News & Updates

I spent a few months thinking about how I wanted to do topical reports - easily the most requested feature.

The Original Anselm Project

About a year ago, the original Anselm Project produced both passage reports and topical reports. The topical reports were... very repetitive. And that is the last thing anyone wants. I don't know about you, but I cannot stand when people repeat themselves 1,000 times, and when AI does it it gets ramped up by another factor of 1,000.

I worked on the passage reports, and I decided that I would focus predominately on those reports because they were refining much easier. Asking the passage what is important is, in someways, easier: Matthew generally informs Matthew. However, to do a search on love meant searching for all the nuance of scripture.

AI seemed to be the right tool for the job, but I just couldn't find the right process to make something high-quality. With a heavy heart, I deleted the topical engine.

But, I knew it would come back. I realized while making the background for the Synod that it could, in theory, answer topical questions. That was the spark that made me think again about the Mixture of Experts in terms of a topical report, but I needed some free time to sketch out the pipeline of what to do.

AI Ratings of the Topical Report

Now that version 3 of the site was over, I had a few free braincells and came up with a pipeline and process for the AI to run through, and now, topical reports are back. I am very happy with the results.

Grok 4.1 gave the report a 95/100. Gemini 3 Pro gave the report a 92/100. ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking gave the report a 95/100. Claude 4.5 Sonnet gave the report a 92/100.

When I clarified that the Anselm Project was designed primarily for pastors and seminarians, the average jumped to 96/100.

Cost

Now, the new engine for topical sermons is quite thirsty. The token counts are much higher than I expected for a report like this when I started, but the reason became clear: there is a possibility that a topic could span all 66 books of the standard canon. Many topics such as ones like grace take at least 50 books.

As a result, I had to make the engine cost 3 credits instead of the normal one. I'll continue to play around with it, and if I can get the token costs down without seriously sacrificing quality, I will make adjustments.

Sharing

The same bonuses for sharing passage reports apply to topical reports, and the community gallery has been updated.

Anselm Project Bible Version 1.6

A minor adjustment - I created a post hoc engine to standardize names. No more Bathsheba and Beth-sheba. Those should all be standardized now into Bathsheba. All divine variations of the tetragrammaton should render correctly as The LORD, as is the tradition with English bibles.

The APB was never intended to be a purely "literal" translation. It was intended to be a literal-equivalent, similar to the ESV. So, some editing after the fact makes a lot of sense. It's possible some errors were made in the change, so if you final any, let me know.

God bless, everyone.

The site has received a visual overhaul, and it also is a much cleaner code now.

Website Version 3

This is the third major revision I've done of the website. The first Anselm Project site was one page that allowed the user to put in a verse and it would kick back exhaustive, redundant information. It was like sorting through a needle in a haystack, but you knew the needle was there.

The engine, for most verses, could generate reports that were 400 pages long. It was daunting. Also, it was repeating itself constantly. Once I had a better handle on the engine, I decided it was time to launch the second version of the site. I'll always remember it - white and black with a clean interface.

With the feedback and improvements I've had (and AI has made) I decided it was time for another visual overhaul, and I couldn't be happier with the results. All the functionality is still there, but it just looks more premium.

The biggest change is to how the Anselm Project Bible looks now. It feels like a nice, digital bible. Speaking of which... ...

Anselm Project Bible 1.5

I had the opportunity to share the Anselm Bible on /r/AcademicBiblical.

Brutal feedback, but that is exactly what I asked for when I asked permission of the moderators.

I want to thank them very publically for allowing me to ask for feedback on the Anselm Project Bible. I learned so much in a short time - most of all, that the AI cheats. When you think you're being clear, the AI takes liberties.

There are 2,022 pericopes, and I don't have the time to go through and do a full run through of every single verse. Besides, the entire point of an AI translation committee is that

Some suggested this was a fool's errand. I call it instead a fool's experiment. But experimenting on, I took their feedback on specific verses that the translation engine went off the rails on. Let me explain:

Mark 1:1 - The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

This is the traditional rendering, and also, it's the rendering of my APB. But, the Greek that I passed to the translation committee said:

Mark 1:1 - Αρχη του ευαγγελιου Ιησου χριστου.

