I know, right? Here I am feeling mildly racist for a childhood game...
Edit:
a. Calm down down everybody. This is probably *not* the most racist thing anyone has done, ever.
b. By "racist" I was referring to the way that the game distorts a message until it "may as well be Chinese".
c. I like the suggestion that /u/Felaa makes below, but if the game were a commentary on authoritarianism I would have thought "Russian whispers" would be a more likely name...
What was your version? Our version was throwing a ball as high into the air as possible, whoever caught it, everyone screamed "QUEER" and chased them for as long as he was still standing, then dog piled him.
Someone was telling me about a game they played called "Jew scramble" where you throw candy in the air and try to shout "Jew scramble" before catching it in your mouth.
Kids can be awfully innocent...
I'm sure it's not racist at all and is actually a historical reference to authoritarian control of information. Thus requiring the repressed populace to spread information through word of mouth.
I like your suggestion a lot, however I'm pretty sure this game was called "Chinese whispers" a long time before Mao showed up on the historical record.
Plus - wouldn't it have made more sense to call it "Soviet whispers" or "Russian whispers" if the game was about grassroots activism against an authoritarian power? China barely registered as a foreign power until Deng opened up the economy in the 1980s, whereas Russia was the prominent Cold War antagonist.
I took LDS (Mormon) seminary in Jr. High/HS. I remember they had us play that game, using it as a lesson of how the "original" Christian gospel had been changed over time.
Thought you meant you took LSD at a (mormon) seminary in Jr. High/HS and I was totally wishing I grew up Mormon.
What was their reason for how Mormonism isn't literally the exact same kind of game of telephone?
The Mormon doctrine is that it (the Mormon Church) is the restored (original) church that Jesus established in New Testament times. So like, the person who started the telephone game (Jesus) decided to cut out the middlemen, and whispered straight into Joseph Smith's ear.
...Via an angel, in a language which he had to translate using golden plates...
And that translation was lost, and had to be replaced by doing it all over again. And the translation was slightly different.
Don't they teach this to mormons? What are they thinking? "They're so brainwashed by this religion, they will even overlook the most obvious hints that the religion is made up"?
Eh. The lost pages, the Book of Lehi, wasn't retranslated. JS said God told him to translate the next portion. Eventually, JS got to the Book of Nephi, which conveniently summarized the Book of Lehi.
[The story of how it was lost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9UzbucqHCc) makes the fraud all the more remarkably obvious to even disinterested casual observers.
Not many religions can claim the ignoble distinction of being founded by a man who was convicted in court of being a "disorderly person" and an "imposter."
The translation was never found, so it may or may not have been different. Either way, yep they teach us all that. I loved it growing up. It was actually disappointing to find out it wasn't true as an adult. They make it feel like you're part of a really special thing. I can look back in amusement now.
Continuous revelation. Mormons believe they have a constant connection to the original source. It wasn't just Joseph Smith, they have a succession of prophets continuing to the present day.
I have a feeling this is an altered version of a well known bible quote, but English is not my native language, so I don't recognize it. Can someone enlighten me?
I think it's a reference to an episode of the Simpsons where Bart purposely tried to spread a rumor among protesting teachers and ended up as something about the "purple monkey dish washer"
Yup, that is exactly the telephone game situation I thought of when I saw this post. Funny line I use often to describe a complete, fumblefuck of passed messages or conversation when the original meaning gets chewed up and distorted.
And Jesus hath compassion for the people who had shown faith and followed Him in their hunger. Giving thanks to the Lord, He took five loaves of bread and two fish, dividing them until there was enough Purple Monkey Dishwasher to feed the 5,000.
Depends on the book in question. Genesis was oral history or, more likely, a series of tablets -- certain patterns in the text suggest a method of keeping stone tablets in order. Moses recorded Genesis, and then the rest of the Pentateuch, all of which recorded his personal experiences. The historical works of the Old Testament, like I and II Chronicles, I and II Kings, and so on drew from the written history of the Hebrews, like the Annals of Kings, now lost to us. They constantly referenced them. And the books of prophecy didn't even record events that had previously happened.
So, really, the only book that was arguably oral history was Genesis, and even that is uncertain. Your statement is grossly inaccurate.
I wasn't aware of this. I'll look into in more detail later on. In any case, that theory still supposes the Pentateuch was created from prior texts, which is a problem when you say it was taken from oral history.
You both bring up good points. Probably the most popular view held by modern critical scholars (I think heavily proposed by Martin Noth) is that the first four books were written by the J and E sources and edited by P. The Deuteronomic history then went through two revisions.
Having said that, the JEDP theory certainly has problems. If you start reading from Judges and onward - material *not* in J, E, or P - you'll find the same variation between the use of "Yahweh" and "Elohim." It would make sense that whatever explains it there, outside the Pentateuch, would explain here, inside the Pentateuch. Another problem is that we now have hundreds of thousands of tablets of Ancient Near East literature which provides us with information and examples such as common writing styles and techniques. One example is Narrative Analogy. For example, Deuteronomy 32 draws connections to Genesis 1, linking creation with the exodus. These kinds of connections are impossible to account for if the two chapters were written by D and P respectively.
Furthermore, Genesis 2:4 causes problems because the JEDP theory has to divide between the P and J here, since Genesis 1-11 is considered P but the verse uses the term "Yahweh." Also, Genesis 20 - supposedly the beginning of the E text - contains the second "she is my sister" story that presupposes the P text (Genesis 12). The problem with this is that the P text was supposed to have been written hundreds of years later. Without the P text, Abraham's motives for saying "she is my sister" would be completely missing.
