Center for New Testament Restoration Blog

Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ !   A lot has transpired since my last newsletter , so it is time to give you another update a bout what has been going on at the C enter for New Testament Restoration (C NTR ) : The work on updating and modernize the code base has been completed and the entire website was updated along with some other improvements. A number of bugs were fixed so that the mobile experience is a lot better too. Now I need to revise the Technical Reference document, which has long been out of date. A comparing tool was added to the website ( https://greekcntr.org/comparing/index.html ) that allows any two manuscripts to be compared either semantically or phonetically. S emantical differences are differences in meaning indicated by lexeme or morphology, not differentiating different word forms within the same lexeme. Phonetical differences are differences in pronunciation, not differentiating co mmon spellings that would have sounded similar. This feat...

Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ! It is time again to take a break and give you an update about some of the things going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR): Most of the work I have been doing the past few months involved revising and documenting the code base and the database, and bringing them up to modern standards. This will eventually lead to a revision of the Technical Reference document, which has long been out of date. This is all in preparation for handing the project off to the next generation. Along those lines, I have had several talks with Asbury Theological Seminary about housing the infrastructure of the project in the future. The project has also been moved from Windows to Linux which did take some time, but went flawlessly. Developers can work in either environment, since the main components such as the Node.js and MySQL did not change, but some of the supporting scripts had to be modified. This conversion had been planned for several ye...

I have been diligently working on several things behind the scenes, so it is time to take a break and give you an update about some of the things going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR):   The 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, has now been completed. The work of getting some transcriptions and aligning them to the collation, however, will still take several months. The volunteer who was going to do that fell seriously ill, so pray with us for his full recovery so that the next phase of that project can continue. The biggest undertaking since my last update was the new update of the CNTR Website. JavaScript and HTML standards have changed greatly in the 20+ years since I started, so an entire rewrite was in order. All of the CNTR code base is being modernized, and I made my first use of web components in the website. Many of the changes you wo...

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 intere...

Here is an update about some of the things going on at the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR): A lot more lexicon work was done under the hood on the CNTR database towards the release of a new open-source lexicon that is under development. There are currently about 10 volunteers working on the task. This is a significant undertaking that may take a couple of years before the data is ready for release. The goal is to produce an open-source lexicon that will exceed the capabilities in a number of areas compared to the copyrighted BDAG lexicon which has been the de facto standard up till now. Related to some of that work, I have finally released, “The Analytical Lexicon and Concordance of the Greek New Testament” which has been published by GlossaHouse ( https://glossahouse.com/products/the-analytical-lexicon-and-concordance-of-the-greek-new-testament ). You can also get it from Amazon and other outlets where the shipping may be cheaper for those overseas. Here is the descripti...

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 Bi...

Many things have transpired at the CNTR since my last newsletter, so let me try to get everyone caught up to speed: My paper entitled “The First Computer-Generated Greek New Testament” was published in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism in November ( http://jbtc.org/v28/TC-2023_Bunning.pdf ). The paper goes into greater detail about the methodology involved in creating the Statistical Restoration (SR) Greek New Testament which was published by GlossaHouse in October ( https://glossahouse.com/products/statistical-restoration-greek-new-testament-srgnt ). The CNTR project is now more intentional on utilizing volunteers and has held several callouts for those who have expressed interest. There are now 10 volunteers who have agreed to help out in various aspects of the project in keeping with their skill sets, with several actively involved in current tasks. My book entitled “Restoration of the New Testament: The Case for Scientific Textual Criticism” was published by GlossaHous...

I can’t mention everything that has gone on, but here are some of the highlights: The project that the CNTR submitted to the Lightsys Code-a-Thon went very well as 4 students from Cedarville University wrote a Python program to find Scripture quotations in the writings of various church fathers. This is not as easy as it sounds because it has to be able to find them with any variant readings or even new variant readings. This should be a valuable asset as I prepare to add that kind of data to the CNTR database. Andrew Case interviewed me in his “Working for the Word” weekly podcast. We discussed a few aspects of the CNTR project and the importance of using open licenses. The CNTR provided free printed evaluation copies of the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament with the Universal Apparatus which was piloted in a class this fall taught by Rob Plummer at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). This provided valuable feedback from the students towards creating a finished...

