Newsletter Highlights - June 2024

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 Bible translations, I should be able to use it to align early translations of the New Testament up to AD 400, in languages such as Latin and Coptic. This could greatly accelerate the addition of such versions to the CNTR collation.
• I presented two different papers at the Midwest Regional Meeting for Biblical Studies, “Early Scribes and Textual Criticism” and “Determiners in the New Testament”. I enjoyed participating in the conference and both presentations were well received.
• The two CNTR proposals submitted to the Lightsys Code-a-Thon went very well. The team of students from Calvin University made great strides in identifying a suitable open-source Text-to-Speech engine solution so that Greek texts on the website will one day be able to be read out loud. And the team of students from Covenant College created the beginnings on a Koine Greek Orthography program which statistically derives the most probable spelling of words.
• The CNTR project is relying more and more on work from volunteers, which is both a blessing and part of the plan to keep the project going for future generations. Volunteers have recently finished the transcriptions for P141 and P130 (which will be added to the website soon). The P130 transcription is notable in that the manuscript hasn’t even been published yet! Consequently, the CNTR continues to be the leader in electronic transcriptions of the New Testament, with many that still cannot be found anywhere else.

The CNTR is still looking for a new Christian organization to take in the CNTR project and has talked with a few interested parties. If you have any suggestions along those lines, please let me know.