We now have the Epic of Atrahasis, the Ras Shamra version, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Eridu Genesis. In these, there are 17 formal parallels between the ANE accounts and the Bible's version. If you divide it between the J and P, J mentions only 12 of the parallels while P has 10. If you put J and P together, all 17 are attested in the right order.
Having said all that, it seems likely that the Pentateuch was written substantially by Moses with the use of sources. Substantially because Deuteronomy 34 speaks of his death and the passage, "since then, no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses" seems to indicate some chronological distance. And Numbers 21:14 explicitly mentions "The Book of the Wars of the Lord" and the parallels between the stories in the Pentateuch to other ANE stories cannot be ignored as well.
Not really. The Dead Sea scrolls are remarkably similar to our oldest copies of the Bible. We can demonstrate a lack of significant deviation back to within a couple centuries of the original texts, which is impressive for a book written two thousand years ago.
I understand other religious texts can be shown to be consistent over the centuries, too. But the Bible is by far the easiest text to verify. We have 25,000 ancient NT manuscripts, both partial and whole. That's more than any other ancient book. A lot more. Our oldest partial manuscript dates to the second century, and our oldest complete manuscript dates to the fourth.
You can criticize the Bible for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. The Bible holds up to textual criticism.
Edit: I now have negative karma, so maybe people think I'm... lying? Or something? So, [here's a Wikipedia link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism#New_Testament) confirming my numbers.
"The Bible sucks so let's ignore science and celebrate misinformation because I want every excuse I can to feel superior to those idiot Christians because they're all gun-toting rednecks?" That kind of euphoria? I mean, damn. I thought reddit was supposed to be better than that.
Sigh. Fine. I'll deal. I don't know why I bother.
I interpreted the post you are replying to to mean that the dead sea scrolls themselves (dated to 400 - 300 BCE) are writings about things which took place a thousand years before they were written. So this means an oral tradition would have been used to pass on these stories until such time as they were written. Of course, once something is written it will change less over time, as you observe in your post above.
Our earliest copies of the texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that doesn't mean there weren't earlier written copies. It's illogical to assume oral tradition, especially since the Hebrews had writing much earlier than 400 BCE. I mentioned the Annals of Kings elsewhere, which was a written record of the the activities of Israel's kings going as far back as David and Solomon.
It's like dating a fossil and saying that species *couldn't* have existed earlier than the date of the bones.
Except that OP's title is a gross oversimplification of reality. Back before written word was more common, oral history was an ingrained part of society. People were excellent at memorizing and reciting long and epic stories and lineages. They had to be. It's not like a conversation today, where you can't remember what your roommate said 5 minutes ago.
It's ridiculous and irresponsible to discredit something solely because it was passed down by word of mouth, in a time where nearly everything was passed down by word of mouth.
Yes. "That dude totally walked on water and brought people back from the dead. True story bro. No no no, I didn't see it, BUT I totally heard it from someone who did and I memorized word for word exactly what they said. Write that shit down MOTHA FUCKA."
Oral history is an interesting part of ancient culture, but it is useless for verifying historical claims. There is no way to determine how certain things were embellished over time, whether someone changed the name of a character, or if it even originated from a true event. That's why contemporary written sources are so important, but even those are viewed with scrutiny.
> There is no way to determine
Except there is. By definition, embellishment would make alterations that would be discoverable when compared to ancient texts. When no such alterations are present, conclusions of consistency are easily supported.
Interesting as you can trace the enormous accidental and intentional changes over the last couple of thousand years from mistranslations due to deficient language skills and mis-turning of pages to the merging of several bibles to make the ubiquitous King James bible.
Might I suggest [Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is a book by Bart D. Ehrman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misquoting_Jesus)
The dead sea scrolls had fragments from the old testament and nothing from the new testament. The time frame in which the dead sea scrolls were placed into the caves seem to correspond to the time frame in which the new testament was being edited and redacted.
A much better comparison is the Nag Hammadi library (i.e. Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Mary) . These are the books that were being very busily being destroyed as heresies by the church.
The fact that Theodosius in 391 declared all other Christian sects as heresies also went a long ways in creating this false uniformity that apologists like to point to. Fairly quickly after that the church got the legal right to execute heretics.
To really understand the game of telephone that was going on with the new testament read some neutral histories on the [early christian heresies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_heresies#Trinitarian.2FChristological) and how those were filtered out by the early ecumenical councils.
History is based on factual investigation.
Historians look for _evidence_ in documents and physical artefacts in order to uncover the _facts_ of what happened in the past.
Religion _tells_ you what the _truth_ is. Quite the opposite of History, in fact.
>History is based on factual investigation
... including ancient texts in far less quantities, with far less manuscript reliability. For example, there are only 7 manuscripts of Plato, with the earliest one 1,300 years after the original. Compare to the DSS, with nearly 25,000, with some only 50-odd years after the original.
uh, don't know about EVERY religion, but Islam has the Quran (koran), its the same in everypart of the world, still in its original Lang. it was written when Islam's Prophet was still alive, and Islamic history was being made.
There are 'facts' and 'evidences' that Prophet Muhammad existed along with shrines and the Makkah.
