Newsletter Highlights - April 2025

It is time again to give you an update about some of the things going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR):

• The CNTR website has been updated so that the collation now displays variants with semantical word differences, while the apparatus displays variants with phonetical word differences. Previously, both the collation and apparatus had been a mixture of the two concepts. This change was the culmination of months of development work which improved the code base in a number of ways and fixed some minor bugs, while possibly introducing some new bugs that I don’t know about yet (please let me know if you see any). This work was related to a paper I presented at the 2025 Midwest Regional Meeting for Biblical Studies conference in Notre Dame, IN entitled, “Semantical and Phonetical Word Variants”. The explanation of this would be highly technical for most users, and will probably not even be noticeable to most users, so I will not go into the details here. But an interesting side note of that presentation is that I gave some actual counts of the number of variants in the New Testament using several different criteria, showing that the modern misleading estimates of 400,000 to 750,000 variants are about an order of magnitude to high. This will hopefully turn into another paper dedicated to that specific topic, but more work still needs to be done on it.
• Also at the same conference, I presented a second paper entitled, “Algorithmic Accidence for Greek Words” to the Greek Language and Linguistics section. That presentation showed how all 22,289 different words found in the New Testament can be algorithmically generated with only 344 exceptions that don’t follow the standard rules. And then the next weekend I presented a paper entitled, “Database Applications for New Testament Greek” at the 2025 Evangelical Theological Society Midwest Regional Meeting in Cedarville, OH. Quite a few were impressed when they saw the power of the CNTR database and how it can dramatically speed up research done on the New Testament. Needless to say, getting three different papers ready to be presented in the span of one week definitely kept me busy.
• The behind the scenes work to modify the database to be able to add the early foreign versions of the New Testament to the website such as the Latin Vulgate and the Peshitta is almost complete, but it will still probably take several months before the transcriptions are ready and the text shows up on the website.
• Volunteers continue to do excellent work behind the scenes on the lexicon project and creating new manuscript transcriptions. The CNTR project continues to rely more and more on work from volunteers which is part of the plan to keep the project going for future generations after I am gone.

Well, that is some of the news from the CNTR. As always, all praise and glory are given to the Lord Jesus Christ for all that has been accomplished!