The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts Review

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(More customer reviews)This is basically the 2nd edition of this work. The first edition was a very amateurish work. This present edition is an improvement in that some corrections were made and photographs were added as well as numerous papyri. Their introduction in this edition of "underdots" helps but may introduce more errors! Scholars (including this reviewer) severly ridiculed the earlier 1999 edition -- and justifiably so.
This 2001 edition consists of 697 pages on alkaline paper (though not ANSI certified stock). It is bound via glue-injection, and is thus a pudgy book which will not lay open. Add to this the fact that the inner margins of the right-hand pages are very narrow and you have a poorly laid-out volume. The main body text is not leaded enough and is thus not very pleasant upon the eyes. The typography is rather poor, due in part to the shortcomings of the Greek font selected for the work, and also due to the software used to construct the text. The photographs are helpful but not useful for testing the accuracy of Comfort and Barrett's collations/transcriptions of these 69 papyri, many are poorly printed and not on a glossy stock.
The work will hopefully become a standard work on the papyri of the New Testament, but it needs years more of testing and correcting. The transcriptions are full of conjectures; that is -- the editors supplied many words from modern Greek texts which are NOT in the papyri. These conjectural additions can be misleading, especially since they are not clearly indicated with BOLD (or properly visible) brackets.
For the most part the transcriptions are accurate. Papyrus P86 was nearly perfectly transcribed, but P46 needs more effort. For example, Comfort repeats an earlier conjecture in suggesting that at I Corinthians 2:1 (page 252) the reading is:
TO MYS] THRION, yet as per the length of the prior lines the following reading could easily be the original...
TO SW] THRION, which some later minuscules (i.e. 489, 927, 2629, [and Von Soden adds minuscule 5]) do actually read. Hence their conjecture (MYSTHRION) can be misleading. In numerous instances we may note that some of the probable original readings are not conclusively found in the papyri, but rather in later copies from the north (not from Egypt).
Some of their bibliographic references are missing or accidentally overlooked. For example, they miss Klijn's work on the corrections of P66 (perhaps because Klijn's hypothesis exposes a weakness in Comfort's and Barrett's). Also in P49 they miss the work done to a later identified fragment by Susan Stephens, and her reconstruction of this fragment conflicts with Comfort's and Barrett's -- so who is correct and who is in error?
A major ideological flaw is that Comfort and Barrett propose that these manuscripts from Egypt represent the text nearest to the original text. Their focus is too limited; they need to also see original readings existing outside Egypt in later manuscripts. With such a philosophy they are overtly biased in their conjectures. They also have a naive understanding of the other text-types as well (they cannot see early Antiochian readings). They seem to be overly influenced with the popular theory (i.e. that the earliest manuscripts are the most accurate) projected by the Germans (Aland and Nestle) and exemplified in Westcott and Hort of England.
Yet despite these shortcomings, the text is well worth the purchase price. It is a needed work and every New Testament textual critic should have a copy. Perhaps in the next editions we will get good, properly contrasted, glossy photos and a better layout. I would gladly pay several hundred dollars for a perfectly accurate work with good photos and more papyri (such as P61, P14, P11, P68 et al). Hopefully, in time, this work will evolve into such an accurate standard. Courtesy of: Mr. Gary S. Dykes

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Superb documentation. Painstaking accuracy. That's what makes this work an invaluable reference for serious Bible students. Contains the text of all the earliest New Testament Greek manuscripts that have been found to date. Readers will also appreciate the sample photographs accompanying most of these 68 transcriptions. Intended for scholars and students who are interested in the original text of the Greek New Testament. This is an accessible and accurate collection, invaluable in determining the original text of the New Testament.

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