I want to highlight the Bible translation organization, unfoldingWord, which has been the main sponsor of the CNTR. unfoldingWord’s motto is “The Church in every people group, the Bible in every language”. While this is also the goal of many other Christian organizations, there are a few aspects of unfoldingWord’s approach that are somewhat unique: 1. Church-Centric Bible Translation (CCBT) . unfoldingWord empowers the native church to be in charge of the Bible translation process from start to finish, which ensures that the resulting translation is relevant, utilized, and updatable if necessary. In order to do translation, there needs to be knowledge of both the source and target language. A seminary graduate knows Hebrew/Greek, but not the target language, while the native church knows their own language, but not the biblical languages. So instead of trying to convince the declining population of seminary graduates to go and live in a jungle somewhere, it is much easier to empower ...

The biggest news is the addition of the beta version of the Universal Apparatus to the CNTR website ( https://greekcntr.org/apparatus/index.htm ). This was a long time in coming as people have been awaiting its arrival since I presented it at the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature and the 2021 Bible Translation conferences. The CNTR apparatus provides several improvements not normally found in other apparatuses: Uses one simplified set of symbols that are easier to understand. Can work with any base text instead of being tied to a specific text. First complete apparatus to show all variants for all early witnesses (most only show about 10% of them). Always shows both positive and negative witnesses. Displays partial matches for readings affected by lacuna. Includes major critical texts (which can be filtered out if not desired). Includes interlinear information (by hovering) so that the average user can get an idea of what the...

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...

1. The Statistical Restoration (SR) Greek New Testament is progressing nicely and the next release of it has been updated on the CNTR website. The algorithm has been slightly improved and this version is now about 1.4% words different than the Nestle-Aland 28th edition (only about 1% different if the expert override function is turned on). Many thanks to all who helped spot various issues and offered suggestions for improvement. This latest SR beta version is now considered Release Candidate 1, which means that unless some other issues are found, this will later become the production version of the text that is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. The technical details of how it was generated are discussed in a paper that I later plan to submit to a peer reviewed journal. I think I am finally beginning to see the light at the end tunnel! 2. The CNTR collation has been updated to fix a few bugs and to now only show one verse at a time. Some users may be annoyed by this b...

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,...

1. I made a short CNTR Introduction video, providing a higher-level overview of some of the CNTR’s goals and purposes in a way is that geared toward the average person. I also made a technical video on the CNTR Database for scholars who may be interested in collaborating with the CNTR and working directly with the data. 2. I gave a presentation on “The Universal Apparatus” at the Bible Translation Conference in October which was well received. It outlines a method for providing a simpler format for displaying variant information, while also providing more complete information resulting in greater accuracy. I later gave a slightly different version of that presentation at the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature Conference, Nida Institute - Copenhagen Alliance section held in San Antonio in November. I spoke a second time at the SBL conference giving a presentation entitled “Orthographic Priority for Interpreting Homophones in New Testament Manuscripts” in the Biblical Lexicography s...

1. On May 26, I was interviewed about the CNTR project on Real Science Radio with talk show host Bob Enyart. It was aired on KLTT which is one of the most powerful radio stations in the nation. This was my first time doing anything like this so it was a good learning experience for me. I was a little nervous at the start of the interview but I think it turned out well. You can listen to the interview at https://kgov.com/greek-new-testament-alan-bunning-cntr . 2. A paper I wrote entitled “Orthographical Priority for Interpreting Homophones in New Testament Manuscripts” was accepted for the upcoming Society of Biblical Literature conference in November in the Biblical Lexicography section. It is hard to imagine, but 10 years ago I would not have even known what those words meant! The Society of Biblical Literature is the largest and most reputable conference in the field of Biblical scholarship. It is also home to every liberal doctrine imaginable, so pray that I can have an impact in ...

As some of you know, the biggest news is that I retired from my Senior Lecturer position at Purdue University and now am working full-time on the CNTR project. Some of you may be wondering what exactly I am doing on the CNTR project and why you should care. It all started several decades ago after I took a Greek class and learned that there are numerous differences in the Greek New Testament texts that our Bibles are being translated from. Many differences in Bible translations have nothing to do with how accurate they are, because the texts that they are translating from are different. For example, consider the Lord’s Prayer contained in Luke 11:2-4: “Our Father which art in heaven , Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth . Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil .” (KJV) Notice that the phrases in the b...

Welcome to the new Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) blog! This blog will keep you updated on the operations of the CNTR and cover topics related to scientific textual criticism. Hope you enjoy it!