Anselm Project Bible 4.0

Version 4.0 of the Anselm Project Bible is out and in the reader. Every one of the 2,058 passages was translated again from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and every place where the manuscripts disagree was decided again. This post covers why that was necessary, how it was done, and what changed.

The problem in version 3

At the end of September a review of an Isaiah report turned up a problem I did not expect. Isaiah 53:2 through 53:12 in the APB matched one modern published translation word for word.

I went to the records. In May, the translating model had written two drafts of that passage. One was its own work, and it was rough. The other was fluent, and it was the published translation. The selection step took the fluent one. The fidelity audit flagged it, the committee was called back in, the flags stayed, and a fallback in my code shipped the passage anyway. That fallback had let 358 of the 2,058 passages out the door with the audit still flagged. Let this be a warning on prompting, because I had asked plenty of times about the fidelity of the project, but I had not asked it the right way.

The audit asked whether every idea in the English traced back to a word in the source. Wording remembered from a faithful translation passes that test every time, because the people who made that translation did their work well. Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 had a clean audit and was 92 percent one published version.

So, I looked at my own prompts. The worked examples I had written to show the committee what good output looked like were phrases from real verses, in the wording of a published translation. Those examples have been removed from every prompt and every diagnostic message.

The problem wasn't in the critical text or the translation work - it was in the review passes, which had license to make adjustments for the sake of readability.

So the version 3 text could not be trusted anywhere, and patching it verse by verse would have meant guessing where the problem was. The whole Bible had to be translated again. Luckily, I had planned on doing that already. After all, there are many new models to try.

How 4.0 was translated

The committee for 4.0 is one model, GPT-6.1 Sol, run blind as per usual. It is never told it is translating the Bible, never given a book name or a verse number, and it has no memory between calls. Each passage went through nine steps in order: an analysis of how the words combine, one draft written from every attested sense of each word, a segment review, a fidelity audit, a terminology pass, a style pass, a proofread, a formal English pass, and a meaning review that sees only the source words and the English.

Two gates are new. The recall gate is code, and it runs after every step. It fails any draft that shares a run of 30 or more words with the earlier text. The meaning gate sends a flagged clause back to the source words, up to three times. Isaiah 52:13 through 53:12 was the first passage through, and it was the test. The first trial drafts got three clauses of it wrong, and the meaning review had to catch all three before the full run started.

No other Bible entered the pipeline at any point, and no person edited a verse. If a gate was still flagged after several rounds, I deputized a model as chairman, which was Claude Fable 5.1. Fable resolved the passage from the committee's last draft, and that ruling is logged against the verse where anyone can read it.

A borrowed phrase from the dictionary

One more source of borrowed wording turned up late. 1 Corinthians 7:36 came out with the phrase "past the bloom of youth," and there is no bloom anywhere in the Greek. This was, oddly, the same problem I avoided in version 3.0, but here it was again. The word in that verse is used once in the New Testament, and the 1922 dictionary entry for it was an old English rendering of that one verse. The committee had been given a translation and told it was a definition.

The solution was to handle hapax and other scarce words very carefully. A word used three times or fewer now carries only its short gloss. Every English word in the translation was then checked against the source words of its verse. The words that traced to nothing were ranked by how rare they are in English, and the 2,135 rarest were each read against the Hebrew or Greek. Thirteen verses were fixed. 1 Corinthians 7:36 now reads "if one is past one's prime."

The check afterwards

After the text was finished, it was compared against four published translations, from files the pipeline never saw. The check measures each passage's longest run of shared words and its overall similarity, against the ceiling that a literal rendering of plain narrative reaches by itself.

Some verses are so common or short or obvious that they are going to be the same across nearly every version. For example, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is going to match everybody. "Jesus wept" is another example.

Of the passages checked, 1,688 are independent, 343 are close, and 26 matched closely enough to be flagged. Each of the 26 was read and ruled on. They are lists of names, census rolls, itineraries, and short literal sentences with one possible wording. Isaiah 52:13 through 53:12 now has no verse identical to any of the four. Isaiah 53:5 reads:

And he was wounded because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities. The chastening for our peace was upon him, and through his wound there was healing for us.

The textual decisions

Version 3.5 settled the 14,877 places where the manuscripts disagree, and I wrote about that in September. Two problems turned up in that work. At 1,621 places the readers had been shown a reading in the wrong form, with a Greek edition's added words standing alone in place of the full wording. And the first reader on all of them was Grok 4.3, a model I am grateful for but have since stopped using for this work.

Translating a new Bible over decisions I no longer stood behind did not sit right. So all 14,877 places were decided again. GPT-6.1 Sol read every one blind. Claude Fable 5.1 read 2,483 of them as a second reader from another company, including every place where Sol wanted to leave the base text. A departure needed both readers to agree, and the first reader had to be at least 0.8 confident. There was no tiebreaker. Where the two disagreed, the base text stood.

The readers adopted 124 departures from the base text. Version 3.5 had 90. Eighty are new, and 46 of the old ones went back to the base. The base text stands at 293 places where one reader or both preferred something else and the bar was not met. Forty-five verses changed in English as a result, and each was translated again from the words and put through the same gates. A few of them:

• Deuteronomy 32:8 now ends "according to the number of the sons of God." It was "sons of Israel."
• 1 Samuel 17:4 gives Goliath's height as four cubits and a span. It was six.
• Psalm 22:16 reads "They have pierced my hands and my feet." It was "Like a lion."
• Psalm 145:13 has its missing line back: "The LORD is faithful in all his words, and kind in all his works."
• Isaiah 53:11 reads "he will see light and be satisfied."
• Ephesians 1:1 says "in Ephesus" again.
• Romans 16:25 through 27 came out of brackets. Both readers keep the doxology.

Some of them land where the major translations land and some do not, but at least here it makes sense now.

The record in the reader

Open any passage in the reader and press Audit. The panel shows the committee's record for that passage: the stages it went through, the first draft, the meaning review, the gates, and any chair ruling with its reason. Every verse with a textual decision carries a note that gives the reading the base text has, the reading the copies also carry, which one was taken, and which readers decided it. There are 876 of those notes.

All 2,058 passages have new audio with the verses timed to the text. The Crux Registry has been brought up to the new decisions, and the history of every revision, including what went wrong in version 3, is on the About page.

If you find a verse that reads wrong, you know where to find me.

God bless, everyone.