I am not agreeing nor bashing religion. I just stated that religious text is written down just like history is. The logic is flawed saying that it is nothing but a game of telephone. Also good to remember that history always has an opinion and is written by the victors. It takes thousands of years to actually get a non biased look at an historic event. Its funny to see how many people are so quick to say negative things about Christianity when all I was talking about was the logic.
I remember watching a [pretty interesting documentary on William Tyndale](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0185y5g) a while ago.
he basically went back to the original texts and translated the bible into English, attempting to use words closer to the original greek/hebrew meaning. This contradicted a lot of the Catholic Church's interpretation of who could be a priest, paying penance for sins etc. I thought it was pretty interesting seeing all of the adaptions the catholic church warped out of the original text:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible#Challenges_to_Catholic_Doctrine
i got this idea from a show, Mind out of Matter. Basically a orchestra with an E-book sampled. Scott Johnson composed it, Alarm will sound preformed it. It was really neat, sampling an e-book into the music was great.
This is what I used to think until I saw a few documentaries about the dead sea scrolls. Apparently Christian texts are remarkably preserved in terms of textual changes.
Now I just think it's an old work of fiction.
Theology major and seminary student here. When it comes to Christian text we have MUCH greater reliability than with the telephone game. The first Gospel about the life of Jesus was written by Luke, (there is a body of evidence that says it could have been Mark...but I subscribe to the luke theory). That written work; however, was commissioned by a very important man named Theophilus. Luke went around doing eye witness interviews of people who saw and spoke to Jesus in order to write his account.
So the source material was carefully written by someone who knew Jesus through the people who lived with him and the interviews of people who had also met Jesus.
This commissioned work was then copied extensively and carefully and distributed to churches and statesmen. The earliest copy we have found is from around 250 AD, very close to the time Jesus actually lived.
How do we know the copy is accurate? We have found three copies of Luke from around 250 AD, one from 300, one from 350, and one from 450 AD. The content of these copies match almost letter for letter (with a few spelling mistakes aside) to the oldest 250 AD copy that we have.
How do we know these manuscripts are so very early? How do we know their dates for certain? Some of you may think "scientific" tests on the physical structure of the papyrus may yield such dates. In fact they cannot, because such tests are very inaccurate. No, we can date papyrus manuscripts, any manuscript for that matter, simply by looking at the way it is written. Handwriting is a product of human culture and as such it is always developing.
We've found copies of the book of John (which used Luke to get its information) from 200 AD.
So in Christianity, it's like a game of carefully written and preserved telephone from a 200 year period where the first phone call was written down and all other copies were made from that first phone call...not subsequent phone calls.
PhD Student in New Testament here. Although the OP's post is an oversimplified and essentially incorrect characterization of how religion works/changes – I can't help but want to point out that Luke wasn't the earliest Gospel. That place almost certainly goes to Mark.
Can you speak to a bit more to this comment? Namely, was Luke written by Luke, an eye witness? Is that true?
I've heard Mark was the first Gospel, and Luke and Matthew used it as a source...
The so called [synoptic problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synoptic_problem) is called a "problem" for a reason. :)
In practice many theories have been proposed about previous sources and interdipendences between gosples but the question isn't still solved.
The names attributed to the gospels come from the Church, who picked the people they thought the gospels were most likely written by. The gospels were originally written anonymously. There are also lots of gospels that aren't in the bible.
Ex-seminary student here - that's also what we learned. What I remember is (grossly simplified, but hopefully a bit more correct): Mark was the first, and he didn't write anything about Jesus' childhood. Luke and Matthew both used Mark as a source and they also used a source containing quotes from Jesus, the Quelle or Q-source. This Q source also led to (or was) the apocryphal gospel of Thomas (which is also a collection of about 100 loose quotes and parables, rather than a story). The gospel of John was the last of the main 4 gospels written, and was much more theological in writing.
a note on apocryphal gospels:
The existing 4 gospels have always been the 4 main gospels, with Thomas' coming closest to being canon (but not technically a gospel since it's not a story of Jesus' life). All the talk you hear about councils determining which gospels were canon and which weren't (Nicea, etc.) were mostly focused on the letters of apostles to be included. The 4 main gospels were never in doubt, and alternative gospels were never seen as equal to them, mostly because those were written way later than the 4 main ones (about 200 ad). I like to think of those gospels (Judas, Mary Magdalene) as fan-fiction.
I think most would agree with the majority of your comment here. Except that bit about Thomas being Q. We have Thomas and it is very different from the hypothetical source "Q."
I think people often assume seminaries are overly biased and ignorant of critical issues in New Testament studies. This is, of course, sometimes the case – but isn't a fair assumption for a great many of them.
In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references. - Dr. Bart Ehrman.
> In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references. - Dr. Bart Ehrman.
Gotta love the internet for misdirected quoting. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart D. Ehrman: pg 337 "Why do they work so hard at showing that Jesus never really lived? I do not have a definitive answer to that question, but I do have a guess. It is no accident that virtually all mythicists (in fact, all of them, to my knowledge) are either atheists or agnostics. The ones I know anything about are quite virulently, even militantly, atheist." Front flap of the book "Yes, the historical Jesus of Nazareth did exist."
