Center for New Testament Restoration Blog

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 This will eventually lead to a revision of the Technical Reference document, which has long been out of date.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...