Textual Criticism, Greek Language and Linguistics

November 25, 2016

Alan Bunning's Textual Criticism Resources

cntriconforhamepage I’ve updated the homepage to give more prominent placement to Alan Bunning’s Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR). The transcriptions of New Testament manuscripts he has provided are amazing. Having these available in machine-actionable form is an incredible boon to the work of textual criticism!

I linked the image on the homepage directly to the manuscripts page at CNTR rather than the project homepage to give quick access to the carefully aligned transcriptions. Once you get there, though, the menu at the top of the page gives you quick access to the project’s homepage and other resources to help you understand the transcriptions and the process used to produce them.

We all owe sincere thanks to Alan for his careful and thorough work.

May 1, 2016

GreekCNTR.org

CNTR It is with great delight that I can now announce the launch of an updated version of The Center for New Testament Restoration with hosting support through Greek-Language.com.

We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Alan Bunning for making his resources freely available online. I am proud to be able to support his work by giving those materials a home here at http://cntr.greek-language.com. While it is possible to access Alan’s materials at that address, though, to avoid confusion, I recommend that you bookmark them at his new domain name: http://greekcntr.org. You will see exactly the same resources at both addresses.

The Center for New Testament Restoration provides a wealth of data on manuscript readings in a very user-friendly format. If you are interested in textual criticism and have not yet discovered this resource, you should take the time to get to know it.

Here’s what Alan had to say in his announcement earlier today:

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.

January 3, 2013

Nestle-Aland 28: The Newest Standard Critical Text of the Greek New Testament

NA28 The 28th edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece (the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament) is now available. It was unveiled in November at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

It has been nineteen years since the last revision, and a great deal of text critical work has happened in the intervening years. The Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster deserves significant praise for this new edition since it is they who have provided the scholarship and expertise to bring about this publication by the Deutshe Bibelgesellschaft.

Among the many advantages of this new edition over the previous one are the online tools for reading it.

Dan Wallace has provided a nice evaluation of the new edition in which he discusses some of the more significant textual differences between the 27th and 28th editions and critiques the diglot version in which the Greek text is accompanied by the English Standard Version. You can read his evaluation on his blog. His evaluation is the bottom half of the blog post you will see when you click on the link.

Another multilingual edition is available that includes the New Revised Standard Bible and the Revised English Bible. Yes: that’s two English translations alongside the Greek text. Right now Barnes & Noble is offering preorders of this triple-text edition at $49.26 rather than the $72.99 price that is being advertised for after publication. [They say this is 32% off, but their math is questionable. $49.26 is actually 32.51% less than $72.99. That rounds to 33%, not 32%, but I’ll be glad to have the extra change!]