Newsletter Highlights - January 2022

1. I made a short CNTR Introduction video, providing a higher-level overview of some of the CNTR’s goals and purposes in a way is that geared toward the average person. I also made a technical video on the CNTR Database for scholars who may be interested in collaborating with the CNTR and working directly with the data.

2. I gave a presentation on “The Universal Apparatus” at the Bible Translation Conference in October which was well received. It outlines a method for providing a simpler format for displaying variant information, while also providing more complete information resulting in greater accuracy. I later gave a slightly different version of that presentation at the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature Conference, Nida Institute - Copenhagen Alliance section held in San Antonio in November. I spoke a second time at the SBL conference giving a presentation entitled “Orthographic Priority for Interpreting Homophones in New Testament Manuscripts” in the Biblical Lexicography section.

3. I put the finishing touches on the first computer-generated Greek New Testament which I am calling a beta version for now. This represents an earth-shaking milestone in the field of textual criticism where subjective decision-making that results in different critical texts can now be replaced with objective scientific statistical analysis. This work is based on several papers, two of which have been accepted to the upcoming 2022 Society of Biblical Literature Midwest Region conference in February:

• “Scientific Definition of Variant Unit Boundaries” – provides an objective scientific definition for the boundaries of variant units that can automatically be identified by a computer algorithm, where previously there has been no standard.
• “Corpus-Based Statistical Measurements of Textual Reliability for New Testament Manuscripts” – provides a scientific statistical measurement of the textual reliability of individual New Testament manuscripts against the entire corpus of data.

Currently, even with a limited dataset, the resulting text is only about 1% different than the Nestle-Aland 28th edition (but we won’t worry about why the NA28 is “wrong” about 1% of the time 😊). Lord willing, both the computer-generated Greek New Testament and the Universal Apparatus will show up on the CNTR website in some fashion in the spring. But this will probably require some significant changes to the website, so I am not going to commit to any particular time frame.

4. There are also some initial talks with a major Bible publisher about the possibility of using some of the CNTR’s technology to publish a new open-license Greek New Testament for the purpose of serving the global Church, particularly in the area of Bible translation. I am cautiously optimistic about the prospects, but there is nothing firm at this point.