Principal Investigator:
Dr. William F. Warren
Director of the H. Milton Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies
Professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

Website: http://nttext.org/

Summary: IDCH is working with the Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies (HCNTTS) to develop resources that will help both scholars and the public gain a deeper understanding of the Greek New Testament manuscripts. More than 6,000 manuscript copies of the New Testament are currently known to exist. Since these copies were made by hand, each is a unique text and has a number of differences, or variants, from the other copies. The enormous number of manuscripts in existence make compiling a list of the variants a major undertaking—one that HCNTTS has been working on for more than a decade.

The initial phase of our collaboration is to create an English-based tool for pastors, teachers, and lay people to help understand a little more about the footnotes that can be found in most English translations. HCNTTS researchers are isolating places in the text where non-original variants of substance offer a difference in meaning the helps us understand how the original text might have been understood in the early church. The variants being isolated are ones that cannot be easily explained as accidental and are helpful for understanding how the early church might have been interpreting scripture.

The goal of the English-based commentary is to help with exegesis. This tool is not meant simply to be a database of variants but is being designed in order to help better understand the biblical text. Some places of variation act as ancient commentaries on difficult places of interpretation in the text. In some places, these variants act as our oldest interpretation!

In the second phase of this project, we will be working to provide online access to the HCNTTS Critical Apparatus. Ten years went into the making of the world’s first comprehensive searchable, electronic database of variants in the entire Greek New Testament. The database is currently available for purchase as a module in Accordance Software and soon in BibleWorks Software. The HCNTTS Critical Apparatus includes variants of all types (including even orthographic shifts, nomina sacra, etc.) with a sampling of at least 50 manuscripts for each book of the New Testament.

In addition to making the apparatus more widely accessible to scholars around the world, our work on this project will make it easier for HCNTTS researchers to maintain and update this enormous database and facilitate future development of tools to support computational analysis and visualization of this data.

About the Center: The H. Milton Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies (CNTTS) at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary is dedicated to studying the manuscript copies of the New Testament. Founded in 1998, has become one of the premier settings worldwide for the study of the New Testament text in the Greek manuscripts, with collaborative work with the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP) and the Institute for New Testament Textual Studies (INTF) in Münster, Germany. The project is led by Dr. William F. Warren, Director of CNTTS and Landrum P. Leavell II Professor of New Testament and Greek at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.