One thing I did not enjoy however was the reference on p. 65 to GA 2427 without any mention that it is a forgery. This should serve as a reminder that it takes vigilance to stay up-to-date against those who wish to smuggle counterfeit currency into circulation. Stephen Carlson showed in 2006 that GA 2427 is a forgery and is better suited to an art gallery than to a place in the textual apparatus of a Greek New Testament. Nineteen years later 2427 is still mentioned as if it is authentic in what is surely going to be a standard textbook.
The pigment found in some of the illustrations in GA 2427 was not invented at the time when the manuscript was initially thought to have been produced. Some of the instances of parablepsis in 2427's text are explained via a scenario in which its scribe was using as his exemplar the 1860 printed edition of Buttmann's Greek New Testament. As Margaret Mitchell reported in 2010, GA 2427 is not authentic. It is "a modern production." It must not be included in the textual apparatus in the future.
The problem of Christian academia's reluctance to abandon the consensus of the previous generation and to ignore compelling evidence is real. For example John Burgon pointed out in 1871 that Aphraates, not Jacob of Nisibis, was the author who should be credited with a citation of Mark 16:17, but in the first and second edition of the UBS Greek New Testament, over seven decades later, Jacob of Nisibis was listed in the apparatus nevertheless (on page 197). To this day, as far as I can tell, Daniel Wallace has not acknowledged that the claim about "asterisks and obeli" accompanying Mark 16:9-20 is bogus. Likewise Ben Witherington III, as far as I know, has not retracted his false claim that “Eusebius and Jerome both tell us these verses were absent from all Greek copies known to them.” (See pp. 412-413 of The Gospel of Mark – A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary © 2001 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.) Grace To You continues to circulate the falsehood-filled sermon of the late John MacArthur in which Mark 16:9-20 was called a "bad ending." The authors of the fourth edition of The Text of the New Testament retract on one page the claim that Mark 16:9-20 is absent from some Ethiopic copies, and repeat the claim on another page!
Sometimes it seems like the only way to get tenured scholars to admit a mistake is public humiliation, similar to what led to Wallace's apology for confidently exaggerating P137's early date. But it doesn't have to be that way. Unlike pseudo-scholars such as James White ("Whitebeard" on X) of Apologia Church (who still, as far as I know, has yet to retract any of his nonsense claims in The KJV-Only Controversy), Christians in the academy should welcome the refinement of their materials and be willing to engage their critics in a spirit of open co-operation. Otherwise they may discover too late that while they have not updated their materials to accurately fit the facts, that when reciting the proverb, "The dogs bark, but the caravan passes," they turn out to be the dogs getting less and less attention and more and more derision due to their inattentiveness.
May GA 2427 never again be listed in any textual apparatus.
