Yarbrough on the Johannine Epistles

A new commentary arrived in the mail today:
Robert W. Yarbrough, 1-3 John (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008).

It is worth noting here because the author claims a close attention to textual criticism as one of the (six) distinctive features of the commentary: 'this commentary offers remarks on every textual variant in John's Epistles found in NA27'. (I also found the general tone of the preface and the promise of the other distinctive features of the commentary very appealing.)

The text-critical "remarks" are there after each section, with generally fairly brief remarks (often not much more than a couple of sentences, never as much as a whole page) on each variant, perfectly sensible as far as a quick survey can reveal. Occasionally, having encountered a commentator taking the text-critical discipline seriously, one wished for fuller discussions (e.g. on 1 John 4.3 and 5.7). I can't detect any global tendency in his text-critical remarks. I didn't find a place where he disagreed with NA27 (on the three passages where ECM differs from NA27 he is non-committal either way - perhaps partly because they lack much exegetical significance).

I like the idea of addressing every variant given in NA27, since that will be useful for students beginning in textual criticism. I also like the way he speaks of the integration of textual criticism and exegesis.

He makes a couple of interesting comments:

'Having gone through every variant of John's letters, most of them (as it turns out) manifestly minor, I have found no reasonable grounds for suspicion of the soundness of our knowledge of what the author of these epistles wrote.' (p. x)

'The numerous variants inherent in the manual copying process offer rich potential for reflection on lexical possibility and semantic nuance, but they offer no room for pessimism regarding whether we know almost exactly what the original text contained.' (p. 5)