Passage Study Editions, and APB 4.0 Begins

Two changes went live this week on the reports page, and a third has started in the background. The Devotional and Passage Study reports have been condensed into a smaller menu with clearer sizes; the Teaching and Scholarly reports are retired; and work on version 4.0 of the Anselm Project Bible has begun.

Two reports instead of three

Until this week there were three passage reports, Teaching, Scholarly, and Devotional, and each came in a V4 and a V3 version. V4 was significantly more intensive, but also implied a greater output - which was usually true. But, there were times when the simplicity of V3 did a better job overall.

Taking that idea, I decided to rework the pipeline into three lanes, and bring Devotionals down to one standard one.

Devotional is one report at 1 credit, and is meant to do one thing: take you through a passage quickly, add some understanding of what the author of that passage intended to grow your biblical knowledge, and a prayer written by a historical Christian that fits the circumstances.

Passage Study is the study report, and since all the cool AI kids are doing it, I have named them to describe their levels of detail: Minor, Major, and Summa. The pipeline has been reworked entirely again, and I am very happy with the output.

Minor, Major, Summa

Minor (1 credit) is a shorter study built on the passage's key verses. Do not let the word "Minor" make you feel like it is going to see you short on info. It won't. Minor would equip a Sunday school teacher with more information on a passage than they would likely ever need to do the passage justice.

It gives the setting, the key verses with what they say and what they teach, word notes on the terms that carry the meaning, the passage's place in the canon, its theology, its connection to Christ, one outline for preaching or teaching, and questions for a class. It stays with what Christians generally agree the passage teaches. It suits a Sunday school teacher or small group leader preparing one lesson, a preacher who wants the shape of a passage before writing, or anyone reading a chapter who wants to know what it is about.

Major (2 credits) is the complete study, specifically designed again for people like me: pastors who know the biblical passage well, or need to know more about the ins and outs of the passage on a more thorough level for the purposes of study and enrichment.

It works through what Minor does already, and then also goes further verse by verse, with word studies in the Hebrew or Greek, the passage in the canonical context, the theology with the interpretive options named, the passage and Christ, preaching and teaching strategy, illustrations that have been checked, and study questions.

Summa (4 credits) is the fullest study together with the work of a critical commentary, and is meant for Seminary students, a professor who needs exhaustive understanding of a passage for lecture, or a pastor working hard through the full synthesis of a book or genre and the history of interpretation.

It has everything the Major and Minor have, and it adds the sections a commentary on the shelf carries: the composition and structure of the passage, the background and social world, the text and its manuscript witnesses, the history of interpretation from the early church fathers through the Reformers to modern scholarship, where scholars disagree and why, and avenues for further study. Fifteen sections. I ran it on Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and on Ephesians 2:1-10 while building it, and the Isaiah report came to about the length of a commentary chapter - over 40 pages.

Reports already generated under the old names stay in your library and in the Shared Gallery exactly as they were. Only the create menu changed.

APB 4.0 has begun

Work on version 4.0 of the Anselm Project Bible has started. It is a full retranslation of every book, made over the critical text the 3.5 committee decided, with GPT-6.1 Sol as the lead translator on the committee. Sol drafts each passage from the Hebrew or Greek tokens and the lexicon, and separate blind readers audit the draft for anything added, dropped, or imported, review it for meaning and for its English, and check every draft against recalled wording from published translations before anything is accepted. As with 3.5, no reader is told what passage it is reading.

In full disclosure, though, I believe that there was contamination during the process of version 3. It is possible that the editor process began choosing work selections that aligned with other published bibles rather than thinking through. I have added more adversarial passes, as well as a plagiarism detection series of scripts.

The first passage through the full pipeline was Isaiah 52:13-53:12, and it passed with flying colors. The first books are running now, and this might be the first translation I release in two pushes given the scope: New Testament first, and Old Testament second.

The 3.5 text stays in the reader until 4.0 is complete, and 4.0 will go up on Hugging Face the same way the earlier versions did.

If you run into anything broken on the new cards, you know where to find me.

God bless, everyone.