Alan Bunning is the Executive Director of the Center for New Testament Restoration. He received a D.Litt. from the Kensington Theological Academy for his work done in textual criticism. Alan previously was an Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at Ivy Tech Community College and then was a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Purdue University before recently retiring.
The Universal Apparatus
Abstract
Translators who are concerned about textual variants are usually limited to the information provided in the apparatuses of their critical texts. Such information is incomplete as they only show about ten percent of the variants while the vast majority are completely ignored. And for the variants that are shown, only a limited list of witnesses are displayed that varies from book to book. And on top of that, sometimes they contain errors! The Universal Apparatus (UA) was created to address these problems by providing the first complete apparatus to be generated for all witnesses across all variants in a corpus. The UA is computer-generated from original source data to minimize the possibility of introducing errors. The UA provides some additional advantages in that it is a lot simpler to use and understand for there is only one set of substitution symbols, and it is portable so that the same apparatus can work with any critical text. It also offers the feature of indicating which readings are supported by the other major critical texts which is often just as much of a curiosity for translators.