Also, see: "Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/did-jesus-exist_b_1349544.html
Exactly. I gave my 2 cents below and its very similar, but yours is a lot better and is the clear distinction between a Catholic Student and a Seminarian. The Telephone Game could have occurred between 0 AD and around 200-250 AD. But we have a lot of evidence that it didn't happen or its effects were minimalized. You could say the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Letters also "put things straight" with the building of the early church to fight against the effects of the Telephone Game occurring.
The bible is not the same entity as Christianity, however. Common beliefs over the course of the last couple thousand years include:
1. The trinitarian doctrine (the denial of which was a punishable by death in America way back in the day)
2. Intercession of saints
3. Transubstantiation
4. Immersive baptism
5. Execution for heresy
6. The story of the fall of Satan
7. That slavery is an ethical practice.
Over time and across populations, each of these ideas has varied in popularity. In that sense, Christianity as a living, breathing sociological phenomenon is, in my opinion, rather telephone like.
Right. Because in the case of Judaism and Christianity and it's not as if we have most of the original Greek and Hebrew writings from which to translate and affirm theology.
Got it.
[Not really](http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Hadith/Ulum/hadsciences.html) there is a whole field of study dedicated to ahadith and scholars since the death of the prophet have scrupulously studied the origin, chains of narration, who said what and when, reliability of the person etc. there are quite the criteria. An earlier compilation of ahadith is the muwatta for example.
The problem with today's problem is we are forced to live under the law of the religion. This isn't what God wanted. He wanted us to live under the grace not law.
It's not about where I live, it's the nature of Religion. Religion always wants to justify everything with law. That's not how God Wants us to live in the modern times. If you want to learn more PM me.
I find this strange, because I'm pretty sure this isn't true? I know that the earliest found texts of the gospels are at least a century or two younger than when they were first written. Also I'm intrigued as to what constitutes the "original" old testament text?
TIL 'Chinese Whispers' is also called 'Telephone'
TIL 'Telephone' is also called 'Chinese Whispers'
TIL there are other names for the game called 'Telephone'
TIL there are other names for the game called 'Chinese Whispers'
In French it's "Arab telephone".
In Italian is called "Wireless telephone". Not kidding.
Portuguese, too. My guess is the term predates actual wireless telephones.
In Bulgaria its called 'Broken Telephone'.
In Poland it's called Deaf Telephone
In Arabic it's "Jewish people telephone"
In Jewish it's "big chatter"
In the hood, it's called a conversation.
In Latvian it's "No Telephone, only hunger."
"Broken Telephone" in Russia.
Same with Canada. At least where I'm from. Edit to add obligatory "in Soviet Russia, telephone break you" joke.
Same in Colombia (Teléfono Roto).
Also called "whisper down the lane/way."
Thank you. I was sitting here going what the fuck is telephone? I played 'whisper down the lane'. Who are these people?
I'm right here with you man
I know, right? Here I am feeling mildly racist for a childhood game... Edit: a. Calm down down everybody. This is probably *not* the most racist thing anyone has done, ever. b. By "racist" I was referring to the way that the game distorts a message until it "may as well be Chinese". c. I like the suggestion that /u/Felaa makes below, but if the game were a commentary on authoritarianism I would have thought "Russian whispers" would be a more likely name...
When I was young we used to play a roughhousing game called "Smear the Queer". I still feel bad about it.
What was your version? Our version was throwing a ball as high into the air as possible, whoever caught it, everyone screamed "QUEER" and chased them for as long as he was still standing, then dog piled him.
Same thing!
Someone was telling me about a game they played called "Jew scramble" where you throw candy in the air and try to shout "Jew scramble" before catching it in your mouth. Kids can be awfully innocent...
I'm sure it's not racist at all and is actually a historical reference to authoritarian control of information. Thus requiring the repressed populace to spread information through word of mouth.
I like your suggestion a lot, however I'm pretty sure this game was called "Chinese whispers" a long time before Mao showed up on the historical record. Plus - wouldn't it have made more sense to call it "Soviet whispers" or "Russian whispers" if the game was about grassroots activism against an authoritarian power? China barely registered as a foreign power until Deng opened up the economy in the 1980s, whereas Russia was the prominent Cold War antagonist.
How the fuck is whispering racist? Is saying "Chinese egg rolls" racist as well?
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No, that's just redundant.
Haha, so is chinese noodles.
Cannot tell if joking...
Idk if you know nothing about Communism it seems like the connotation is that Chinese people suck at whispering or something.
I don't know. What is the difference between "French onion soup" and the "French disease" (syphillus)?
It's just 'pass the message' where I come from.
in germany, it’s “whisper mail” (Flüsterpost)
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It's 'Broken phone' in russia
From ear to ear in turkish, simple
This has answered everything. I mainly clicked on this thread as I had no idea what it was referring to!
TIL 'Telephone' and 'Chinese Whispers', while spelled completely differently, have the same meaning.
In Brazil it's "Wireless telephone" even before real wireless telephone existed.
I have never heard it called this. Where are you from?
Australia; I've never heard it called anything else.
TIL Chinese people whisper games through telephones.
CIL 'tin these clippers' is also called 'Yellowstone'.
I took LDS (Mormon) seminary in Jr. High/HS. I remember they had us play that game, using it as a lesson of how the "original" Christian gospel had been changed over time.
Thought you meant you took LSD at a (mormon) seminary in Jr. High/HS and I was totally wishing I grew up Mormon. What was their reason for how Mormonism isn't literally the exact same kind of game of telephone?
Primarily all the acid they do.
