From: Bart Ehrman (behrman@email.unc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 01 1998 - 11:19:30 EDT
I didn't take detailed notes on the Introduction, and so don't recall
all of the specifics. I do remember thinking, and suggesting to the
editor at Baker, that he should show the work to a trained paleographer
(Comfort, of course, is not), since there were so many obvious mistakes
(one example that I do happen to recall: Comfort evidently didn't realize
that documentary scribes were professionals).
It's really too bad, because on a personal level, Comfort is a very
nice fellow. But his scholarship suffers from a lack of training in the
field and an evident refusal to get expert help in areas that he himself
is not knowledgable about. This is all painfully evident in his earlier
publications; I still think that Bill Petersen's review of _The Quest of
the Original Text of the NT_ is one of the two or three most devastating
reviews of any work in any field that I've ever seen (JBL 113 [1994]
529-31). And Comfort's _Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations of the
NT_ is just riddled with silly mistakes (he calls the book of Revelation
an epistle; he claims that Athanasius's 39th festal letter fixed the NT
canon; he says that homoeoteleuton is a kind of transcriptional error; he
states that "Western" readings originated in the Western part of the
Mediterranean; he claimes that Westcott and Hort adopted readings "just
because" they were found in Codex Vaticanus, etc. etc. etc.).
In any event, it may be that the manuscript was refereed by someone
after I saw it, and that some of its mistakes have been rectified;
since, though, I was being ask to blurb rather than referee it, my hunch
is that it was already in production and ready to roll.
-- Bart D. Ehrman
On Sat, 31 Oct 1998, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> At 09:27 AM 9/1/98 -0400, Bart Ehrman wrote:
> > I was sent the the Introduction to this book and asked to write a blurb
> >for it. I declined, because it was filled with egregious factual errors.
>
> Such as?
>
> Jonathan
>
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