Saturday, August 25, 2012

Meyer obit fail

AN OBITUARY FOR MARVIN MEYER in the Telegraph has some careless errors. Marv deserves better. Mark Goodacre administers a fisking at the NT Blog. And to add to Mark's comments, note the first sentence of the article:
What we know as the New Testament – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation – was actually born of thousands of texts and gospels circulated among the early Christians.
If only there had been thousands of Christian texts and gospels circulating in the early centuries C.E., and if only we still had them! There were scores, certainly, and the number may have been as high as the low hundreds, but not thousands.

Earlier obituaries etc. are here and links.

UPDATE: It just gets worse. Mark has a new post up: Plagiarism in the Telegraph's obituary of Marvin Meyer. Epic fail.

I agree fully with Mark's concluding comment:
I think that it is disgraceful that The Telegraph's obituary of Marvin Meyer is a patchwork of passages plagiarized from different electronic articles and I would like to suggest that they acknowledge what they have done, issuing a full apology, and replacing the plagiarized piece with something that appropriately honours Professor Meyer's memory.