Jesus, the Gospel and the Telephone Game

Many scholars compare the way the Bible's accounts of Jesus were passed on with the children's telephone game, where children whisper a complicated message from one to another. In the process the message is corrupted, and at the end everyone has a good laugh. But how good is the comparison between this game and the way the Gospel stories were actually passed on?
In this video, professor Dan Wallace dissects the telephone game, to argue that the process of transmission of bible from the illiterate Hebrew speaking peasants, fishermen, the low-level local tax collectors of the Roman Empire, and other disciples of Jesus to the highly educated Greek writers of the scripture was not similar to the children telephone game! He, of course, does not mention that the anonymous writer of gospels were not the Hebrew speaking disciples of Jesus, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Matthew the tax collector, Mark the attendant of Peter, Luke the attendant of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee!
According to the Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):

Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus' life and teachings.

However, even assuming that these gentlemen are absolutely right about the solid structure of the bible transmission, one wonders how can they explain the glaring discrepancies among the same stories, such as the story of the empty tomb or the story of crucifixion, as narrated in the four gospels, without offering incredibly irrational and sometimes hilarious reasoning? In fact, the bible textual contradictions forced an imminent evangelist scholar, like Professor Ehrman to abandon Christianity altogether. He writes:

But it was not long before I started seeing that the "truth" about the Bible was not at all what I had once thought when I was a committed evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute. The more I saw that the New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies, the more troubled I became. At Moody, I thought that all discrepancies could be objectively reconciled. But eventually I saw that in fact they could not be. I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them, I studied them, I sought spiritual guidance, I read all I could. But as someone who be- lieved that truth was objective and who was unwilling to believe what was false, I came to think that the Bible could not be what I thought it was. The Bible contained errors. And if it contained er- rors, it was not completely true. This was a problem for me, be- cause I wanted to believe the truth, the divine truth, and I came to see that the Bible was not divine truth without remainder. The Bible was a very human book. But the problems didn't stop there. Eventually I came to real- ize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mis- takes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies. That is what this book is about.

Unfortunately, many pastors and evangelists deliberately try to confuse their congregations, by resorting to irrelevant evidence and statistics that appear to suggest that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus' disciples or their attendants. In other words, Christians are kept in the dark about the scholarly researches   even by Christian scholars. Nevertheless, the mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions, in order to provide a narrative of Christianity's central figure —Jesus Christ— to confirm the faith of their communities.

In fact, researchers agree that the original author of Matthew was actually a Greek-speaking educated Jew, who was living in Antioch, and as someone who was more knowledgeable about Jewish traditions, intended to correct many of the erroneous assertions in the earlier gospel of Mark about those traditions. Thus Matthew who was the tax collector for the Romans, could not be the real author of that gospel, because being a collaborator with the occupiers would have ostracized him from the Jewish community. Even conservative New Testament scholars like professor Bruce Metzger have agreed that :

In the case of the first Gospel, the apostle Matthew can scarcely be the final author; for why should one who presumably had been an eyewitness of much that he records depend ... upon the account given by Mark, who had not been an eyewitness? --The New Testament, p. 97

Similarly, Raymond E. Brown, perhaps the foremost English-speaking Catholic biblical scholar, the author of some 40 books, who taught at Union Theological Seminary for two decades, states :

That the author of the Greek Gospel was John Mark, a (presumably Aramaic-speaking) Jew of Jerusalem who had early become a Christian, is hard to reconcile with the impression that it does not seem to be a translation from Aramaic, that it seems to depend on oral traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek, and that it seems confused about Palestinian geography. --An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 159-160

The Gospel of Luke, borrows from as much as 65% of the verses in Mark, thus scholars agree that Mark was his source. Thus it is obvious that John Mark, the attendant of Peter, could not be the author of Luke . Note that the author of Luke is also the author of Acts, in which John Mark, the attendant of Peter, is mentioned in Acts (12:12), which implies that the author of Luke-Acts knows him, and has even borrowed a substantial amount of his material. Yet, he never identifies Mark as one of his references! in the words of Randel McCraw Helms, an American professor of English literature:

So the author of Luke-Acts not only knew about a John Mark of Jerusalem, the personal associate of Peter and Paul, but also possessed a copy of what we call the Gospel of Mark, copying some three hundred of its verses into the Gospel of Luke, and never once thought to link the two—John Mark and the Gospel of Mark—together! The reason is simple: the connecting of the anonymous Gospel of Mark with John Mark of Jerusalem is a second-century guess, on that had not been made in Luke's time.-- Who Wrote the Gospels? (p. 2)

According to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, an influential theologian of the School of Antioch, a biblical commentator, and Christian bishop of Cyrrhus (393-~458CE), in the early centuries of Christianity, there were many Christian gospels in circulation, He wrote:

"Arius and Achillas, together with their fellow foes, have been expelled from the Church, because they have become aliens from our pious doctrine: according to the blessed Paul, who said, 'If any of you preach any, other gospel than that which you have received, let him be accursed, even though he should pretend to be an angel from heaven, and 'But if any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing' and so forth. (...)do you avoid it as you would a pest, mindful ever of the apostolic faith, that, I mean, which was set out in writing by the Fathers at Nicaea; do you remain on steady ground, firm and unmoved in the faith, and henceforward suffer neither your clergy nor laity to listen to vain words and futile questions, for we have already given a form, that he who professes himself a Christian may keep it, the form delivered by the Apostles, as says St. Paul, 'if any one preach to you another gospel than that you have received let him be Anathema.'

