The Analytical Lexicon and Concordance of the Greek New Testament (ALC) represents a new category of biblical resources based on new advanced scholarship. There have been other analytical lexicons before 1, but they don’t indicate where the word forms occur. And there have been other concordances before 2, but they do not indicate the morphological parsings of the word forms. The ALC, however, combines the best of both worlds and moves the bar forward in scholarship by providing several significant advantages:
To this end, the ALC endeavors to continue to provide the best scholarship available in the field of linguistics and lexicography in order to help facilitate the understanding of the New Testament Greek for the average user.
The ALC was created in 2024 by Alan Bunning for the Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR).6 The CNTR was founded in 2013 and is an unincorporated non-profit association run by volunteers devoted to the core values of free, open, and accessible materials, scientific textual criticism, and biblical scholarship led by evangelical Christians. The ALC is just one of many resources produced by the CNTR in fulfillment of its overall vision. The data used for the ALC is extracted from the CNTR database which is the same database used to generate the CNTR collation, apparatus, and transcriptions. This CNTR database also contains detailed lexical, morphological, and syntactical data providing a comprehensive view of the Greek New Testament.
Words are depicted with a traditional orthography using canonical spellings, accents, and capitalization that became prevalent during the Middle Ages. There were no spaces, standardized spelling, accents, capitalization, or punctuation in the early Greek manuscripts, and the forms of some letters were not the same either.7 The traditional orthography is used here, however, as a convenience for students since that is the form used in most other biblical resources. Words from the early manuscript with scribal spelling mistakes are also represented with their corrected spellings.
Lemmas that are given for words that have been declined or conjugated are depicted in the following lexical forms (accounting for suppletion): nouns in nominative singular form, adjectives in nominative masculine singular form, and verbs in present infinitive form. The present infinitive form for verbs is a more suitable abstract form for lexicography than the first-person singular used in some lexicons, for it better distinguishes the stems of contract verbs.
Editorial decisions were made according to an orthographical-priority approach for words in the early manuscripts that are homophones.8 For example, there are hundreds of verbs with the ending of “ται” or “τε” that are used interchangeably given the common phonetical substitution “αι” = “ε”. While the context may often indicate a preference between a third person singular word or a second person plural word, there are occasions where the choice would otherwise be ambiguous. In such cases, the canonical interpretation of the spelling was given priority, provided it was in keeping with the grammatical context and known scribal habits.
The glosses accompanying the lexical entries were originally derived from John Jeffrey Dodson's Greek-English Lexicon9 and modified in various ways, adding glosses for words not assigned Strong’s numbers and for several words not found in any other lexicon. Caution is warranted in the use of glosses in general, for they are merely intended to give an overview of the range of meanings, and should never be confused as a substitute for rigorous lexical work.
Words are depicted using a parsing scheme derived from the CNTR database, where the syntactical role (part of speech) of each word is identified along with its morphological attributes. The word “role” is used here to refer to its part of speech in a sentence which could be different than its normal lexical classification. For example, a word that is normally thought of as an adjective could be used substantively which technically then makes it a noun in the sentence. There are also several subcategories of these roles that are designated in the parsing scheme where applicable:
| Role | Subcategories |
|---|---|
| noun | diminutive |
| substantive | comparative, superlative, cardinal, ordinal |
| adjective | comparative, superlative |
| determiner | article, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, cardinal, ordinal, possessive, quantifier, relative |
| pronoun | demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, personal, possessive, reciprocal, reflexive, relative |
| verb | |
| adverb | comparative, superlative, interrogative |
| preposition | improper |
| conjunction | coordinating, correlative, subordinate, adverbial |
| particle | foreign |
Closed function morphemes such as determiners, pronouns, and conjunctions have detailed grammatical subtypes that are different from open content morphemes such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs which could be further categorized by semantic domains of meaning obtainable from the lexicon.10 The role of a word determines which of the other morphological properties may apply.
| Role | Properties |
|---|---|
| noun | case, gender, number |
| substantive | |
| adjective | |
| determiner | person, case, gender, number |
| pronoun | |
| verb | mood, tense, voice, person, case, gender, number |
| interjection | |
| adverb | |
| preposition | |
| conjunction | |
| particle |
| Property | Attributes |
|---|---|
| mood | indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative, infinitive, participle11 |
| tense | present, future, aorist, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, future perfect |
| voice | active, middle, passive |
| person | first, second, third |
| case | vocative, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative |
| gender | masculine, feminine, neuter |
| number | singular, plural |
A more detailed description of all of these terms and their abbreviations is found in the glossary at the end of the book. As with any linguistic parsing scheme, there are always a number of editorial decisions that are made with various trade-offs:
Some of the parsing information such as substantives and the determiner subcategories may be more detailed than the linguistical distinctions found in other parsing schemes. For those who prefer a simpler parsing scheme, note that it is quite easy to convert these categories to a broader parsing scheme. For example, someone may wish to ignore the distinct properties of determiners and just consider them all to be adjectives. But the converse of going from the more general to more specific is not possible – it is a one-way street.
Consequently, it is possible to covert this data to either Robinson’s15 and Tauber’s16 parsing schemes without data loss, but the opposite is not possible.
For each word form, all of the verses where it occurs in the New Testament are listed exhaustively unless followed by the “…” symbol. For those very common words, the number of occurrences is limited to 300 verses, which affects only 61 entries. Verse numbers that are listed with no space between them all reside in the same chapter.
The superscript notation that follows a verse represents a manuscript containing a singular variant reading that is not found elsewhere in the corpus. The purpose of this is to alert the reader that they may not find the occurrence of such words listed in other commonly used biblical resources. (Note that there will still be some variants that are not singular which are not represented in other materials.) The identifiers used for the manuscripts along with their full descriptions can be found on the CNTR website.17
The CNTR endeavors to provide high-quality data and continues to improve and correct its data when errors are noted. As with any work introducing an extensive amount of new scholarship on a dataset of this magnitude, some errors are probably to be expected. To help minimize errors, this parsing data was compared to both Maurice Robinson’s and James Tauber’s data to help improve its accuracy for the words that are found in the critical texts. Of course, there are many disagreements between these two schemes, as well as with the ALC’s own parsing scheme. Sometimes different linguistic categories are used to explain the same situation, and sometimes the word forms are ambiguous so the designation is simply a matter of opinion.
The ALC does not provide all possible parsings of a given word in each given location, but editorially makes what is considered to be the most plausible choice. In most cases where more than one choice was possible, multiple experts were consulted. While some categories of parsings may be disputable, the advantage is that the similar occurrences of words are still grouped together, so it is still relatively easy to find them, regardless of how they have been labeled.
As previously mentioned, the lexical, morphological, and syntactical data used for the ALC is derived from the CNTR database, which will also be used as the basis for the upcoming companion CNTR lexicon. Although this data is currently relatively stable, some aspects of it may change if different designations are specified in the lexicon. Thus, it is expected that the ALC may later be revised to conform to the categories of the CNTR lexicon when it is released sometime in the future.
In the open-source world, there is always the issue of deciding when the data is good enough to be released, versus allowing early inaccurate or incomplete copies to be distributed all over the Internet where they are usually never updated. Thus, in this case, the data has been deemed to be “good enough” for initial release. The latest form of the data as it is being developed and improved is always displayed online in the CNTR collation of early manuscripts.18
It probably could go without saying that this undertaking would not have been possible without being able to stand on the shoulders of the giants who went before me. Beyond that, there are a few individuals who I want to thank in particular:
But most of all, I want to give all praise and glory to Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of my life. For if it were not for Him, this project never would have been started, and none of this would have ever transpired.