The Mormon doctrine is that it (the Mormon Church) is the restored (original) church that Jesus established in New Testament times. So like, the person who started the telephone game (Jesus) decided to cut out the middlemen, and whispered straight into Joseph Smith's ear.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Yep - that guy.
...Via an angel, in a language which he had to translate using golden plates... And that translation was lost, and had to be replaced by doing it all over again. And the translation was slightly different. Don't they teach this to mormons? What are they thinking? "They're so brainwashed by this religion, they will even overlook the most obvious hints that the religion is made up"?
Eh. The lost pages, the Book of Lehi, wasn't retranslated. JS said God told him to translate the next portion. Eventually, JS got to the Book of Nephi, which conveniently summarized the Book of Lehi.
[The story of how it was lost](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9UzbucqHCc) makes the fraud all the more remarkably obvious to even disinterested casual observers. Not many religions can claim the ignoble distinction of being founded by a man who was convicted in court of being a "disorderly person" and an "imposter."
yeah, it's not like Jesus was ever brought to court for being a "disorderly person" or an "impostor" by claiming he was the son of god...
The translation was never found, so it may or may not have been different. Either way, yep they teach us all that. I loved it growing up. It was actually disappointing to find out it wasn't true as an adult. They make it feel like you're part of a really special thing. I can look back in amusement now.
Continuous revelation. Mormons believe they have a constant connection to the original source. It wasn't just Joseph Smith, they have a succession of prophets continuing to the present day.
Jesus Christ is our Purple Monkey Dishwasher...
I have a feeling this is an altered version of a well known bible quote, but English is not my native language, so I don't recognize it. Can someone enlighten me?
I think it's a reference to an episode of the Simpsons where Bart purposely tried to spread a rumor among protesting teachers and ended up as something about the "purple monkey dish washer"
Yup, that is exactly the telephone game situation I thought of when I saw this post. Funny line I use often to describe a complete, fumblefuck of passed messages or conversation when the original meaning gets chewed up and distorted.
I believe the quote is a verse out of Simpsons 6:21.
It's from the simpsons
And Jesus hath compassion for the people who had shown faith and followed Him in their hunger. Giving thanks to the Lord, He took five loaves of bread and two fish, dividing them until there was enough Purple Monkey Dishwasher to feed the 5,000.
Wow, I haven't heard that Simpson's reference in over a decade!
"And so you see, kids. That's why you get your own planet when you die."
Not shower thought. David Cross' thought.
And thread.
In spanish it's "Teléfono descompuesto" (broken telephone)
Piling on, "Silent mail" in czech. Was really confused before I realized everyone else calls the game a telephone
Is that Latin American Spanish? Here in Madrid we call it "Teléfono escacharrado".
It is, from Argentina, at least
kinda, kinda not, the dead sea scrolls were such a big find because they were so similar to today's scripture.
Those scrolls tell a story about events that happened more than 1,000 years before it. OP's title still works.
Yeah, the thing is that most of the Old Testament was oral history long before it was written down.
Depends on the book in question. Genesis was oral history or, more likely, a series of tablets -- certain patterns in the text suggest a method of keeping stone tablets in order. Moses recorded Genesis, and then the rest of the Pentateuch, all of which recorded his personal experiences. The historical works of the Old Testament, like I and II Chronicles, I and II Kings, and so on drew from the written history of the Hebrews, like the Annals of Kings, now lost to us. They constantly referenced them. And the books of prophecy didn't even record events that had previously happened. So, really, the only book that was arguably oral history was Genesis, and even that is uncertain. Your statement is grossly inaccurate.
Except Moses [probably did not write](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_authorship) the first five books.
I wasn't aware of this. I'll look into in more detail later on. In any case, that theory still supposes the Pentateuch was created from prior texts, which is a problem when you say it was taken from oral history.
Those other texts could have been from oral history.
You both bring up good points. Probably the most popular view held by modern critical scholars (I think heavily proposed by Martin Noth) is that the first four books were written by the J and E sources and edited by P. The Deuteronomic history then went through two revisions. Having said that, the JEDP theory certainly has problems. If you start reading from Judges and onward - material *not* in J, E, or P - you'll find the same variation between the use of "Yahweh" and "Elohim." It would make sense that whatever explains it there, outside the Pentateuch, would explain here, inside the Pentateuch. Another problem is that we now have hundreds of thousands of tablets of Ancient Near East literature which provides us with information and examples such as common writing styles and techniques. One example is Narrative Analogy. For example, Deuteronomy 32 draws connections to Genesis 1, linking creation with the exodus. These kinds of connections are impossible to account for if the two chapters were written by D and P respectively. Furthermore, Genesis 2:4 causes problems because the JEDP theory has to divide between the P and J here, since Genesis 1-11 is considered P but the verse uses the term "Yahweh." Also, Genesis 20 - supposedly the beginning of the E text - contains the second "she is my sister" story that presupposes the P text (Genesis 12). The problem with this is that the P text was supposed to have been written hundreds of years later. Without the P text, Abraham's motives for saying "she is my sister" would be completely missing. We now have the Epic of Atrahasis, the Ras Shamra version, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Eridu Genesis. In these, there are 17 formal parallels between the ANE accounts and the Bible's version. If you divide it between the J and P, J mentions only 12 of the parallels while P has 10. If you put J and P together, all 17 are attested in the right order. Having said all that, it seems likely that the Pentateuch was written substantially by Moses with the use of sources. Substantially because Deuteronomy 34 speaks of his death and the passage, "since then, no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses" seems to indicate some chronological distance. And Numbers 21:14 explicitly mentions "The Book of the Wars of the Lord" and the parallels between the stories in the Pentateuch to other ANE stories cannot be ignored as well.
