How to set up your LLM as a Bible study tutor

This post gives you a set of project instructions that turn any major LLM into a surprisingly competent Bible study tutor rooted in traditional, small-o orthodox Christianity. It is a companion to my earlier post, “How to Read the Bible All the Way Through for the First Time.” You copy the instructions, paste them into a Project (or Gem or Notebook), and start asking questions as you read. The post also addresses common objections (yes, LLMs lean left politically, but that doesn’t really affect how they’ll behave when instructed this way). At the end, I explain how established Christians can adapt the instructions for their own situation and study needs.

Is this even a good idea?

First, let’s address objections to the bare idea suggested by the title. (If you’re already convinced, skip to the main discussion.)

What? Set up your LLM as a Bible study tutor? Are you saying you think it’s a good idea for people to use AI to learn the Bible?

Well—yes. If you use them right. I’ll explain how to use them right.

But LLMs have been shown to be left-wing and so you shouldn’t use them to study the Bible.

Yes, but that’s for political stuff. LLMs are trained especially on free material, and there is a lot of solid commentary and other theological material from the 19th and early 20th century that is free, high-quality, and traditional—and LLMs have been trained on that material. Since much of this public-domain material predates the adventurism of more recent theology and Bible scholarship, it is actually quite sound. So they can explain every part of the Bible, and they can also address hard questions about it (and closely related questions from theology, philosophy, history, etc.). The better LLMs can even do a good job explaining the Hebrew and Greek.

But surely they make mistakes. Such mistakes could be disastrous!

Yes, but: LLMs have come a long way in the last 3+ years. The sorts of mistakes they make now are very obscure. They will rarely if ever get anything important wrong. You’d have to get quite deep into obscure matters of exegesis, or into the more recondite areas of history of theology, before you could catch an LLM in a plain factual error. As for quoting the Bible, it’s stunningly accurate. The worst mistakes I’ve caught it making were failure to use punctuation at the end of a verse correctly, and once I found it omitting a parenthetical clause from the middle of a verse without using ellipsis (but that was only once).

Aren’t LLMs kind of dumb? They surely aren’t smart enough to answer hard questions about the Bible intelligently.

This is a fair question, but the short answer is that they have become remarkably (some say frighteningly) intelligent in the last couple years. They are well beyond being able to answer Bible study questions clearly, accurately, and interestingly. The better ones can deal well with harder questions of theology and exegesis.

I’m still worried that they’ll subtly manipulate me into some heretical view.

Another valid worry, but frankly, they’ll generally do what you ask, and the more specific and forceful your instructions, the more exacting they will be. For example, if you want them to speak with a certain denominational perspective—Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Orthodox, or “mere Christian”—they will, and in my experience, they do it surprisingly well. The instructions below instruct the LLM, “you represent the traditional, small-o orthodox, faithful Christian point of view.” You can, of course, edit that to taste.

But I don’t even know how I would begin to do this. Seems risky.

I’ll explain the how-tos in the next section.

Did an LLM write this for you?

Nope! The LLM didn’t write any of this for me.

How to use the LLM for Bible Study

Before you sit down with a Bible and an LLM, remember what you’re doing. Your task—that is, the task I recommend, if you have few firm theological commitments and are reading the Bible all the way through for the first time—is to understand the Bible on its own terms, as faithful, small-o orthodox Christians have understood it traditionally. All parts of this formula are important. Your task is not to explore your own thinking about the Bible, much less to develop your own theology. If you are not a believer, I am not saying your task is to talk yourself into being a believer. It is to understand the Bible on its own, traditional terms.

I say this because LLMs are a remarkably useful tool for precisely this task.

Technical setup

First, let’s talk about setup. The first step is to sign up with an LLM, and make sure that the LLM you want to use has projects. ChatGPT offers free “projects” and Gemini offers free “gems.” The others require a paid subscription. (I subscribe to both Claude and Grok and can recommend both.)