Among various gospels the church ratified just four of them. They picked the number four because "there were four winds, four points of the compass, four corners of the temple", mirroring the arguments of Irenaeus in the 2nd century. As professor Ehrman writes:

The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for dec- ades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never en- titled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150-60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the "Memoirs of the Apostles."
It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in cir- culation that they were definitively named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresiologist Irenaeus, around 180-85 CE. Irenaeus wrote a five-volume work, typically known today as Against Heresies, directed against the false teachings rampant among Christians in his day. At one point in these writings he in- sists that "heretics" (i.e., false teachers) have gone astray either because they use Gospels that are not really Gospels or because they use only one or another of the four that are legitimately Gospels. Some heretical groups used only Matthew, some only Mark, and so on. For Irenaeus, just as the gospel of Christ has been spread by the four winds of heaven over the four corners of the earth, so there must be four and only four Gospels, and they are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."-- Forged: Writing In The Name Of God - Why The Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (p. 250)"

Scholars have shown that the specific wording of the Gospel titles also suggests that the portion bearing their names was a later addition. The κατα ("according to") preposition supplements the word ευαγγελιον ("gospel"). This word for "gospel" was implicitly connected with Jesus, meaning that the full title was το ευαγγελιον Ιησου Χριστου ("The Gospel of Jesus Christ"), with the additional preposition κατα ("according to") used to distinguish specific gospels by their individual names. Before there were multiple gospels written, however, this addition would have been unnecessary. In fact, many scholars argue that the opening line of the Gospel of Mark (1:1) probably functioned as the original title of the text:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ...

Scholars like Norman Perrin and Barnabas Lindars also find Hebrews enigmatic because it does not appear to represent the views of any early Christian community. In fact, most scholars agree that the Book of Hebrews and 1 John, which are anonymous texts, have been erroneously attributed to the apostle Paul and John the son of Zebedee. According to the Oxford Annotated Bible (p. 2103)

Despite the traditional attribution (of Hebrews:to Paul) ... [t]here is not sufficient evidence to identify any person named in the New Testament as the author; thus it is held to be anonymous.

The Oxford Bible also maintaines that:

The anonymous voice of 1 John was identified with the author of the Fourth Gospel (i.e., John) by the end of the second century CE ... Since the Gospel was attributed to the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, early Christians concluded that he had composed 1 John near the end of his long life ...-- (p. 2137)

Some scholars argue that the opening verses of 1 John is probably composed by a leader of a circle the Johannine teachers who were faithful to the apostolic testimony of the Beloved Disciple, and this is why that opening employs the first person plural "we", referring to that circle.

The Patristic literary texts written by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, that were produced in the late second century, before the doctrine of orthodoxy became fixed, are more likely comparable to Hebrews. In fact, scholars agree that one cannot detect any unambiguous profile of these author's doctrinal ideology, the main characteristics of their congregations, or the historicity of text's occasion from the analysis of these early Patristic texts. Hence, it would be absolutely silly to consider Hebrews as a manifesto of Christianity. Furthermore, it is under this light that the view of professor Bart Ehrman, the eminent textual criticism expert's must be examined, who states that:

Because our surviving Greek manuscripts provide such a wide variety of (different) titles for the Gospels, textual scholars have long realized that their familiar names do not go back to a single 'original' title, but were added by later scribes. --Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, pp. 249-250

Moreover as professor Armin Daniel Baum, an evangelical theologian and the professor of New Testament at the Freien Theologischen Hochschule Gießen writes :

While most New Testament letters bear the names of their (purported) authors (James, Jude, Paul, Peter, or at least "the Elder") the authors of the historical books [the Gospels and Acts] do not reveal their names. The superscriptions that include personal names ("Gospel according to Matthew" etc.) are clearly secondary. --The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books," p. 121

They were not only the four gospels that were attributed to wrong authors in the words of Professor Ehrman:

Scholars are highly uni- fied in thinking that Paul did not write the book of Hebrews, even though it was included in the canon of the New Testament by church fathers who thought that it was. 9 The letters l, 2, and 3 John sound in many ways like the Gospel of John, but they are strikingly different as well, especially in the historical context they presuppose. They were probably not written by the same au- thor, who was not John the son of Zebedee in any event, but by a later Christian living in the same community, which had begun to experience a different range of problems from those presupposed in the Fourth Gospel. Later Christian writers who accepted the books as sacred authorities needed to assign them to an apostle, however, and so it made sense to claim that they, like the Fourth Gospel, had been written by John the son of Zebedee. Assigning anonymous books to known authorities did not stop with the writings of the New Testament. Just to give one ad- ditional example, I might mention one of the most interesting books not to make it into the canon of Scripture. For centuries there were Christians who thought the book should be included. I think we can all be glad that it was not. This book provides one of the most vitriolic attacks on Jews and Judaism from early Chris- tianity. Had it been included in Scripture, Jewish-Christian rela- tions may well have turned out even worse, if that can be ima- gined, than they did. This book was originally written anonym- ously, but it later came to be attributed to one of Paul's closest companions and co-workers and so is known as the Epistle of Barnabas.