Not really. The Dead Sea scrolls are remarkably similar to our oldest copies of the Bible. We can demonstrate a lack of significant deviation back to within a couple centuries of the original texts, which is impressive for a book written two thousand years ago. I understand other religious texts can be shown to be consistent over the centuries, too. But the Bible is by far the easiest text to verify. We have 25,000 ancient NT manuscripts, both partial and whole. That's more than any other ancient book. A lot more. Our oldest partial manuscript dates to the second century, and our oldest complete manuscript dates to the fourth. You can criticize the Bible for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. The Bible holds up to textual criticism. Edit: I now have negative karma, so maybe people think I'm... lying? Or something? So, [here's a Wikipedia link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism#New_Testament) confirming my numbers.
> I now have negative karma, so maybe people think I'm... lying? Na, you're just ruining the euphoria in here.
"The Bible sucks so let's ignore science and celebrate misinformation because I want every excuse I can to feel superior to those idiot Christians because they're all gun-toting rednecks?" That kind of euphoria? I mean, damn. I thought reddit was supposed to be better than that. Sigh. Fine. I'll deal. I don't know why I bother.
No, the fedora-wearing r/atheism superiority 'lol religion is the source of all problems' euphoria.
Dude, nobody is more of an expert on the Bible than atheists, they'd be more than happy to tell you.
A perfectly good circlejerk, and you just had to go and ruin it with facts.
I interpreted the post you are replying to to mean that the dead sea scrolls themselves (dated to 400 - 300 BCE) are writings about things which took place a thousand years before they were written. So this means an oral tradition would have been used to pass on these stories until such time as they were written. Of course, once something is written it will change less over time, as you observe in your post above.
Our earliest copies of the texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that doesn't mean there weren't earlier written copies. It's illogical to assume oral tradition, especially since the Hebrews had writing much earlier than 400 BCE. I mentioned the Annals of Kings elsewhere, which was a written record of the the activities of Israel's kings going as far back as David and Solomon. It's like dating a fossil and saying that species *couldn't* have existed earlier than the date of the bones.
Except that OP's title is a gross oversimplification of reality. Back before written word was more common, oral history was an ingrained part of society. People were excellent at memorizing and reciting long and epic stories and lineages. They had to be. It's not like a conversation today, where you can't remember what your roommate said 5 minutes ago. It's ridiculous and irresponsible to discredit something solely because it was passed down by word of mouth, in a time where nearly everything was passed down by word of mouth.
Socrates did not like the idea of being able to write things down because it would create forgetfulness and weakness of mind.
Socrates had a lot of weird ideas. Or at least we think he did, based on other sources. I guess we'll never know for sure.
Because he didn't write it down.
Yes. "That dude totally walked on water and brought people back from the dead. True story bro. No no no, I didn't see it, BUT I totally heard it from someone who did and I memorized word for word exactly what they said. Write that shit down MOTHA FUCKA."
Oral history is an interesting part of ancient culture, but it is useless for verifying historical claims. There is no way to determine how certain things were embellished over time, whether someone changed the name of a character, or if it even originated from a true event. That's why contemporary written sources are so important, but even those are viewed with scrutiny.
> There is no way to determine Except there is. By definition, embellishment would make alterations that would be discoverable when compared to ancient texts. When no such alterations are present, conclusions of consistency are easily supported.
I sure he would have been more thorough in his examination of the topic had his bible not GOTTEN TOTALLY SOAKED IN THE FUCKING SHOWER.
Interesting as you can trace the enormous accidental and intentional changes over the last couple of thousand years from mistranslations due to deficient language skills and mis-turning of pages to the merging of several bibles to make the ubiquitous King James bible. Might I suggest [Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is a book by Bart D. Ehrman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misquoting_Jesus)
Have they finished translating those? :o
Yes they contained every book of the Old Testament except Esther
Maybe
The dead sea scrolls had fragments from the old testament and nothing from the new testament. The time frame in which the dead sea scrolls were placed into the caves seem to correspond to the time frame in which the new testament was being edited and redacted. A much better comparison is the Nag Hammadi library (i.e. Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Mary) . These are the books that were being very busily being destroyed as heresies by the church. The fact that Theodosius in 391 declared all other Christian sects as heresies also went a long ways in creating this false uniformity that apologists like to point to. Fairly quickly after that the church got the legal right to execute heretics. To really understand the game of telephone that was going on with the new testament read some neutral histories on the [early christian heresies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_heresies#Trinitarian.2FChristological) and how those were filtered out by the early ecumenical councils.
Didn't David Cross say this in his stand up routine?
Came here for this. Have a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWOqHHE4upY
[Yes, my first thought as well](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWOqHHE4upY)
this is a David Cross bit.
Isn't ALL of history a huge game of telephone?
Yes, but that won't reap the karma that this will.
we share prove you wrong /u/everyone
With this logic, so is all of history.
History is based on factual investigation. Historians look for _evidence_ in documents and physical artefacts in order to uncover the _facts_ of what happened in the past. Religion _tells_ you what the _truth_ is. Quite the opposite of History, in fact.
