Newsletter Highlights - October 2022

The Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) is pleased to announce the official release of the Statistical Restoration (SR) which is the first computer-generated Greek New Testament. The creation of the SR text offers a paradigm shift in the field of textual criticism, replacing the subjective theological bias of human editors with the use of objective statistical and computational methods, rooted in data science and computer science. All the earliest manuscript evidence is fed directly to a computer program as raw data, which generates a Greek New Testament attempting to reflect the most probable text based on statistical analysis and algorithms designed to simulate a reasoned-eclecticism approach of textual criticism, weighing both internal and external evidence. The SR is only about 1% different from the Nestle-Aland text, but some of those are merely orthographical differences that don’t affect the meaning. The motivation, rationale, limitations, and implications for creating a text like this are described in the new book, “Restoration of the New Testament: The Case for Scientific Textual Criticism”.

Some information about the SR can be found in its Introduction and in this overview video. The more technical aspects of the SR that would interest scientists and developers will be released later in a paper that is planned to be submitted for publication. The SR is now available for download from GitHub in several different formats. The SR text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) and the source code for the main program is released under the GNU General Public License 3.0 (GPLv3). Providing the SR under open licenses allows others to build on the work and contribute other improvements to serve the interests of the global Church.

After being in beta for about seven months, the SR now receives its own place in the CNTR collation. Many thanks to those who provided valuable feedback to the SR while it was in beta. The SR supersedes the Bunning Heuristic Prototype (BHP), which had a successful run and served as the basis for many Bible translations all over the world, but it has finished serving its initial purpose and thus is now dropped from the collation. The new entry in the CNTR collation called “Developmental Statistics” will represent the ongoing development work toward the second edition of the SR. If any Christian scholars or developers are interested in getting in on the ground floor of that and possibly taking over that effort, please contact the CNTR.