Got some new books in the mail today (with some Christmas fundage from Mom & Dad B; thanks!). I'll likely be blogging about them as I read them. One of them is Philip Comfort's new (and, upon initial review, very excellent) title New Testament Text Translation and Commentary (amazon.com). This is like Metzger's Textual Commentary (amazon.com) only with English New Testament readers in mind as primary readers, though detailed text-critical and Greek variation data is included.

Here's a paragraph from the introduction; this is in the "makes you go hmmmmm ..." department:

Nonetheless, the reader will see that he NU and WH editions often agree on matters of major textual significance. Where the WH and NU diverge, however, NU far more frequently concurs with TR than does WH. Furthermore, where WH and NU differ, I am inclined quite frequently to agree with WH on the basis of documentary evidence. (Comfort, xxvi, bold emphasis added)

Did you catch that? According to Comfort, when WH and Nestle/UBS ("NU" in Comfort's abbreviation) disagree, NU agrees with the TR far more frequently than WH does. I find that very interesting, particularly for the derision and scorn the Alands seem to have for the TR text (second only to their dislike of WH, which for whatever you want to say, seems to me to be the basis of their text).

Appendix D has further information about this, particularly a critique of the "local-geneaological" method which NA/UBS follows. This is interesting as I just read another critique of the local-geneaological method last night in Fee & Epp's NT Texts volume.

Also, I may do some comparisons between Metzger, Roger Omanson's rewrite of Metzger, and Comfort (and, perhaps, W&H's introduction for passages that include material) just to see how they all compare to and complement each other. If that sounds interesting, let me know.