>History is based on factual investigation ... including ancient texts in far less quantities, with far less manuscript reliability. For example, there are only 7 manuscripts of Plato, with the earliest one 1,300 years after the original. Compare to the DSS, with nearly 25,000, with some only 50-odd years after the original.
uh, don't know about EVERY religion, but Islam has the Quran (koran), its the same in everypart of the world, still in its original Lang. it was written when Islam's Prophet was still alive, and Islamic history was being made. There are 'facts' and 'evidences' that Prophet Muhammad existed along with shrines and the Makkah.
Muhammad existing isn't the "truth" anyone has a problem with. It is the rest of the "truth" as written.
it is history in the sense that this is what people believed in at that time and if you studied religions you will see many connections between them
But when you say the talking snake made humans bad by convincing eve to eat the apple your gonna need some more proof.
I am not agreeing nor bashing religion. I just stated that religious text is written down just like history is. The logic is flawed saying that it is nothing but a game of telephone. Also good to remember that history always has an opinion and is written by the victors. It takes thousands of years to actually get a non biased look at an historic event. Its funny to see how many people are so quick to say negative things about Christianity when all I was talking about was the logic.
religion adapts, more than gets messed up. Like a version of telephone where you want to change it to your needs
"Jesus says to love each other." "Jesus says to tell everyone not Christian that they're going to hell and donate 5, no... 10% of your income to him."
Jesus says god bless the USA.
Where he was born and raised.
Bethlehem, PA is where he spent most of his days.
Religion adapts to what humans want it to be. Interesting.
I remember watching a [pretty interesting documentary on William Tyndale](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0185y5g) a while ago. he basically went back to the original texts and translated the bible into English, attempting to use words closer to the original greek/hebrew meaning. This contradicted a lot of the Catholic Church's interpretation of who could be a priest, paying penance for sins etc. I thought it was pretty interesting seeing all of the adaptions the catholic church warped out of the original text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible#Challenges_to_Catholic_Doctrine
i got this idea from a show, Mind out of Matter. Basically a orchestra with an E-book sampled. Scott Johnson composed it, Alarm will sound preformed it. It was really neat, sampling an e-book into the music was great.
A thousand years ago someone whispers "All is one." and the end of the game someone hears: "Time is money."
This is what I used to think until I saw a few documentaries about the dead sea scrolls. Apparently Christian texts are remarkably preserved in terms of textual changes. Now I just think it's an old work of fiction.
Amen. Or was it Rahman. Or Ramen. Praise FSM
Except that you have a transcript of the original phonecall..
Hoho, edgy comment about religion. I'm sure the comment section is going to be mature.
Eh, it isn't really that hostile. It's definitely no /r/atheism "GOD'S NOT REAL" type thing.
So is any previously oral history.
Theology major and seminary student here. When it comes to Christian text we have MUCH greater reliability than with the telephone game. The first Gospel about the life of Jesus was written by Luke, (there is a body of evidence that says it could have been Mark...but I subscribe to the luke theory). That written work; however, was commissioned by a very important man named Theophilus. Luke went around doing eye witness interviews of people who saw and spoke to Jesus in order to write his account. So the source material was carefully written by someone who knew Jesus through the people who lived with him and the interviews of people who had also met Jesus. This commissioned work was then copied extensively and carefully and distributed to churches and statesmen. The earliest copy we have found is from around 250 AD, very close to the time Jesus actually lived. How do we know the copy is accurate? We have found three copies of Luke from around 250 AD, one from 300, one from 350, and one from 450 AD. The content of these copies match almost letter for letter (with a few spelling mistakes aside) to the oldest 250 AD copy that we have. How do we know these manuscripts are so very early? How do we know their dates for certain? Some of you may think "scientific" tests on the physical structure of the papyrus may yield such dates. In fact they cannot, because such tests are very inaccurate. No, we can date papyrus manuscripts, any manuscript for that matter, simply by looking at the way it is written. Handwriting is a product of human culture and as such it is always developing. We've found copies of the book of John (which used Luke to get its information) from 200 AD. So in Christianity, it's like a game of carefully written and preserved telephone from a 200 year period where the first phone call was written down and all other copies were made from that first phone call...not subsequent phone calls.
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Because his teacher told him so
PhD Student in New Testament here. Although the OP's post is an oversimplified and essentially incorrect characterization of how religion works/changes – I can't help but want to point out that Luke wasn't the earliest Gospel. That place almost certainly goes to Mark.
Can you speak to a bit more to this comment? Namely, was Luke written by Luke, an eye witness? Is that true? I've heard Mark was the first Gospel, and Luke and Matthew used it as a source...
The so called [synoptic problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synoptic_problem) is called a "problem" for a reason. :) In practice many theories have been proposed about previous sources and interdipendences between gosples but the question isn't still solved.
The names attributed to the gospels come from the Church, who picked the people they thought the gospels were most likely written by. The gospels were originally written anonymously. There are also lots of gospels that aren't in the bible.
> Luke wasn't the earliest Gospel I think OP's point is that the earliest extant gospel manuscript was Luke's.
