Center for New Testament Restoration Blog

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...