Announcing that the Center for New Testament Restoration has finally added the beta version of the Universal Apparatus to its website.
https://greekcntr.org/apparatus/index.htm This was a long time in coming as people have been awaiting its arrival since it was presented at the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature and the 2021 Bible Translation conferences. The CNTR apparatus provides several features 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 they mean.
- Utilizes variant unit boundaries automatically determined by a computer algorithm.
- Created directly from the raw manuscript data to help eliminate errors.
The apparatus currently only contains extant manuscript data from up to 400AD along with some modern critical texts. This beta version is still a work in progress and therefore remains restricted by copyright, but when it is ready for production it will be released under an open license. Try doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-F5) if you don’t see the changes. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.