Text / Telephone

Text

/

Telephone

Merely thousands of years ago text didn't exist; now it's ubiquitous. (And anything overly familiar maybe hard to think clearly about.) Animals have used sounds for a very long time. Animals have also used visual cues for a very long time. Humans developed speech, modern humans developed complex languages, both natural and artificial. (You mother calling your for supper is using natural language; the salesman talking about hooking your car up to the computer is using artificial language, as is the doctor telling you about your embolism: I here am writing a mixture of both natural and artificial languages.)

Telephone is the name of a game that many scientists are familiar with, and that we all recognize the truth of the moment we hear about it. At a party form the members into a line: so they're organized like numbers, serially: 1, 2, 3 ... The game leader writes a word on a slip of paper, then whispers that word to the person in position 1: at an end of the line: the beginning of the line. Person 1 whispers what he hears to Person 2: and so on and so forth. Person N whispers it to person N+1 until Person Last is reached. Person Last then writes down the word that he hears. Finally the game leader displays the two pieces of paper: 1) the message sent, and 2) the message received. Rarely will the messages match.

Now put those two ideas together: Text + Telephone. Conclusion: there is frequently noise on the phone: the information sent is not always the information received.

Jesus is supposed to have given us advice. The evidence is not clear. Now we're supposed to believe that we have his text: pure, clear, saving! Not likely: except by miracle.

Now, after a lifetime of dealing with text, and criticism, and scholarship, including textual criticism, I jot this little note, touching on an array of problems concerning information.

The other day I mentioned some textual problem to my date. "Well, what does the manuscript say," she asked, in all innocence, her naivete just brimming. That's the problem, exactly. For important documents from the past, we don't have the manuscript. We can't check what the author wrote: not God, not Moses, not Homer, not Sophocles, not Jesus, not Shakespeare ... and even among contemporaries, not necessarily with pk: so many of my manuscripts have been lost, stolen, borrowed and not returned, interfered with (by the FBI among other parties!)

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I have a number of things I want to sketch here, and I intend to. Bear with me as the balance of the post develops scrapbook-style.

What pop icon do you remember the first appearance of in your lifetime? When Elvis performed Jail House Rock there was only one version that go a wide hearing. A millennium before Elvis would have been like anyone else: his song could be heard only by those within range of his voice when he's signing it. The mother nursing her baby may have only half-heard it, so too the lovers nudging each other in the dark. But by the 1950s things got mass recorded, mass broadcast ... the public got used to the delusion that there could be one version of something. "Toscanini, now that's Beethoven!" "Nonsense! Wilhelm Furtwenger! Now that's Beethoven!"

In the 1960s we heard the Beatles on the radio. Then we heard them in the movies, and everywhere. Now we hear popular Beatles tunes as "classics": we hear them on the elevator: is that "I Give You All My Love"? Well, it ain't the version from the 1960s. You can follow I don't doubt my point about Elvis and the Beatles. Maybe you follow my point about this or that recorded performance of esteemed classics: such as some symphony by Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mozart. Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to Shakespeare?

Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to the New Testament? How about the Old Testament?