Center for New Testament Restoration

[Alan Bunning]

Here is the beta version of a website I have created that contains individual electronic transcriptions of all extant manuscripts, quotations, talismans, etc. of the Greek New Testament up to a terminus ad quem of 400 AD. It has taken me several years to create what some consider to be the “holy grail” of textual criticism. All of these manuscripts have also been assembled in a verse-by-verse collation for the entire New Testament. Instead of rely on apparatuses, you can now see transcripts of the manuscripts themselves. The standards used for these manuscripts is discussed at http://bunning.gweb.io/CNTR/downloads/manuscripts.pdf and an overview of the project and its future goals is discussed at http://bunning.gweb.io/CNTR/downloads/project.pdf. I would certainly appreciate any comments or criticism concerning the direction of the project, which I understand many will find to be radical. But please try to limit your comments to logic, reason, and evidence if you wish to persuade me of a better approach.

This beta version might be a little slow at times because it is on a free hosting site, so please don’t start linking to the site yet or the bandwidth limits would soon be exceeded. I have already had to move the site once. Right now I am just looking for feedback and will probably move the site to a more permanent URL later. I am hoping to find a partnership with a Christian college or university to house this project and continue its research, so if you know of such opportunities, please let me know. For now, the website is at:

http://bunning.gweb.io/CNTR/

The individual transcriptions and the collation are located under the manuscripts tab. Please let me know of any comments you have.

Alan Bunning

[RandallButh]

Wow, that is a lot of work. Glad to see א 01 B03 A02 and D05, and the principle eclectic versions listed.

[Ken M. Penner]

Thanks for this. Your project clearly illustrates some of the complexity scribes encountered when of transcribing Hebrew or Aramaic into Greek, exemplified in Mark 15.34 in parallel lines.
Any plans for something similar for the Jewish Scriptures in Greek?

[Alan Bunning]

Any plans for something similar for the Jewish Scriptures in Greek?

It will take me quite some time to finish the things I already plan to do with this project. After that, I will just have to see how it goes...

[Alan Bunning]

Announcing that the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) website has been updated with several significant improvements. The most notable being the move from the unreliable free web hosting services I have been using, to a more permanent home at http://greekcntr.org. Please update your links accordingly. Many thanks to Micheal Palmer for providing services to host this website under his Greek-Language.com domain.

As has been eagerly awaited for some time, all CNTR transcriptions have now been released in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML format for free download under a Creative Commons license. Realize that these transcriptions are still a work in progress, so derivative works will not be allowed until later when more of the bugs have been worked out of the system.

Besides this, there have also been many other bug fixes and improvements in the manuscript transcriptions which are listed under the News tab. In particular, the position of the words in the collation has significantly improved due to a new and improved alignment algorithm.

Let me know if you see any errors or can suggest any improvements. Feedback is welcome as I look to improve this valuable resource and make the constructs of the New Testament free and accessible to all.

[Jonathan Robie]

Way cool. I knew about the new host, I'm extremely pleased that the XML can now be downloaded. Thanks for all the work you put into this important resource!

[Paul-Nitz]

This site should be promoted.
A) You B-Greekers who use it, tell us your experience.
B) You B-Greeking clergy out there, recommend this site to your alma mater seminary's NT department.

My alma mater appreciated the heads up. One NT prof. asked, "Could this be made available free (like Perseus) within the Logos software?"

[Alan Bunning]

FYI, I just made another major update to the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) website http://greekcntr.org. One notable feature is a first cut of adding revised Strong’s numbers to all CNTR texts which can be seen by hovering over any word in the collation. This is the first step in providing morphological parsing to all texts using one standard scheme which is explained in the project description (http://greekcntr.org/downloads/project.pdf). I will have to make some more changes to it later to incorporate the feedback I am getting from Stephen Hughes on the "Possible or plausible?" thread. Another new feature is the ability to filter out witnesses by class. This was added in anticipation of the many more witnesses that will be included in the future. There were also some other minor bug fixes and textual improvements. A complete list of all of the changes is listed at http://greekcntr.org/news.htm. As always, if you notice any problems or want to help out in any way, please let me know.

[Alan Bunning]

I have just finished my next major milestone at the CNTR (https://greekcntr.org) in which I have parsed all the most important variants of the New Testament and provided contextual English glosses for each word, essentially turning the entire CNTR collation into an interlinear format. The “most important variants” here means every variant found in the class 1 and class 2 data up to 400 AD, as well as any variant chosen by the major critical texts. That is about 35,000 words I had to parse (beyond the ones already parsed in the major critical texts) and had to create several new lexical entries to accommodate them. As far as I can tell, for the first time in history, the average person who does not know Greek is now able to see where the variants are and, more importantly, can get an idea of what they mean. For those who use my collation for teaching Greek, do not fear, for the interlinear feature can be turned off with the filter option. (If you have been using the website before, you may need to do a hard refresh to get it to work.) I know there are still a few errors in the data and the glosses need a lot more work, but that should improve significantly over the next few months. There are plans that volunteers from Unfolding Word will later check everything for accuracy. In the meantime, let me know if you see any errors or have any suggestions for improvement.

The greater item of interest to people here, however, is the work that was done under the hood which will not be readily evident for a while. That is, I finished the universal slot system I had mentioned here months ago which enables all manuscripts to be compared to the equivalent words in other manuscripts, ignoring spelling differences and alternative forms. This will allow people who are working on different textual features to quickly transfer their data to the equivalent words of another text. And the beautiful part of the design is that the SlotID’s will never change even as new variants are added. Several groups had approached me requesting this type of data, and a first cut of it has been shipped to Andy Huber (creator of Biblearc) for checking with some new software he is creating. All words were also analyzed and classified by the computer phonetically, and all spelling deviations (dittography, haplography, etc.) were recorded so that they can be easily queried. (I still have a couple weeks of work to do on sound-alike conjugations though). I always cringe when someone publishes a paper where they painstakingly counted the number of some particular scribal habit by hand, when I can write an SQL query off the CNTR database to do the same thing in about 5 minutes. You will notice that the collation now indicates dittography and spelling errors (see the legend), and later will show the specific spelling transformations.

Another by-product of this process for textual criticism, is that the boundaries of all variant units are now marked, enabling the automatic generation of a more detailed and comprehensive apparatus than the ones normally supplied with the critical texts. I also now have the capability to produce EXACT variant counts based on various criteria: letter differences, word differences, word position differences, and variant units. If you are interested in getting access to some of this data, I will see what I can do to accommodate requests, but I make no guarantees as to timeliness right now. This whole process took 9 months of my nights and weekends and I have neglected a lot of other work at its expense, so I will need to spend the next few months getting everything else caught back up. Eventually I will get around to writing these things up in more detail in the project description, and there are probably 2 or 3 papers that I should probably look to publish as well. If someone wants to co-author a paper on precise variant counts, I would be willing to move that up in priority. BTW, I plan on attending the Linguistics and New Testament Greek conference at SEBTS in Wakeforest next weekend in case anyone wants to catch me there.

[Barry Hofstetter]

Just wanted to acknowledge this. Sounds like a lot of hard work, but of great use when perfected.