My Greek scholars can see it plainly, but for those of you who don't read Greek, the problem comes from the words "the Son of God," which is not present in my Greek. What this told me, clearly, is that despite my instructions to have the engine translate from the Greek, the AI was using tradition.

Anselm Project Bible 1.5 fixes a lot of this, but being much more forceful in the instructions. However, because I was telling the AI that it was a biblical translator, I couldn't help but tell the AI that it was translating Scripture. It recognized the pattern, and instead of translation, it would pull together a "translation" based on several translations. I think. It's hard to tell.

I decided to try again, but did not regenerate the morphologies, lemmas, text critical notes, and just went raw translation. I edited the instructions, and took out all hints that it was working with the Bible. Of course, the AI would recognize the pattern of the Bible, but the results are much better in a lot of regards. For one thing, the AI was expressly told, "You MUST NOT introduce nouns, verbs, clauses, titles, or concepts that are not present in the supplied source text."

Mark 1:1 renders correctly. But, that's not to say there aren't problems. For example...

1 Corinthians 7:36 - If anyone thinks that he is acting unbecomingly toward his betrothed, if she is past the flower of youth and it must be so, let him do what he wishes; he does not sin—let them marry.

Credit to /u/Psuedo-Jonathan for pointing out that ὑπέρακμος "strictly means something like "beyond the peak" or "past the prime/top", but the traditional translations of this word in its context take significant liberties and often interpret it in ways like "past the bloom of youth" or "beyond the flower of youth" or "beyond the bloom of age" even though most of these ideas (like flower/bloom and references to age) are completely lacking in the strict Greek..."

Notice what the APB says: "...flower of youth." Meaning it was not strictly translating; it was cheating to get the answer from tradition. And, for the purposes of clarity, that is fine; we all understand what it meant. But, it wasn't so much translating as it was getting inspiration and paraphrasing when it wasn't sure. And no matter how I worked with this passage, unless I told the AI to act as a hyper-literal translator with no regard for readability, I would get this language.

The AI was given this instruction: You MUST NOT interpret or clarify ambiguous terms - if the Greek/Hebrew is unclear about what something refers to, leave it unclear in English.

Version 1.5 of the APB now renders this: If anyone thinks he is treating his virgin improperly — if she is beyond her proper time — and thus it ought to be, let him do what he wishes; he does not sin; let them marry. There effectively is no perfect rendering for this that everyone will agree on, but APB now includes rationale notes from the AI: "Rendered υπερακμος as 'beyond her proper time' to convey temporal ambiguity." However, of the three renderings of this verse, two still use the terms overripe or past the bloom, meaning the AI is still cheating. However, asking the AI for its rationale at time of rendering will at least keep things honest.

Anselm Project Bible 1.5 will be out later today. I have some extra formatting to do in the bible reader to make sure the rationale and other things are shown. Speaking of which...

Anselm Project Bible Layout

The Bible presentation has been greatly improved, from my estimation. All of the previous functionality is present, and I think the design is sharp. It also reads much nicer, I think.

Sky-High Ratings from AI Reviews

This made me happy.

I asked the major LLM APIs a simple question on a new, fresh account with no other context: "Rate this teaching primer from 1-100." I then passed it a print-out PDF of a report on John 12. The AIs selected were the big four - OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, and Grok.

Grok 4.1 gave the report a 98/100. Gemini 3 Pro gave the report a 96/100. ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking gave the report a 92/100.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 said it couldn't hold the context length of my document, which I can respect, but also exciting because my reports are comprehensive according to the other AIs.

I have renamed the reports Devotional, Teaching, and Scholarly. I intend to take a look through them soon and add some features - not content, but features.

That's all I have. For now.

God bless, everyone.