Once you are subscribed, you should create a special Project (or Gem or Notebook) in your LLM. Here are some handy instructions for doing that, for the five most common LLMs:

The project instructions

The above setup instructions refer to Custom/Project Instructions (and the like). This is basically a background prompt that is sent with everything you submit to the LLM. Copy it, paste it in, and edit it to taste:

Tips on how to use the LLM

Here is a grab-bag of advice based on my own experience of using an LLM for my own Bible study. The example replies are from Claude.

• Straightforward questions: Sometimes, you just don’t understand something. Where you might use a study Bible, commentary, Bible dictionary or encyclopedia, or even an atlas, the LLM will often have a faster answer. If you still want an answer from a human, you can ask it to quote an answer or two from a human-written resource. Example:
  
  You: In Genesis 15, God tells Abram to cut animals in half, and then “a smoking furnace and a burning lamp” pass between the pieces. What is going on here?

  LLM: This is an ancient Near Eastern covenant ceremony. When two parties made a solemn covenant, they would cut animals in half, lay the pieces opposite each other, and both parties would walk between them. The implied meaning was: “May what happened to these animals happen to me if I break this covenant.” The stunning thing here is that only God—represented by the smoking furnace and burning lamp—passes between the pieces. Abram does not. God is taking the entire obligation upon himself, making this an unconditional promise. This is why theologians call the Abrahamic covenant a covenant of grace: it depends on God’s faithfulness, not Abram’s.
• Explain a whole difficult passage or chapter. Sometimes, especially if you read much in one sitting, you might find yourself completely lost as to what a chapter means and why it’s even there at all. Example:
  You: I’ve been sort of following Leviticus and I sort of understand the point of sacrifices and so forth, but Leviticus 14 completely baffles me. Why two birds, cedar wood, scarlet yarn, and “hyssop” (what’s that)? It’s so bizarrely random!

  LLM: This is the ritual for declaring a healed leper clean and restoring him to the community — and the two-bird ceremony is more coherent than it first appears. The first bird is killed over running (literally “living”) water, so its blood mingles with the water of life. The living bird is then dipped in that blood and released into the open field. The picture is of death and life together: one bird dies, and the other, now marked with the blood of the dead bird, carries that death away into the open and flies free. The healed leper is the living bird — he was as good as dead (Miriam’s leprosy is compared to a stillborn child in Numbers 12:12), and now, through blood, he is released back into life. The cedar wood, scarlet yarn, and hyssop appear together again at the red heifer ceremony in Numbers 19, and hyssop by itself appears at the Passover in Exodus 12:22; these are associated throughout the law with purification and the application of blood. The fact that the same ceremony is applied to a house with persistent mold in its walls (14:49–53) tells you that the issue is not really about dermatology or home repair — it is about uncleanness as a theological category, the intrusion of corruption into the midst of God’s people, and what it takes to remove it. Christians have traditionally seen the two birds as a type of Christ’s death and resurrection: one dies, the other goes free bearing the marks of that death — the same pattern that appears more famously in the two goats on the Day of Atonement in chapter 16.
• Get objections answered: There are plenty of obvious objections that you should ask. Trust the Bible; it has degrees of depth and coherence that many fail to appreciate. The LLM can bring this out nicely. Example:
  You: In 2 Kings 2, there is a famous passage where it appears Elisha causes some rude boys to be eaten by bears. This seems bizarre, unnecessary, and unjust. How could this possibly be defended?

