Newsletter Highlights - February 2021

As some of you know, the biggest news is that I retired from my Senior Lecturer position at Purdue University and now am working full-time on the CNTR project. Some of you may be wondering what exactly I am doing on the CNTR project and why you should care. It all started several decades ago after I took a Greek class and learned that there are numerous differences in the Greek New Testament texts that our Bibles are being translated from. Many differences in Bible translations have nothing to do with how accurate they are, because the texts that they are translating from are different. For example, consider the Lord’s Prayer contained in Luke 11:2-4:

“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.” (KJV)

Notice that the phrases in the bold font are missing from the NASB, NIV, ESV, and other modern versions of the Bible. It is not because the translators did not translate the text properly, it is because they were translating from a Greek text that did not contain those words! So this then begs the questions as to what is the correct text that should be translated from? And that is the question that the CNTR project set out to answer.

In order to answer that question, I began by finding and transcribing all of the earliest Greek manuscripts that contained any portion of the New Testament up to 400 AD. This took me over a decade to complete and this is the first time that it has ever been done. The CNTR database now contains over 1.5 million words featuring 196 early witnesses from extant manuscripts. This data was then made available for free on the CNTR project website and has already revolutionized the field of New Testament textual criticism. Using this data that I compiled has already resulted in the completion of two new Greek New Testaments – the Tyndale House Greek New Testament (THGNT) and my own Bunning Heuristic Prototype (BHP) which serves as the basis for the unfoldingWord Greek New Testament (UGNT). The BHP is already being used to translate the Bible for several unreached people groups with many more slated for this year.