Remember the kids’ game telephone? A group of kids would sit in a circle. A phrase would be given to the first child who would whisper it to the second. The second would whisper it to the third and so on until the last child heard the phrase. I doubt the last child ever said the phrase exactly as the first one did.

That game came to mind while reading the book The Story of Scripture: How We Got Our Bible and Why We Can Trust It by Robert L. Plummer (2013, Kregel Publications). The author asserts there are nearly 5,800 unique manuscripts that contain a portion of the Bible. He also asserts that with all the various sources, across a wide geography and time, there are fewer than 10% of the words that vary from one source to the next. Those variations are typically attributed to scribe errors or additions, not changes in content or meaning.

How is that so?

At a time when much of scripture was shared verbally and what was written down had to be copied by hand for each and every copy, why are there not more variations?

For a couple hundred years, the early church essentially played the world’s biggest game of telephone. If scripture is not the inspired Word of God, should there not be more omissions, variations, and outright disagreements in those 5,800 sources?