Center for New Testament Restoration Blog

It is time again to give you an update about some of the things going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR): The CNTR website has been updated so that the collation now displays variants with semantical word differences, while the apparatus displays variants with phonetical word differences. Previously, both the collation and apparatus had been a mixture of the two concepts. This change was the culmination of months of development work which improved the code base in a number of ways and fixed some minor bugs, while possibly introducing some new bugs that I don’t know about yet (please let me know if you see any). This work was related to a paper I presented at the 2025 Midwest Regional Meeting for Biblical Studies conference in Notre Dame, IN entitled, “Semantical and Phonetical Word Variants”. The explanation of this would be highly technical for most users, and will probably not even be noticeable to most users, so I will not go into the details here. But an intere...

Here is an update about some of the things going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR): A lot more lexicon work was done under the hood on the CNTR database towards the release of a new open-source lexicon that is under development. There are currently about 10 volunteers working on the task. This is a significant undertaking that may take a couple of years before the data is ready for release. The goal is to produce an open-source lexicon that will exceed the capabilities in a number of areas compared to the copyrighted BDAG lexicon which has been the de facto standard up till now. Related to some of that work, I have finally released, “The Analytical Lexicon and Concordance of the Greek New Testament” which has been published by GlossaHouse ( https://glossahouse.com/products/the-analytical-lexicon-and-concordance-of-the-greek-new-testament ). You can also get it from Amazon and other outlets where the shipping may be cheaper for those overseas. Here is the descripti...

Its time again to give you an update about some of the things going on at the CNTR since my last newsletter: A lot of work was done under the hood on the CNTR database, providing better documentation and making it easier for other developers to use in the future. While a lot of that work is not visible to the average user, one notable aspect is the ability to process church father scripture quotations. Thus, all the church father quotations from extant manuscripts up to AD 400 are now displayed on the website. A lot more church father quotations will be added later from various published series of their works, but that will probably take another decade to complete. All of the metadata for all of the CNTR transcriptions was overhauled and improved. I have been testing out a beta version of an AI program developed by SIL International which among other things, can align foreign translations to the Greek New Testament. While Bible Translators would use the program to check their modern Bi...

Many things have transpired at the CNTR since my last newsletter, so let me try to get everyone caught up to speed: My paper entitled “The First Computer-Generated Greek New Testament” was published in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism in November ( http://jbtc.org/v28/TC-2023_Bunning.pdf ). The paper goes into greater detail about the methodology involved in creating the Statistical Restoration (SR) Greek New Testament which was published by GlossaHouse in October ( https://glossahouse.com/products/statistical-restoration-greek-new-testament-srgnt ). The CNTR project is now more intentional on utilizing volunteers and has held several callouts for those who have expressed interest. There are now 10 volunteers who have agreed to help out in various aspects of the project in keeping with their skill sets, with several actively involved in current tasks. My book entitled “Restoration of the New Testament: The Case for Scientific Textual Criticism” was published by GlossaHous...

I can’t mention everything that has gone on, but here are some of the highlights: The project that the CNTR submitted to the Lightsys Code-a-Thon went very well as 4 students from Cedarville University wrote a Python program to find Scripture quotations in the writings of various church fathers. This is not as easy as it sounds because it has to be able to find them with any variant readings or even new variant readings. This should be a valuable asset as I prepare to add that kind of data to the CNTR database. Andrew Case interviewed me in his “Working for the Word” weekly podcast. We discussed a few aspects of the CNTR project and the importance of using open licenses. The CNTR provided free printed evaluation copies of the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament with the Universal Apparatus which was piloted in a class this fall taught by Rob Plummer at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). This provided valuable feedback from the students towards creating a finished...

I want to highlight the Bible translation organization, unfoldingWord, which has been the main sponsor of the CNTR. unfoldingWord’s motto is “The Church in every people group, the Bible in every language”. While this is also the goal of many other Christian organizations, there are a few aspects of unfoldingWord’s approach that are somewhat unique: 1. Church-Centric Bible Translation (CCBT) . unfoldingWord empowers the native church to be in charge of the Bible translation process from start to finish, which ensures that the resulting translation is relevant, utilized, and updatable if necessary. In order to do translation, there needs to be knowledge of both the source and target language. A seminary graduate knows Hebrew/Greek, but not the target language, while the native church knows their own language, but not the biblical languages. So instead of trying to convince the declining population of seminary graduates to go and live in a jungle somewhere, it is much easier to empower ...

The biggest news is the addition of the beta version of the Universal Apparatus to the CNTR website ( https://greekcntr.org/apparatus/index.htm ). This was a long time in coming as people have been awaiting its arrival since I presented it at the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature and the 2021 Bible Translation conferences. The CNTR apparatus provides several improvements not normally found in other apparatuses: Uses one simplified set of symbols that are easier to understand. Can work with any base text instead of being tied to a specific text. First complete apparatus to show all variants for all early witnesses (most only show about 10% of them). Always shows both positive and negative witnesses. Displays partial matches for readings affected by lacuna. Includes major critical texts (which can be filtered out if not desired). Includes interlinear information (by hovering) so that the average user can get an idea of what the...