  LLM: The passage is less strange once you adjust several common misreadings. The word translated “little children” in the KJV (na’ar qatan) does not mean toddlers; na’ar is used elsewhere of young men old enough to serve in armies, and the term here likely describes a mob of youths or young adults. The taunt “Go up, thou bald head” is not schoolyard teasing — “go up” echoes Elijah’s ascent, and the mockers are essentially saying, “Go on, disappear like your master; we reject you and your God.” This is happening at Bethel, one of the two centers of Jeroboam’s calf-worship, so these are not random children but young people formed in a community that had formally repudiated the prophetic office and the worship of the Lord. The judgment is severe, but it comes at a hinge moment: Elisha has just inherited Elijah’s mantle, and the question the surrounding narrative is pressing — through the parting of the Jordan, the healing of the spring at Jericho, and now this — is whether God’s authority stands behind this new prophet the way it stood behind the old one. The bears answer that question. Christians have always acknowledged the passage is shocking, but the tradition reads it as God vindicating his prophetic word at a moment when the entire northern kingdom was organized around its rejection.
• Historical–archaeological questions. Sometimes such questions fall into the category of objections, but often you’ll simply learn some historical or archaeological factoid, and you want them explained some more, perhaps also explaining how faithful Christians deal with obvious problems. Example (a grab bag):
  You: I got into a long conversation with someone studying the historical-critical method. I’ve heard most of this before but I’m just curious what you would say about these issues that came up (or came to mind later): why elohim is plural when “God” is singular; why it is that the story of Noah’s ark seems to be found in some form in the Gilgamesh; and why the Philistines appear in Genesis 21, centuries before our earliest archaeological evidence of their presence in the region. All of these, my friend said, point to an early polytheistic cult that became monotheistic only later. I don’t buy it but I was shaky on the details. I don’t need a long answer, just remind me of the orthodox Christian approach to these issues.

  LLM: None of these points actually gets you to early polytheism. Elohim is a well-known Hebrew plural of majesty — it takes singular verbs throughout the Old Testament, which is exactly the opposite of what you’d see if it were a vestige of polytheism. The Gilgamesh parallels are what you’d expect if there was a real flood that multiple cultures remembered: the question is the direction of dependence, and the morally chaotic, polytheistic Mesopotamian versions read far more like corruptions of an older, clearer account than the other way around. The Philistines in Genesis 21 are the weakest arrow in that quiver — the word likely refers to an earlier Aegean or Mediterranean presence in the region (for which there is growing archaeological evidence), or it’s a later editorial updating of a place name, the way a modern writer might say “Iraq” when narrating events from the Babylonian period. Your friend is doing what historical-critical scholars often do: assembling real and interesting observations and then leaping to a theological conclusion that the observations don’t require.
• Help with comments: Are you in an online Bible study? Or are you simply notes for yourself? Get instant feedback on these. I have learned a great deal this way over the past 3+ years. Example:
  
  You: I learned today that, according to the Ellicott commentator (1 Sam 15:23), aven is translated “iniquity” but more literally means “nothingness”—and would be used by later prophets to describe (or castigate) idols. Thus “Beth-Aven” can be read as “House of Nothing.” Similarly, the “gods” are called “vanities” and “worthless things.” This shows, contrary to the theory of Michael Heiser and his followers, that “the gods” were held to be something literally like “nothings,” far from being dignified as duly appointed representatives of God among the nations. Heiser might insist that the prophets meant to say the idols themselves were aven, but there is basically no good evidence of this. Over and over again the gods themselves are mocked and dismissed in this way, when idols as such are not in view at all.

  LLM: That’s a sharp observation, and the lexical point is stronger than you may realize. The word aven (אָוֶן) carries a semantic range that runs from “emptiness” through “worthlessness” to “wickedness” — and the prophets exploit the full range, precisely because in their view the wickedness of idol-worship consists in the emptiness of the thing worshipped. Hosea’s renaming of Bethel as Beth-Aven (Hosea 4:15, 10:5) is the classic case: the “House of God” becomes the “House of Nothing” because what is worshipped there is a nothing. Your point against Heiser’s Divine Council framework is well-taken as far as the prophetic literature is concerned — Isaiah 41:24 (“ye are of nothing, and your work of nought”), Jeremiah 2:5 (“they walked after vanity, and are become vain”), and Jeremiah 10:14–15 (“every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them; they are vanity”) are all directed at the gods themselves, not merely at their physical representations. The traditional Christian reading sees Paul drawing the threads together in 1 Corinthians 8:4–6 and 10:19–20: the gods are nothing as gods — they have no divine standing — but the demons behind them are real, which is why idol-worship is dangerous rather than merely silly.
• Word studies and hard original-language exegesis. You might be able to see, for one reason or another, that a passage makes use of some unusual word or construction. You can ask the LLM to explain it. Example:
  You: I’m reading the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6, and I was struck yet again by the bizarre construction, “lead us not into temptation.” I know that “temptation” can mean testing, but—is that what is meant here? Is “lead” doing some important work? Discuss the Greek and different theories about what this means.

