Explanation

Our starting point is the Greek text prepared by the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR).

Dr Alan Bunning of CNTR undertakes scientific analysis of more ancient manuscripts than ever before examined in the history of textual criticism. Most modern New Testament Greek texts are based on manuscripts that date from the Middle Ages, copies that were made more than a thousand years after the death of those who had been with Jesus. Dr Bunning has assembled 193 manuscripts all dated prior to 400AD, and he has made them freely available in a digital database.

Dr Bunning points out “that there are over 35 places where every early manuscript is in agreement with how a word is spelled, but every modern critical text has changed that spelling to a different form.”

An example is the 6th word in the book of Matthew, ΔΑΥΕΙΔ (David). The Textus Receptus, the Westcott-Hort text, and the Nestle-Aland text (used by the United Bible Societies), all render this spelling as ΔΑΥΙΔ. But the earliest manuscripts all render this ΔΑΥΕΙΔ.

The epsilon (Ε) in ΔΑΥΕΙΔ makes a difference in the numerics of the word, the verse and, together with other variants, to the underlying mathematics of the New Testament.

The correction in the spelling of ΔΑΥΕΙΔ, and in four other names in Matthew 1 (ΟΖΕΙΑΝ, ΕΛΙΑΚΕΙΜ, ΑΧΕΙΜ, and ΜΑΘΘΑΝ), makes no difference to the accuracy of translations into English, nor to theology, but it obviously affects the numerics.

Format

Our Greek text is presented in all uppercase letters. The original Greek was written in all uppercase letters.

A review of the CNTR website will show that certain letters had a different form in New Testament times (eg, sigma was in this form С rather than Σ), but we are using modern Greek uppercase letters because they are familiar to most students. The numeric value of letters are not affected.

In the original New Testament writing there was no punctuation in the text and no space left between words.

Cursive script

Greek writing changed around the 8th Century AD. Cursive script came into use. This is the lettering style that is in use in modern New Testament Greek readers. However, it was not the writing style of Bible times. To quote Dr Bunning “…students today are learning to read Medieval Greek that is almost unrecognizable from its earlier form.”

Diacritic marks were also added to the cursive script of the New Testament text. The diacritics were to help with pronunciation.

However, two marks were put in place to indicate that certain letters in the original writing were dropped from the text. One of these is the iota subscript. The other is used to indicate the apocopic form of a word.

In all cases, we have restored the dropped letters. This does not affect translation into English, or theology, but it does affect the numerics.