OK, thanks for posting this. Sounds like they are explaining why a manuscript 1200 years older is preferred.
But while I am trying to consider Ender's telephone analogy with regard to these texts, I still have no idea how his reference to the dead sea scrolls helps him make it.
What I can determine by my own meager scholarship is that the KJV which was made with very few manuscripts is slightly inferior to the NIV and modern versions which used a great many more manuscripts, many of which were older.
But if the "telephone game" analogy is valid, I would expect the NIV and KJV to be hopelessly divergent. But I find they have very little difference except in what English words were chosen for translation. The apparent differences in manuscript were minute and irrelevant to anybody but the nit-picking perfectionists who do God's tedius work of translating these things.
Thus I must conclude its unreasonable to take Ender seriously in this matter.
“But while I am trying to consider Ender’s telephone analogy with regard to these texts, I still have no idea how his reference to the dead sea scrolls helps him make it.”
The telephone game is a foolish argument and you are wasting your time wondering about it. If you want to learn about how the biblical texts were transmitted over time there are many good books on the subject, FF Bruce’s works come to mind. The study of the error correction methods built into the text and those used to keep copyist errors to a minimum are are fascinating. The number of letters and arithmetic value of each line were known for each book, some books create an ‘X’ if they are correctly copied, and so forth.
The KJV was based on the textus receptus of Erasmus. Greek texts had arrived in the West after the fall of Constantinople, and Erasmus was able to assemble the textus receptus out of them. This corrected a number of errors that had crept into the Latin vulgate text that was the sole source in the West for centuries.
Since Erasmus time many more manuscripts have been discovered permitting modern scholars to get a perspective unavailable to Erasmus. And ancient translations from the Greek into Aramaic and other languages permit another way to cross check manuscripts for differences. All the same the number of differences is small between any of these texts. The ancients had many methods to insure that they copied accurately.