Center for New Testament Restoration

Manuscript Welcome to the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR): “Bringing scientific textual criticism to the masses.” An overview of the CNTR project can be found in this short video and the Project Overview. One of the purposes of the CNTR is to apply a scientific approach to the age-old question, “What were the original autographs of the New Testament?” This is discussed in the NEW book, “Restoration of the New Testament: The Case for Scientific Textual Criticism”.

The CNTR has quickly grown in popularity and its data has already been used in the creation of three new critical texts – the Tyndale House (TH) Greek New Testament, the Bunning Heuristic Prototype (BHP) Greek New Testament, and the NEW Statistical Restoration (SR) Greek New Testament. The SR is the long-planned replacement for the BHP which served as the basis for the unfoldingWord Greek New Testament (UGNT) that has already been translated into scores of different languages all over the world. The SR is a computer-generated text designed to reflect the most probable text based on statistical analysis and algorithms using the earliest manuscript evidence with a reasoned eclecticism approach. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the field of textual criticism as the subjectivity and theological bias of human editors is replaced with more objective statistical and computational methods. The SR is released under an open license (CC BY 4.0) and is available as a free download. More information about the SR can be found in this short video and its Introduction.

The CNTR was the first to complete two major milestones in an effort to advance the field of textual criticism:

The CNTR has released electronic transcriptions of every available extant Greek manuscript containing portions of the New Testament up to the year 400 AD, many of which still cannot be found anywhere else. The CNTR database now contains over 1.8 million words featuring over 200 of the earliest witnesses from extant manuscripts. All of these witnesses have been aligned into the highly-acclaimed CNTR computer-generated collation.
The CNTR has provided an English interlinear view of the collation and NEW apparatus so that for the first time in history, the average person who does not know Greek is now able to see where the variant readings are and can get an idea of what they mean. All of the manuscripts and critical texts have been morphologically parsed to the same scheme and displayed with Enhanced Strong’s Numbers which had never been done before.

All of this data resides in the CNTR database which includes a number of advanced features that were specifically designed for work in textual criticism, enabling areas of research that had never before been possible. The CNTR project is a continual work in progress and various aspects of the CNTR database are at different stages of development, so please contact the CNTR to report any errors or discrepancies that you may find. All of the data on the website should be considered to be in a beta stage and remains restricted by copyright to prevent errors from being disseminated while its being developed. As data is ready for public distribution, it is released under an open license and made available for free download in the Resources area.

This website works best on a desktop computer with the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, or Opera browser. The mobile experience is currently less than desirable. If there appear to be problems, try doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-F5) to ensure that the latest updates take affect. If the manuscripts do not appear to be using Koine Greek characters, please download the free KoineGreek font.

Alan Bunning, D.Litt.
Executive Director
Center for New Testament Restoration
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