A Telephone Game Behind the Gospels?

Bart Ehrman's Flawed Model of the Gospel tradition

A slightly revised version of my earlier piece: Bart Ehrman’s ‘Telephone Game’.

Behind the writing of our first Gospel lies a black box – a period of almost forty years in which the teaching and stories of Jesus were shared among his early followers.

But what went on in this time?

That the activity was largely oral is universally agreed. This makes sense of the context of the Jesus movement – the ancient Mediterranean – a vastly different setting to the modern world, in which which almost everyone was illiterate.

It also makes sense of what we know about the Jesus movement specifically. Many early Jesus followers – following Jesus himself – thought that the end of the world was nigh. This made redundant the need to preserve Jesus’ teaching for posterity.

But can we say anything more about how the early Gospel materials were transmitted?

One popular analogy for understanding this process is found in the popular textbook, A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, by New Testament Professor, Bart Ehrman.

This textbook is familiar to most students of the Bible in secular Universities, and is one that I taught from during my doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh.

According to Ehrman, the process of sharing the early Jesus traditions - which eventually found their way into the Gospels - can be likened to the Telephone Game:

“You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game “telephone.” A group of kids sits in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. (If it didn’t work this way, who would play the game?!) Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants— from different backgrounds, with different concerns, and in different contexts—some of whom have to translate the stories into different languages.”¹

In this post, I will explore this analogy in greater detail. I will begin by stating what I find compelling about this analogy, before offering a critique.

Why the Telephone Game Analogy Works

There are several reasons why this analogy works. I will look at just three:

1. Invention in the Gospels: There is some material in the Gospels which, for all of its theological and spiritual value, should not be taken as historically true; it was invented, at some stage or another, in the transmission of the Jesus tradition. One example Ehrman gives is the discrepant dates of Jesus’ death in the Synoptic Gospels and John, a contradiction which is not easily harmonised (see here).²

2. Non-malicious Intent: Yet to say that material was invented or adapted in transmission is not to ascribe malicious intent to those who participated in the process. On the contrary, material could be changed to apply Jesus’ teachings to a new context, or to express the theological significance of his life in a new way.

3. Not strictly controlled: The analogy also works because it is doubtful that the process of passing on Jesus tradition – much like the Telephone Game – was strictly controlled by the originators of the traditions. If it was, we would struggle to explain why we find the differences among the Gospels, including differences on such matters as the names of the disciples – the originators – themselves.

Where the Telephone Game Analogy Breaks Down

Yet like all analogies, there comes a point where the Telephone Game breaks down.

Some dissimilarities between the oral Gospel tradition are immediately obvious: while the purpose of the Telephone Game is to muck it up, one purpose of early Gospel tradition was to recall the teachings of a religious leader. And while the end of the chain in the Telephone Game can be completely different to its initial stimulus, Ehrman assumes that we can recover many things about the Gospel tradition.

Perhaps the most devastating flaws in the analogy have been pointed out in a major in a critique of Ehrman’s work by New Testament scholar, Alan Kirk.³

Individual vs. Collective Transmission

The major problem with the analogy is that the Telephone Game represents a single line – or chain – of transmission. We see this in the way that Ehrman describes the process of the Jesus tradition in his popular-level book, Jesus Before the Gospels:

“… since the story is told from one person to the next and then to the next and then to the next, ‘each information who forms a link in the chain of transmission creates new variants, and changes are made every time the tale is told. It is therefore not surprising to find that very often the original testimony has disappeared altogether.’”⁴

Here Ehrman weaves into his description of the traditioning process a quotation from a 1965 study, Oral Tradition, the prolific oral historian, Jan Vansina. Yet as Kirk has shown, Ehrman leaves out an important qualification in Vansina:

‘In fact the only kind of hearsay testimonies that lend themselves to distortions of this kind are personal recollections, tales of artistic merit, and certain kinds of didactic tales [whereas] in the transmission of traditions, the main effort is to repeat exactly what has been heard.’⁵

For Vansina, the transmission of tradition represents a very different kind of process to hearsay and personal recollection, which are open to the sort of distortions envisaged by the Telephone Game analogy.

