>Again, buy Bauer. (If I really believed that Danker would get a revision
>out [3rd. rev. ed.?] within the year, I'd say wait. But I suspect it will
>be much longer than that. So buy it if you don't have it.)
>
>Edward Hobbs
Has anyone heard anything recent re. the ETA of the 3d ed.? The orig. date
was, I think, now 3 years ago... The first two years I was telling students
to wait, but as of last year I gave that up and was sending buy signals.
Any analysts making buy/hold recommendations on BAGD for this year?
Rod
---------------------------------
(Edward Hobbs in response:)
The two persons on this List probably best able to answer the question are
myself and Edgar Krentz--Edgar probably much better than I. Here's my
own readihng of the situation.
Last November, in New Orleans, the University of Chicago Press was again
quoting "six months from now" as the ETA for Bauer3. But I spent an
evening with Frederick Danker, mostly discussing his work on the revision,
and he wouldn't make an estimate of when he would release everything to the
Press, but instead went into considerable detail about how he was
regularizing many things in Bauer's references which were less than
consistent, and how much time this took.
I will see Fred this November in San Francisco, and try again. Meanwhile,
Edgar Krentz, who was Danker's colleague for many years, might have better
information.
But my personal reading is this (psychological) one: Frederick Danker must
be somewhere near my age, and one thing I am keenly aware of is that
(having already passed my allotted threescore-and-ten) whatever I release
from now on is not going to be revised by me in the future. I strongly
suspect that Danker wants to make this (final revision by him) edition of
Bauer as excellent as possible, not needing further revision for perhaps
several decades. Hence he is probably calculating how much improvement in
how much time he can manage (thinking of his own health and his age).
For this reason, I have begun saying to those without a Bauer: Don't wait.
Get it now. If you have only a year's use before the new one comes out, it
will be worth the cost. Then when you buy the new edition, you can either
put the older one in your vacation home/study/other office/church library,
OR give it to an impoverished student who would otherwise be tempted by
something dreadful like Thayer.
To be honest, I think it is more important for a student learning Greek to
have good lexica (meaning Bauer + LSJMG) than for those of us who have
spent decades with them, for we are aware of the terrible deficiencies and
faults of the antique tools, whereas the new student isn't. Since the
first translation of Bauer came out in 1957, I have required EVERY Greek
student to buy Bauer, without exception.
Edward Hobbs (who started teaching Greek in 1947)