Talking Out Of Turn

I was caught off guard yesterday and found that I needed to prepare the kids’ lesson for our Wednesday night bible study. I came up with something that seemed to be helpful, and I thought I’d share it.

I cut out 32 pieces of paper, each about 3 inches by 3 inches. On one of them, before I got to Bible study, in crayon, I drew a very simple line drawing. In my case, it was a house (a square with a triangle for a roof, a rectangle for a door, a dot for a doorknob, a little trapezoid for a chimney, and a line coming out of that chimney representing smoke, which curli-cued twice on its way off the right side of the drawing). Under the house (in front of it, in perspective) I drew two lines representing a path leading up to the door. Above the house to the left I drew a sun: a circle with eight lines coming out representing sun rays.

This is a fairly simple diagram that has two advantages: first, a very small child could reproduce this with enough detail to be recognizable, and second, it has certain details that lend themselves to counting and comparison. Note that there are eight sun rays, two curli-cues in the smoke line, and so forth.

I also put a tiny number in the corner of each piece of paper. On the one on which I drew the house, I put a zero. Then I put a one on the next one, a two on the next two, and then I broke the rest up in groups of four and marked them with numbers in order (four had a “3,” the next four had a “4,” and so on until “9″).

When it came time to do the lesson, I handed out dark crayons to everybody (adults and children alike participated in this), and chose one little girl to be the first generation copyist. She took my drawing and a blank sheet of paper, and reproduced it as faithfully as she could. Then she picked two people (her parents) to be the next generation. I gave one of them my original drawing and one of them her copy, and asked them to faithfully reproduce the drawings. We now had a zero (the original), a one (the first copy), and two two’s (one a copy of a zero, one a copy of a one). From then on I tried to give out a mixture of generations to each subsequent generation; some would get two’s or three’s, some would get the generation just before theirs. It was easier to give out later generations, and there were more of them, as each generation for the next couple of rounds doubled in size.

By the time my papers were used up, the results were already fascinating. Things I noticed:

1. The curli-cue smoke had turned into either a cloud or some faraway birds in half the fourth generation.
2. One late copyist was a very small child who didn’t exactly get anything right; that copy was unintentionally corrected to a great extent by the next generation, who had seen some earlier copies and changed it from memory to conform a bit more to the standard.
3. Someone in the fifth generation copied the number “4″ from the previous generation, and that “4″ gradually became a large star on the other side of the drawing.
4. Most importantly, each of these changes was traceable if you had a wide variety of drawings to compare. You could recognize families and common sources.
5. If you only had the ninth generation of manuscripts, you could still make statistically-based guesses as to the details of the original drawing, and the only thing you’d likely get wrong would be the smoke which had turned into clouds or birds.

In the end, though, we had a sun with eight rays on the left side, either smoke or clouds on the right, a house with a chimney and a door, and a path leading to the door, on the vast, obvious majority of the drawings. In the process, when we put everything together, we had lost nothing; the proliferation of drawings and the varying styles of copying were actually effective error-correction when viewed properly.

The drawing was preserved - not line-for-line preserved in an unbroken ancestry from copy to copy, but preserved in proliferation.

I submit to you that this is a way to explain, to children or adults, how it is that we can trust that books written 2000-3000 years ago have come down to us without significant error, even though some copyists clearly had their own agendas, even though some copyists were quite poor, despite complete misunderstandings of the drawing itself (witness the “4″ that became a star).

Are you still worried about 1 John 5:7, or the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery, and their impact on what we believe to be true about Scripture? I’m not. Imagine, instead of children playing a game, that we have adults who are quite serious about reproducing text. How bad can it get? As long as there are Christians and as long as they are spread throughout the earth, there will be an inerrant Word of God that we can trust. God used the Church, corrupt and messy as it could be, as the means to preserve His Word. And He is to be glorified in that.