Newsletter Highlights - September 2026

 Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ! This newsletter is well overdue. I got caught up in a lot of things over the summer, so now it’s time to get you caught up to date with what has been going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR): 

  • Talks are continuing with Asbury Theological Seminary about hosting the infrastructure of the project and eventually overseeing the project when it’s time for me to ride off into the sunset. The code base has been brought up to the latest standards and most of the documentation for the project has now been completed. All these are steps in preparation towards handing the project off to the next generation.

  • The CNTR translation tool has added French and Hindi due to the work of volunteers Gustav Berloty and Jenice Martin. Chinese is coming soon! The collation, apparatus, and these translation pages can all be synced together by a button on the toolbar so that if you select a verse in one window, it will bring up the same verse in the other windows. I use the feature all of the time now, so I expect people from other countries will benefit from it as well.

  • The CNTR’s Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament along with the English glosses from the collation were adopted by the Reader’s Bible on the Global Bible Tools website (https://globalbibletools.com) which is run by Andrew Case. The CNTR is always happy to share its data to help empower the global Church.

  • Volunteer Joanna Woo has created a Sword module for the Koine Greek version of the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament which comes with the CNTR’s entire Universal Apparatus (https://crosswire.org/sword/modules/ModInfo.jsp?modName=SRKoine). It does not contain any punctuation or diacritical marks, so it is better suited for advanced Greek students.

  • Volunteer Luke Carpenter has done some programming using AI to align the Latin Vulgate with the CNTR collation, but we need someone who knows Latin and Greek to check it before we put it online. If you are able to help with that or know someone else who can, please let us know. This process will serve as the prototype for adding the other early versions as well.

  • The work I am most excited about right now is adding the church father scripture quotations to the CNTR database. What once looked like a task that would take more than a decade to complete has been reduced to what may be only a matter of months. While we initially pursued using our own AI trained by one of the volunteers, I have since come up with an algorithmic solution that appears to generate better results. The prototype is still under development, but the results look very promising. Some volunteers will eventually be needed after the data is mined to oversee some of the final steps, but almost all of the work can be automated.

  • The CNTR keeps becoming more and more popular averaging up to 20,000 hits a day. According to some website trackers, the CNTR is the number one website for textual criticism, but I don’t put a lot of stock in such numbers. The CNTR currently has around 18 active volunteers working on a wide range of projects which is part of the vision of keeping the project going long 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!

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