Baker withdraws Comfort book
Jim West
jwest at highland.net
Tue Sep 21 08:07:06 EDT 1999
At 06:23 AM 9/21/99 +0000, you wrote:
>Dear Jim,
>
>While I would agree that the Comfort book should have been overhauled
>rather than pulled, I'd stop short in saying that this was a personal
>attack on Comfort, as you imply in your post.
>At least here on the B-Greek site, I saw a lot of vigorous, scholarly
>disagreement - but nothing personal.
You may not have followed the discussion on the TC List, where, from the day
the book was announced it received the most virulent attacks. People who
had not even READ it, once it did appear, had plenty of negative things to
say about it. In short, what we have here is the effort of some disgruntled
souls to thoroughly discredit the work even BEFORE it was seen. This
naturally raises the question of why.
Two people "reviewed" the book. One on the TC list (and you should have
seen the number of posts which essentially said "see, we told ya it was not
going to be any good"- and these by people who had not bothered to look at
the book). The other for the online TC Journal. BOTH of these critiques
were responded to quite clearly and precisely by David Barrett. The TC
Journal nevertheless has still not posted the response by Barrett.
The authors admit there are a few minor errors. And there are. But no more
than in any other book.
What motivated the cruel and unjustified attacks? Only God knows (though i
have an idea or two which I shared with Baker in some detail).
Simply put, Baker is wrong to pull the book. When a child makes a few
mistakes you dont kill it. Thats a bit extreme. When an important book
appears with some minor mistakes (no matter how these are blown out of
proportion) you correct them in a second edition, you dont kill the project.
Best,
Jim
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
email- jwest at highland.net
web page- http://web.infoave.net/~jwest
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