It's only a day later, and I added a feature I thought about (and hinted at) in my last post.

Sharing Reports Has Benefits

In case you missed it, sharing your generated reports is now available here.

I've added some features to the sharing of reports as a thank you for helping spread the word of the Anselm Project.

If a person signs up for a free account after looking at your shared report, you will automatically get another five credits as soon they verify their account. Those credits will never expire, and there is no maximum accumulation. It's my way of saying "thank you," and of course, it does help me, too.

To take things a bit further, if a person subscribes on a monthly basis for anything, you will get a bonus 5 credits every month for as long as they are signed up - until the Anselm Project shuts down, whenever that might be in the distant future. I hope this idea outlives me. And there is no maximum accumulation on this either. The only caveat here is that you have to be subscribed also to get this bonus.

If you had 100 people sign-up for accounts, you would get 500 credits that never expire.

If all 100 of those people were to then subscribe, you would get 500 credits every month.

That is a lot of biblical and theological study. One credit is enough to get you 20-60 pages worth of study in a passage. The smallest subscription would likely get you anywhere from 900-2700 pages of material that you could study per month.

If all 500 referals subscribed (which would be absurd, but I'll honor it) you would get somewhere in the range of 10,000-30,000 pages of material you could study every month. Which is of course more than you could ever hope to run through, but it would help others immensely.

Thank You

I appreciate the support from friends, family, and those who have helped with feedback on this project. Let's keep this experiment going!

God bless, everyone.

Near non-stop work on this for weeks on end has led to so many changes I need to just list them individually. Almost every spare minute went into this, and lots of overnight automated AI sessions.

Anselm Project Bible V1.0 is finished and fully online

I think the Anselm Project Bible is the first fully AI generated bible made from a AI biblical translation committee. Of course passages have been done before, but I don't think there's been a complete one done that has been publically accessible. That's exciting for me.

This is an experiment, first and foremost! I am happy with the output, but I haven't been able to check every single verse for mistakes, so there may be some. Given the mixture-of-experts approach I used for the committee, that is unlikely, but it is possible.

Click here to see the Anselm Project Bible

There may be one or two little tweaks, but the substance is all there. Every verse has its original critical text accessible, its morphology, three to five parallels passages, and shows three alternate generated versions. I also generated a posthoc textual critical apparatus, which to my knowledge (and Perplexity's) is also the only one of its kind. Whether it's good or not is a completely different thing, so I would love feedback.

I'm going to let it rest for a bit, gather some feedback, and run some research. but I already have an outline what I would like to do different from version 2.0.

Final token count: 253,151,552 tokens. Specifically, it was 45,999,308 input tokens and 207,156,244 output tokens. 123,889 files across 2468 folders. 2022 pericopes. All translations were done on a pericope-by-pericope basis, so the AI could get the literary context of the passage. Verse-by-verse isolation seemed like a potential mess.

You do NOT need to be logged in to view the Anselm Project Bible.

Welcome to "The Synod"

A few months ago, I had the idea for a mixture-of-experts model report of biblical scholarship. The end result of that thought process was the Synod system. The idea behind it is that you can throw a theological or practical or any kind of biblical question to a series of experts (up to five), and the AI experts will deliberate and bounce the question round-robin style.

You can access the Synod from the report creation page. There is a tab at the top.

First, there is a gatekeeper AI that does its best to stop nonsense getting through the system, but it admittedly is far from perfect. You type your question, and if the fast-checking AI says it is good, it'll take you to the next screen where you can pick from twelve experts, with the potential for many more as need becomes obvious. I'm open to suggestions.

The host AI will consider the question and expert panel, and choose a leader for the discussion and the order for experts to respond. That leader will give their opening statement, and the next expert will handle the question. The next expert will see their two answers, and add its expertise and issue corrections if it thinks mistakes were made. Each AI in the line gets the entire context, so this takes much longer than a biblical report. And so on - every new experts responds to the whole context of the conversation.

