Newsletter Highlights - March 2022

The CNTR is pleased to announce the completion of the beta version of the first computer-generated Greek New Testament, which for now I am going to call the “Statistical Restoration” (SR). The creation of the SR text offers a paradigm shift in the field of textual criticism, replacing the subjectivity and theological bias of human editors with the use of objective statistical and computational methods. All the earliest manuscript evidence is fed directly to a computer program as raw data, which generates a Greek New Testament to reflect the most probable text based on statistical analysis and algorithms designed to mimic the processes of textual criticism, weighing both internal and external evidence. The SR offers a number of significant advantages:

• Weighs the raw manuscript data consistently and objectively without human intervention based solely on scientific principles.
• Can be updated automatically whenever new witnesses are added.
• Automatically comes with morphological parsing, Enhanced Strong’s Numbers, English interlinear, and the Universal Apparatus.
• Will later be released under an open license for use by the global Church, after it moves from the beta stage into production.

A number of breakthroughs had to occur along the way in order to accomplish this feat, including the automatic determination of variant unit boundaries and their relationships to each other, the classification of homophones based on the orthographical-priority method, and rating the statistical reliability of manuscripts against the corpus of data. The scientific underpinnings for this are explained in six different papers which are planned to be submitted for publication, three of which have already been presented at the Society of Biblical Literature conferences.

This version of the SR is about 1.5% different than the Nestle-Aland 28th edition, but some of them are merely spelling differences that make no translatable difference. Depending on the options used, it could be made to be less than 1% different, but the goal here was not to try to replicate any particular critical text, but rather to apply a scientific-based, data-driven approach derived from the raw data. It takes about two seconds for the program to generate one Greek New Testament, and the text was optimized by running batches of 1000 texts at a time with varying parameters. Also note that this beta version of the SR text is subject to change as it is scrutinized by others for possible flaws. The text is now visible on the CNTR website in the collation view: https://greekcntr.org/collation/index.htm. More information about the Statistical Restoration can be found in this overview video: https://greekcntr.org/resources/4SRGNT.mp4

It is expected that this release of the SR may have a profound impact on the field of textual criticism over time. This is not the end of a process, but just the tip of an iceberg that opens the door for all sorts of other statistical analysis, computer processing, and the application of artificial intelligence. Indeed, I predict that the future of textual criticism will eventually be founded in the fields of data science and computer science, and the SR text is merely one early example of that. But I am not really the first to recognize this. I will conclude with this observation made by Colwell and Tune way back in the 1960’s when people were just beginning to recognize the power of the computer:

“We are working in a period when the data for textual criticism will inevitably be translated into mathematics. In fact it is doubtful that NT textual critics can really hope to relate all of the data now available to them without the aid of computers.”

Well, that day has arrived!