{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.024031007751937984, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005426356589147287, 'mean_word_length': 4.786995515695067, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Review: Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood

will reflect more thoroughly the evidence of the early papyri. In this context Comfort should have alerted readers to the series from the Munster Institut, Das Neue Testament auf Papyrus, of which two volumes have appeared to date, so far covering eleven New Testament books. Comfort’s conclusion that the papyri could and should be having more influence on future translations agrees with Eldon J. Epp’s observation in his contribution to the Fitzmyer Festschrift (To Touch the Text, ed. M.P. Horgan and P.J. Kobelski, NY: Crossroad 1989, 261-88), that the popularly used NZ6 would not be much different had the New Testament papyri not been discovered. Epp like Comfort, claims that the papyri are under-utilized and undervalued in the creation of a critical edition of the Greek New Testament and in translations dependent on it. With the publicity and prominence given by most textual critics to the earliest witnesses to the text, Epp’s and Comfort’s conclusions are perhaps surprising-and they are true. Epp and Comfort see this state of affairs as worthy of complaint. But we may legitimately question this complaint. As the theoretical or potential bearer of the original text any third-century or even secondcentury manuscript may be just as flawed as, say, a sixth or a thirteenthcentury manuscript. We need to know (but never can) how many stages separate each manuscript from the autograph, and what changes occurred at each copying. It is reasonable to deduce that the earliest copies, made before the New Testament writings gained the status of canonical scripture, were the very ones to be copied less slavishly and therefore less accurately. Thus the whole tradition of manuscript copying would have been contaminated even before the third-century and the few extant remains from that date are no more reliable than later witnesses. But this argument is not Comfort’s. Comfort’s investigations are worthwhile and cover a neglected area of textual criticism. The presentation of the material is well-executed and the book concludes with fourteen plates showing significant portions of some early manuscripts. The debate about the role of the papyri in the textual history of the New Testament is one that needs to be kept alive (as Eldon J. Epp has frequently maintained, most recently in his contribution to the SBL collection The New Testament and its Modern Interpreters, 1989). Comfort’s book will assist in keeping this debate before us. For this we should be thankful.