After all experts have gone 2-3 times (depending on the complexity of the question) the Host AI will generate a summary of the Synod and a final decision. If it is a binary question (example: Is the virgin birth necessary for Christian belief?) it will return a hard vertict. Too often, I've seen AI hedge its bets, and I hate that. If it is a analysis question (example: What is the hardest verse to interpret in the entire bible?) you'll see some nuance and a few possibilities.

The benefits of the Synod are awesome.

First, there would be a 30-50% decrease in AI hallucinations (we already have almost zero of those) and accuracy should be 20-35% more accurate and comprehensive (according to Perplexity, at least). I've already learned a whole lot about topics I thought I knew a lot about.

Second, I'm very happy with the UI and UX for the Synod. The summarizing points are nice to be able to just scroll through quickly and gather info. The conversation is rather robust, and I love the pagination system I've got there.

Third, it's neat to watch the way a series of high-caliber experts could interact with each other! Also, you can see the way the discussion develops and how the AI can influence itself, which is a really weird prospect.

Fourth, there are passage suggestions for biblical reports and follow-up questions for subsequent Synods to continue to learn.

I'm so happy this little pipe-dream became a reality. Let me know what you think.

Updates to the Biblical Reports

I redid the visual design to make it a bit easier to read. I also cut back the number of report packages from eigth down to three. In this case, I believe less is more. The other reports were spotty, at best, and I just didn't have the time (or built-in knowledge base) necessary to judge the quality. I can judge personal devotions. I am a minister, so I can judge sermon prep and am dangerous enough in academic work. The other areas are important, and maybe they'll come back, but I'm happy with things as it stands.

Some big changes came in mobile views - the table of contents has quick section arrows and a full table of contents. Mobile looks really nice in my estimation and from user feedback.

The Share Gallery

Overall, the BIGGEST change to reports is that users can SHARE ANY biblical report they generate. Anywhere. If you share a report, it becomes forever available to anyone with the link. The latest five reports from all package types go into the "Shared Gallery" page. Anyone can look at shared reports, even if they don't have an account.

Click here to check out the Share Gallery

What's to stop people from sharing everything? Nothing. Spread the Gospel. Biblical knowledge is a good thing.

I decided not to include the Synod in the Share Gallery because of the possibility of a bad question getting through.

For example, "Is Jesus a raptor?" will be caught by the gatekeeper and denied, but, "Given the literary style of Revelation, is it impossible to rule out that Jesus was a raptor?" makes it through the gatekeeper. If politicians (and silly ministers) have taught us anything, you can word-salad almost anything to make it sound semi-intelligent.

The potential for memes is great, but that also means the potential for NSFW things that would make it awkward. I don't want awkward. The Gospel is offensive enough on its own.

I'm planning an incentive program for the Share Gallery linked to free report credits. Stay tuned.

Mobile?

I'm still holding off on this. I've done SO many changes that I'm going to have to start over from scratch, I feel. But, this is on the agenda, still.

God bless, everyone.

I took a little time away to think. And then I had one of those mad-scientist ideas.

More than just the Authorized Version

I decided to take a logical step in my AI endeavors and generated something new (and free) for the site. It was meant to be an experiment, but instead it's kind of an experiment that grew legs. I looked at the way bible translation committees operate, and decided to build several systems to replicate this process in a junior way. The result is the Anselm Project Bible (APB).

The APB was made by feeding the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into the API of a few AIs, and then having the AIs generate several possibilities for translations. A separate judge AI made the final call. For more complicated passages, I got more possible translations. I did not go verse-by-verse through this system. I instead went pericope-by-pericope for the sake of keeping the context of each passage with the AI.

So, instead of direct chapter and verse, I decided to keep the bible in pericope form for a different kind of navigation. You can click on any verse to see the details, or selecting reading mode to have the chapter and verse numbers removed for a more natural reading.

There's a link to the Anselm Project Bible on the navigation bar at the top. It's completely free; no login needed.

