Is storytelling like a game of ‘telephone’?
I sometimes get questions about the accuracy of the orally repeated Bible stories. People wonder if it’s like the ‘telephone game’ in which a phrase is passed around a circle by whispering it into the ear of the next person.
At the end it differs wildly from the original phrase. What keeps the same thing from happening to the Bible stories as they’re passed along?
Some time ago, Teresa and I made a day trip out to visit one of the monthly two-day trainings for the adult literacy teachers/storytellers that are held in every division.
Keep in mind that the storytellers I’m going to describe are our great-grandchildren – we didn’t train them nor even the one who is training them. They are fourth generation from us.
We started out driving through hills and forests, traveling on a narrow, winding highway through an extensive tiger preserve. Three hours of dodging cows, tractors, trucks and pedestrians finally brought us to the town where the training was to take place.
Eight adult literacy teachers had come – five young women and three young men. Each of them leads an adult literacy center and tells the Bible stories in a previously unreached village. Most are first-year teachers; for one young man, this was his very first training session.
Their supervisor had asked several to tell Bible stories for us. I recorded these on video so we’d have a record of their telling. Two young women and one young man each told a Bible story. Some of the stories were quite long; all the storytellers used excellent dramatic skills in their tellings, important for communication.
It was evident that the other storytellers in the circle were visibly moved as they listened, even though they knew the stories by heart themselves. One was seen wiping tears, another listener is hanging on every word, the emotion of the story reflected on her face. Another girl’s lips are moving as she silently says the story in chorus with the teller as though it were a song. The young man tells his story with much humor; all the listeners are laughing and strongly engaged in his telling.
Noticing something strange
As I reviewed the video I had made, I noticed something. As one girl was telling the Abraham epic (she was in 12th grade, finishing her final exams that same week), three of the other young women in the storytelling circle can be seen behind her. Suddenly one of the girls who had been sitting there expressionless, begins to move her hands in her lap. I backed the video up to look more closely.
As the story is being told, she clearly thinks something has been left out. She uses the fingers of both hands in some sort of mnemonic system of her own devising to double check the teller. Then the girls on either side get involved and a Bible is opened and passed back and forth so they can verify how the story should have been told.
It was quite clear that these tellers are not just doing the minimum, but have internalized a standard of excellence for accuracy in oral repetition of the Bible stories. You can imagine how encouraged Teresa and I were to see proof of this.
At least five years had passed since we handed those stories off to others and set them free into the wild. Yet reproduction has been accurate out to the fourth generation!
Two safety measures that keep stories true to scripture
There are two plumb lines that help keep an orally transmitted story accurate.
First, thanks to the tireless efforts of Bible translators, many of the oral people of the world now have a Bible or Bible portion available in their own language, or at least in an adjacent trade language. If even a few people can read, the written story will serve to keep the told story on track. A more traditional oral safeguard is the fact that stories are never whispered. They are told aloud for the entire community to hear. Truth is held by the community as a whole, so a storyteller who changes a familiar story or tells it incorrectly loses face in the community.
In the oral Bible project, the biblical storytellers are taught to correct one another as they are learning and telling the stories. It became common to see several in each learning group with their Bibles open, following along as the story is being told, ready to correct the teller.
