Apologetics · FaithLogic
“Copies of Copies of Copies”
A common image, from the opening of Misquoting Jesus: we have “copies of copies of copies, in most cases many centuries removed from the originals.” The phrasing invites the children’s game of telephone. The analogy breaks in four places.
Telephone is one line; transmission is a tree
In telephone, a single message passes down a single chain, whispered once, with no way back. The New Testament was copied many times, in many places, from early on — and copying then continued in parallel down every branch for centuries. There is no one chain to corrupt.
Errors do not accumulate — they expose each other
Cross-checking between branches
Because the lines are independent, a slip introduced in the Alexandrian tradition is not present in the Byzantine or Western traditions, and vice versa. Comparing the branches makes most errors stand out immediately. In telephone, an early mistake is locked in and amplified; here, an early mistake in one line is caught by the others.
There are fixed points earlier than most Greek copies
Versions and citations
The Old Latin and Syriac translations were made in the second century — they show what Greek text lay in front of a translator at a specific time and place. So do the roughly one million New Testament quotations in the church fathers. These are dated checkpoints against which the later Greek manuscripts can be measured.
The goal is reconstruction, and it succeeds
Triangulating backwards
Telephone has no original to compare the final message against. Textual criticism does the opposite — it works back from many witnesses to the earliest recoverable text. For around 99% of the New Testament the witnesses agree closely enough that the wording is not seriously in question; the disputed remainder is catalogued and footnoted, and none of it carries a doctrine.
The author of the phrase agrees
In the appendix to the same book, Bart Ehrman affirms — with Bruce Metzger — that no essential Christian belief is affected by a textual variant (see How Textual Criticism Actually Works). The metaphor at the front of the book oversells the problem described in the back of it.
💡 Copies of Copies — Reasonable Summary“The telephone analogy assumes one chain, one whisper, no correction. The New Testament was copied in parallel down many independent lines from the start, so errors in one line are exposed by the others rather than accumulating. Second-century translations and a million patristic quotations give dated reference points earlier than most Greek manuscripts. The discipline reconstructs backwards from all of them, and for about 99% of the text the result is not in doubt. Ehrman, who used the phrase, concedes no doctrine is at stake.”
Related Sections
• How Textual Criticism Actually Works — the method in full.
• How We Know the New Testament Text — the number and age of the witnesses.
• The Tahrif Dilemma — the Islamic “the Bible was corrupted” version.
• The New Testament on Trial — the “400,000 variants” charge.
• How We Know the New Testament Text — the number and age of the witnesses.
• The Tahrif Dilemma — the Islamic “the Bible was corrupted” version.
• The New Testament on Trial — the “400,000 variants” charge.
This is part of the FaithLogic study library — the biblical, historical and manuscript case that Jesus is God, with every claim linked to its source. Open the interactive version for search, cross-references, read-aloud, and the full library.