Even more devastatingly, Kirk notes that Ehrman quotes here the original 1965 version of Vansina’s book. But in the 1985 edition, Kirk notes that Vansina’s position is “qualified, to the point of effectively abandoning, precisely this ‘chain of informants’ model for transmission, inclining instead toward the communal model:

[M]ost oral tradition is told by many people to many people... People hear performers and all the auditors have heard that message... Hence the transmission really is communal and continuous. There are no neat lines of communication reserved for all oral traditions. The information coming from more people to more people has greater built-in redundancy than if it were to flow in one channel of communication. Multiple flow does not necessarily imply multiple distortion only, but perhaps the reverse [emphasis added by Kirk]”⁶

Ehrman’s faulty reception of memory scholarship is also seen in his appeal to David Rubin’s 1995 book, Memory in Oral Traditions. He cites Rubin:

‘[w]hen the recall of one person is the initial stimulus for that of another [as in the Telephone Game], the first person’s recall is all that is transmitted for the original… The recall of the second person will be a product of the recall of the first person, the biases and style of the second person, and the condition of the second person’s recall.’⁷

But as Kirk astutely observes, Rubin is here commenting upon the original laboratory experiments of Frederic Bartlett, in which Bartlett shows that memory is open to distortions alongside chains – a piece Ehrman isolates as “of particular importance” for understanding the Gospel tradition.⁸

Yet such laboratory experiments are a wholly different context to oral tradition. According to Rubin, oral tradition circulates not in chains – the kind of series found in the Telephone Game – but along networks. He explains:

“In the laboratory, it has been customary to pass a piece from one person to the next with no individual seeing more than one version of the piece [i.e. a chain]...In oral traditions, it would be unusual for this pattern to occur... [T]he chain would have a single line leading in and a single line leading out. In contrast, for a single individual, the net would have an indefinite number of lines leading in and out, each at a different time...”

Rubin lays out the difference between a chain and a ‘net’ as follows:

“[T]he difference between chains and nets is that in a chain an individual hears only one version and transmits it to only one other person, whereas in a net individuals can hear and combine many versions before passing on their own version any number of times to any number of people. The main advantage of a net over a chain is that if the version transmitted by one singer omits parts or introduces changes that are outside the tradition, then other versions can be substituted for these lapses...They [also] allow a listener to learn the range of acceptable variation... [Consequently] the net [is] more stable than the chain.”⁹

Note here that Rubin says that the net is more “stable” than the chain. This is not to say that the net of the early Gospel tradition is completely accurate. Far from it. As many have demonstrated, legends can develop at great speed. But it is to say that the oral tradition is more stable than implied by the Telephone Game analogy.

Kirk concludes:

“Far from supporting it, Rubin’s discussion calls in question what is nothing less than the master premise of Ehrman’s entire analysis. In view of Ehrman’s attraction to the ‘telephone game’ analogy, his appeal to Rubin is particularly ironic, given that Rubin actually singles out the ‘party games’ analogy for some light mockery.”¹⁰

The End of the Telephone Game

What then are we make of one attempt to explain the earliest Gospel tradition?

The Telephone Game memorably explains aspects of the Gospel data, attesting to Ehrman’s remarkable gifts as an educator and populariser of scholarship. Yet if Kirk is right, it also directly misrepresents the best of oral tradition and memory studies.

In the end, perhaps it is not the Gospel tradition, so much as Ehrman’s reception of the scholarship, which has been distorted in its (single) line of transmission.

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N.B. When asked by Daniel Knox on Bart Ehrman’s blog last August whether he had ever responded to Dr Kirk’s response to him, Ehrman replied that he had not.

1. See Bart D. Ehrman, A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 50. An earlier version of this passage is found in Ehrman’s Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51-52.

2. Ehrman, Introduction, 51.

3. In what follows, I reproduce the argument of Alan Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham and Bird on Memory and the Jesus Tradition,” JSHJ, 15 (2017): 88-114.

4. Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels (New York: Harper One, 2016), 190-191 citing Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, trans. H.M Wright (London: Aldine, 1965), 76.

5. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 109.

6. Alan Kirk, “Ehrman,” 94-95, citing the updated version of Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 31.

7. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Tradition: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 130 cited in Ehrman, Before the Gospels, 191.

8. See Kirk, “Ehrman,” 96, citing Ehrman, Before the Gospels, 136 (emphasis original).

9. Rubin, Memory, 133-135.

10. Kirk, “Ehrman,” 98, alluding to Rubin, Memory, 122.