Biblical Studies Carnival #229 for September 2025

Jim West once again hosts the Biblical Studies Carnival at Zwinglius Redivivus.  He describes September as the most boring month, so he reposted a ten-year-old carnival. The highlight:

Phil’s a nifty guy. He tends to be too peaceable but I suspect that’s because he’s Methodist or Anglican or Episcopalian or something soft Arminian. But he’s still likeable.

While I am nifty, I am not sure how Jim managed to get every other description wrong…

Jim did a real carnival, The Official September Carnival: Wrath and Judgment Edition. Jim explains that the “current governmental policies have made us all a little poorer and are set to make a lot of people a lot sicker. Reason enough for wrath….To be fair, there’s not much wrath or judgment in the posts this month, so you’ll just have to imagine that as I wrote the carnival, it was I myself who was filled with wrath and judgment.” he also tagged this carnival with “AI is trash.”  (Ironicly, I used AI to fix his original sentence.)

I think this infographic is important because it shows that Reddit and Wikipedia make up two-thirds of AI’s training data. I am less inclined to hate Wikipedia these days. There is plenty of well-curated data on incredibly trivial topics. Who hasn’t researched studio guitar players in LA in the late 1960s?  And even before AI took over the search engine world, if I needed technical support, I often limited my Google searches to Reddit anyway, since the site has fifteen years of people complaining about stuff, resulting in plenty of quick answers to why some app doesn’t work quite right. The main problem is that there is also a great deal of misinformation, outdated information, and nonsensical complaining on these sites that will be filtered into the AI training data.

Applied to biblical studies, Wikipedia may be a good resource for obtaining a quick definition or confirming the date of an obscure manuscript. In the early days of Wikipedia, someone said, ‘Wikipedia is not a bad place to start your research, but a terrible place to end your research.” As a veteran university professor, I would rather have my students use Wikipedia than a devotional posted on Youth Pastor Bob’s Blog of Fun and Worship from 2004.

I have utilized AI to accomplish some impressive tasks. For example, I recently converted the table of contents of an essay collection into SBL style references and then exported that list to a file, which I imported into EndNote. That took about ten minutes to figure out and another ten seconds to do the work. This saved me a considerable amount of time. However, if I used AI to summarize those essays, then I have not learned. Worse, if I used those summaries in an academic essay (such as a class paper, a sermon, or even a blog post), I would be misrepresenting generative AI as my own work. That is an academic honesty problem, not far from plagiarism.

However, generative AI poses a significant challenge for biblical studies. It is fast, easy, and sometimes it yields results. Using AI as a fancy search engine is not a real problem. However, using it as a substitute for careful reading of God’s word is a serious issue, especially for those who teach and preach in local churches. If the goal is spiritual transformation, it cannot be achieved with a well-crafted AI prompt.

So what’s next for the Biblical Studies Carnival? Old friend and traveling companion Claude Mariottini will host the carnival for November (due December 1). As you can see, I need a volunteer for the October carnival (due November 1). If you are interested in helping out, please contact me: plong42@gmail.com. I’d love to have a volunteer for that month, or early 2026. If you are curious about what it takes to host a carnival, please shoot me an email, and we can discuss it further.