Using Artificial Intelligence to Reconstruct the Text of the New Testament

What is it about?

Textual criticism is the field of research in which scholars examine and compare manuscripts of ancient texts in order to reconstruct the original wording of the text. While computers have been utilized in New Testament textual criticism for decades, this paper explores a powerful yet untapped application of computer science to the task of textual criticism: artificial intelligence.

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Photo by Skyler Gerald on Unsplash

Photo by Skyler Gerald on Unsplash

Why is it important?

While human scholars have greatly advanced the field of textual criticism over the last several decades, there is still a limitation to how quickly human scholars can can process the thousands of manuscripts that we have of the New Testament. By applying machine learning algorithms to the task of textual criticism, scholars could conduct an exhaustive evaluation of every manuscript available for a given text in a fraction of a second, vastly increasing the efficiency of their work and facilitating advancements in the field of textual criticism.