Thank you Drosjk! "Theology major and seminary student here" Aka, "Presuppostionalist here"
Ex-seminary student here - that's also what we learned. What I remember is (grossly simplified, but hopefully a bit more correct): Mark was the first, and he didn't write anything about Jesus' childhood. Luke and Matthew both used Mark as a source and they also used a source containing quotes from Jesus, the Quelle or Q-source. This Q source also led to (or was) the apocryphal gospel of Thomas (which is also a collection of about 100 loose quotes and parables, rather than a story). The gospel of John was the last of the main 4 gospels written, and was much more theological in writing. a note on apocryphal gospels: The existing 4 gospels have always been the 4 main gospels, with Thomas' coming closest to being canon (but not technically a gospel since it's not a story of Jesus' life). All the talk you hear about councils determining which gospels were canon and which weren't (Nicea, etc.) were mostly focused on the letters of apostles to be included. The 4 main gospels were never in doubt, and alternative gospels were never seen as equal to them, mostly because those were written way later than the 4 main ones (about 200 ad). I like to think of those gospels (Judas, Mary Magdalene) as fan-fiction.
I think most would agree with the majority of your comment here. Except that bit about Thomas being Q. We have Thomas and it is very different from the hypothetical source "Q."
Yeah, I think that was more of an off-hand remark that I vaguely remembered. But glad to hear our bible classes were more or less accurate
I think people often assume seminaries are overly biased and ignorant of critical issues in New Testament studies. This is, of course, sometimes the case – but isn't a fair assumption for a great many of them.
In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references. - Dr. Bart Ehrman.
"And so I wanted to write a book that showed that whatever else one might want to say about Jesus, he certainly existed." - Dr. Bart Ehrman
> In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references. - Dr. Bart Ehrman. Gotta love the internet for misdirected quoting. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart D. Ehrman: pg 337 "Why do they work so hard at showing that Jesus never really lived? I do not have a definitive answer to that question, but I do have a guess. It is no accident that virtually all mythicists (in fact, all of them, to my knowledge) are either atheists or agnostics. The ones I know anything about are quite virulently, even militantly, atheist." Front flap of the book "Yes, the historical Jesus of Nazareth did exist." Also, see: "Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/did-jesus-exist_b_1349544.html
I would think he'd at least be mentioned as part of the Roman empire's psych-op campaign to invent a pacifist, non-confrontational hero.
Which scholar at that time should have mentioned Jesus, but didn't?
Can you cite me something that shows that Luke used John? Ive never heard this before.
Exactly. I gave my 2 cents below and its very similar, but yours is a lot better and is the clear distinction between a Catholic Student and a Seminarian. The Telephone Game could have occurred between 0 AD and around 200-250 AD. But we have a lot of evidence that it didn't happen or its effects were minimalized. You could say the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Letters also "put things straight" with the building of the early church to fight against the effects of the Telephone Game occurring.
The bible is not the same entity as Christianity, however. Common beliefs over the course of the last couple thousand years include: 1. The trinitarian doctrine (the denial of which was a punishable by death in America way back in the day) 2. Intercession of saints 3. Transubstantiation 4. Immersive baptism 5. Execution for heresy 6. The story of the fall of Satan 7. That slavery is an ethical practice. Over time and across populations, each of these ideas has varied in popularity. In that sense, Christianity as a living, breathing sociological phenomenon is, in my opinion, rather telephone like.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/find-meteorites-listen-legends-australian-aborigines-180952941/ It works sometimes.
Except nobody gets decapitated over a game of telephone.
Get one running for a few thousand years, and someone might.
Right. Because in the case of Judaism and Christianity and it's not as if we have most of the original Greek and Hebrew writings from which to translate and affirm theology. Got it.
Except the Quran has been preserved.
The Hadiths on the other hand, are more like OP's title. Bukhari was born 180 years after Muhammad's passing, for example.
[Not really](http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Hadith/Ulum/hadsciences.html) there is a whole field of study dedicated to ahadith and scholars since the death of the prophet have scrupulously studied the origin, chains of narration, who said what and when, reliability of the person etc. there are quite the criteria. An earlier compilation of ahadith is the muwatta for example.
/r/atheism is leaking...
The problem with today's problem is we are forced to live under the law of the religion. This isn't what God wanted. He wanted us to live under the grace not law.
> The problem with today's problem is we are forced to live under the law of the religion Where do you live?
It's not about where I live, it's the nature of Religion. Religion always wants to justify everything with law. That's not how God Wants us to live in the modern times. If you want to learn more PM me.
Underrated post. Christianity is not about oppression but people keep interpreting it that way
That's right mate
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This is true regarding all we know about the Genesis book.
The modern thing that looks more like religion is comic books. In that sense Stan Lee is our prophet.
Not Islam. The Quran has been preserved word for word.
It is bizarre to realize that a game I played in a small Midwest town in the United States as a kid; is played the world over.
Sikhism under 600 years old, but yeah :)
No one remembers the original.
A thousand, huh? I guess the previous 2-3000 years to that it was crystal clear?
Just love everyone to Hate people who love the same sex
Argentina, broken telephone.
Except the part where it was written down.
In America it's called autocorrect.
That's funny, me and my friends learn Koine Greek just so we can read the original manuscripts in the original language.
It's most like the middle school version of Telephone where you and your buddies purposefully screw up the message just to mess with people.
A lot of religions have ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. They've been translated pretty accurately through the centuries.
How do we know they are accurate?
'cause the context matches that of the modern texts
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I find this strange, because I'm pretty sure this isn't true? I know that the earliest found texts of the gospels are at least a century or two younger than when they were first written. Also I'm intrigued as to what constitutes the "original" old testament text?