It is generally agreed that a period of some 40 years lies between the Gospels and the events they record.

How, then, were the stories of those events passed on.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman thinks about transmission in terms of 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.’

The analogy seems appealing in a number of ways:

• It helps explain the occurrence of different (and apparently conflicting) accounts, such as the discrepant dates for the death of Jesus in the Synoptics and John.
• It is not necessary to ascribe malicious intent or dishonesty to those who participated in the process of transmission.
• The process of transmission of the Gospel traditions – like the process followed in the telephone game – was not under strict control.

Nevertheless, the analogy soon breaks down:

• Whereas the purpose of the telephone game is to disrupt the process of communication, the purpose of those involved in passing on the early Gospel tradition was precisely the opposite – to preserve the words and deeds of a great religious teacher.
• Whereas the telephone game represents a single one-way chain of communication, oral tradition is a web, or network: it is passed on by many people to many people, with backwards as well as forwards flow.  In the telephone game, distortions are cumulative and non-correctable, but in oral tradition there are multiple opportunities for people to ask: “Did he really say that?”

David Rubin writes:

‘[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.’

The above is based on this article, by John Nelson

Bill Mounce comments:

Oral tradition has very little in common with the telephone game. In the game:

• the message is heard and passed along one person at a time,
• there are no controls over the message,
• there is no cost attached to reliable or unreliable transmission.

All of this makes it fundamentally different from the oral transmission of the Gospels:

• The biblical stories were relayed in communities (not one-to-one),
• when the stories were shared in community, many people knew the stories and would correct mistakes relayed in the retelling,
• the people retelling the stories had a strong personal interest in the truthfulness of what they were saying, especially when persecution of the church increased.

The joke of the telephone game is irrelevant to this discussion.