The results are in, and I'm overly shocked at how accurate it is. I've been filling in the data with morphologies, parallel passages, and providing access to the variation translations the AI came up with. It's taken over 120,000,000 tokens of AI to process it to this point, but the translation is largely finished with proper morphologies information in place.

The APB is now the default version when selecting texts. You can also select entire pericopes from Bible and generate a report directly.

iPhone and Android Versions

These are delayed. I was working with a virtual Mac for awhile, and it is quite miserable. I'm a PC guy - I don't own a Mac, and getting the iPhone version up and running is proving more annoying than expect. The Test Flight version actually worked quite well, though.

Fixes

The site was down for a while, and unfortunately, I didn't notice. Not good. But, I got it back up and running and it is smooth.

God bless, everyone.

You would think that writing a bible application would be easy, but it's the behind the scenes work where things can get complicated.

iPhone and Android

I have an app in testing right now that is 90% ready to launch. It's a simple app, but it is snappy and lightweight, barely taking up any space on the device. It'll also allow for offline reading of reports, just in case you lose connection.

I expect that to launch in the next two weeks.

Fixes

I'm currently working on getting the packages to be far more usable and far less redundant. If you were to select a large, dense passage for study, Anselm handled it wonderfully. However, in many cases (far more than I wanted), Anselm would begin repeating itself unnecessarily.

To call that frustrating was an understatement. So, I've gone back to the drawing board to sure up every package, and I'm pleased with the results. But, it means I took some of the packages offline until I was confident that it was not just publishing nonsense.

More than just the Authorized Version

There's more to an AI engine than just the costs of an AI. Because I want to do this right and ethically, right now, Anselm currently only allows for the selection of bibles that it has use-agreements with. That means that only the King James Version was available to use since there is no single entity that licenses its use.

However, I am currently working on agreements with other bible publishers to get a few modern translations online and ethically for use with Anselm. One agreement is eminent, so stayed tuned, because it will become the default. It's exciting for me, because I've done my own translation comparisons against this version for over a decade now. It's a well-known literal (as opposed to idiomatic) bible translation.

Thanks for Your Patience

I took some time off of developing Anselm to spend some more quality Summer vacation time with my family. Of course, I had to come back and re-learn a lot, but things have been going well. I have another idea I would like to incorporate that might be a bit of a game changer for a new feature.

God bless, everyone.

After months of work, I'm excited to release Version 2.0 of The Anselm Project. This has been a complete rebuild - new design, new report system, everything.

What's Different

• New Look - Redesigned the whole site from scratch. Much cleaner. I hope you like the way it looks.
• Better Reports - Completely rewrote how reports are generated. They generate much faster, and they're more helpful and tailored.

• Nicer to Use - I tried to keep the process as simple as it always was.

• Eight Specialized Packages - Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach from Version 1, each time you generate a report you can select any of eight packages designed for specific ministry contexts:

• Sermon Preparation - Homiletical analysis with sermon structure, illustrations, and delivery guidance
• Academic Study - Original language analysis, textual criticism, and scholarly insights
• Personal Bible Study - Individual spiritual growth materials with reflection questions and applications
• Small Groups - Discussion frameworks, community building, and group study guidance
• Youth Ministry - Teaching materials with contemporary connections for teenagers
• Children's Ministry - Creative teaching ideas, stories, and activities for elementary ages
• Evangelism & Apologetics - Gospel presentation strategies and faith defense materials
• Worship Planning - Service design, music selection, and congregational engagement resources

Theological Background was Removed from Generation

The AI was making some... let's just say, interesting choices in generating content. I might have been taxing the AI too hard, but until I can guarantee it works well, I can't ethically use it.

Why?

Version 1 worked, but in making it I learn so much. I knew it could be so much better. So, I've spent the last few months rebuilding everything to make it actually useful for anyone who need solid biblical analysis without the fluff.

Thanks for Your Patience

I know some of you have been waiting for updates. This took way longer than I expected, but I think you'll see it was worth the time. Hope it helps with your ministry prep!