart professional thinker's dismissal of biblical texts apparently came down to (1) it's very old, and (2) it's written in foreign languages. Seriously, that's what it amounted to. (Is he similarly skeptical about Aristotle? He's not really into history of philosophy, so he might be, for all i know.)

Anyway, to support his distrust of ancient translated texts, he pulled out the old analogy of the telephone game. You know: one kid makes up a message and whispers it to a second kid, who whispers what she hears to a third, and so on, and the last kid announces the utterly garbled message, and everybody laughs. Aren't really old, many-times copied and translated manuscripts just as ridiculous?

Here's a new telephone game that I think is a better analogy. The first kid writes down her message on a slip of paper, along with the time. She then hands this off to two other kids, who each copy down the message as faithfully as they can on new slips of paper, and write down the time. Each of them passes their copy on to one or two more kids. They keep this up for a while, until you've got hundreds or thousands of timestamped slips of paper. If you picked one of these slips at random and read it out loud, you might get something people could laugh at. But that's not how this game works.

First, you randomly choose maybe one in every twenty slips of paper, and throw all the others into an incinerator. Then you take all of the dozens or hundreds of surviving slips, and you hand them to a bunch of folks with a lot of practice playing this game. They line everything up, and compare the different versions and their timestamps, and they do their best to reconstruct the original message (and in the few places where they really can't tell, they add footnotes). Finally, you take the version these folks come up with, and you read it out loud to everybody.

Unless the original message was a joke, i don't think you'll hear a whole lot of laughter.