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“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.

"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."

Actually, yes... F.F. Bruce is a fine source especially because even though his premise and agenda was the validation of the NT Texts as reliable, even he is unable to completely account for or dismiss the vast messiness and controversy with which the canon of the NT has some down to us.

The primary shortfall in his work is the sectarian choice to presume Pauline Christianity as "true" and thereby reject or ignore the vast diversity of the early Church. As a result, even his messy review is erroneously skewed to make the canonization look inevitable when it rather patently was not.

His treatment of Marcion for example is (at least from the perspective of scholarly objectivity) particularly shameful. Tagging him with the heavily-baggaged label of "heretic," he writes that "Marcion's list, however, does not represent the current verdict of the Church but a deliberate aberration from it."

A deliberate aberration from what? There was no such "verdict of the Church" at the time at all. How does one "deliberately aberrate" from something that does not exist?

Bruce is simply unprepared or incapable of asking the one serious and substantive question regarding Marcion (or any of the other members of that vast fleet of Gnostics and other Christian sects that existed at the time). What if Marcion was right?

No, my friends. The "game of telephone" (which I first introduced regarding the Old Testament rather than the New) takes on a particularly unforgiving character regarding the Gospels and associated texts. The significant changes I speak of are not mere "copyist errors." They are the wholesale loss, rejection, suppression and attempt to eradicate a vast corpus of documents regarding a Church history that is not the linear, seamless transmission of authority via apostolic succession that Pauline Christianity would have us believe.

That is simply the version of Christianity that won the war.