  LLM: The Greek is καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν — kai mē eisenenkēs hēmas eis peirasmon. The verb εἰσφέρω (eispherō) means “to bring into” or “to carry into,” and it is in the aorist subjunctive with μή, which makes it a direct negative petition: “do not bring us into.” So “lead” is slightly soft; the Greek is more forceful — carry us into, deliver us into. The difficulty is obvious: James 1:13 says God tempts no one, so why would Jesus teach us to ask God not to do something he would never do? The word πειρασμός (peirasmos) is the key. It can mean either “temptation” (a solicitation to sin) or “testing” (a trial of faith). Most traditional commentators take it here as testing — severe, faith-threatening trial — and read the petition as a prayer of humility: “Do not bring us into a trial so severe that we would fall.” We are not accusing God of tempting us; we are confessing that we are weak and asking him not to put us to a test we cannot bear, which Paul echoes in 1 Corinthians 10:13. A second line of interpretation, older than is sometimes realized, takes the verb as having a permissive sense — “do not let us be brought into” — which is natural enough in the underlying Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken, where causative verb forms routinely carry a permissive meaning. This is the reading Pope Francis endorsed when he approved the revised Italian and French translations. A third possibility, favored by some of the Fathers, is that πειρασμός here refers to the great eschatological trial — the final tribulation before the end — and the prayer is “spare us from the ultimate test.” These readings are not mutually exclusive: a prayer that asks God to keep us from trials we cannot endure, spoken by people who know their own frailty, covers all three.
• Simplify hard things. Example (a follow-up to the latter question):
  You: Dude, I did not understand that, like, at all. I don’t actually know Greek. Explain it more simply.
  

  LLM: Sorry — let me back up. The phrase “lead us not into temptation” is odd because it sounds like God might want to tempt us, and we’re asking him not to. But the word translated “temptation” is better understood as “severe testing” — not a lure to sin, but a crisis so hard it could break your faith. And “lead us not into” is actually stronger in the original than it sounds in English — it’s more like “don’t carry us into.” So the prayer is really saying: “We know we’re weak. Please don’t put us through more than we can handle.” Paul says essentially the same thing in plain language in 1 Corinthians 10:13 — God won’t test you beyond what you can bear. That’s the petition in a nutshell.

How to adapt the above LLM prompt for established Christians

If you are a long-time Christian, the prompt I just gave you will be very useful to you, I’m sure. But I would adapt it for your use case. Here is how.

Step 1. Answer: Does some LLM know you and your religious views well?

Step 2a. If an LLM already knows your religious views well, then first, have it make a dossier about you. (This might be interesting. It was interesting to me.)

Step 2b. If an LLM does not know your religious views well, then prepare it a dossier about yourself. Questions that you ought to answer include:

• What is your denomination or tradition, and where do you sit within it—are you a traditionalist, a moderate, a progressive?
• What are your positions on the major questions that divide Christians: the canon, the sacraments, ecclesiology, the role of tradition, eschatology?
• How much do you already know—do you work with the biblical languages, read the Fathers, or are you a layperson with a study Bible and a strong opinion?
• What are you actually using this tool for: devotional reading, sermon preparation, apologetics, academic research, debate prep, biblical commentary?
• Who are your typical interlocutors—are you arguing with Catholics, atheists, progressive Protestants, your own denomination’s liberals?
• How do you think Scripture should be read—do you hold to the analogia fidei, do you give weight to ANE comparative material, do you accept or resist historical-critical methods?
• What are your active projects or areas of study, if any?
• And how do you want to be engaged—do you want pushback when your arguments are weak, or do you want the LLM to stay in an expository mode and let you draw your own conclusions?

The more specific you are, the less time you will spend correcting the LLM’s assumptions in every conversation.

Step 3. Have the LLM adapt the above long prompt to your use case. Here, in the same conversation where you gave the LLM a theological dossier about yourself, you’ll do two things.

(a) Paste the project instructions above into the conversation.

(b) Then prompt it this way:

I am re-writing the instructions for an LLM “Project” that I will use for my Bible and theological study. I want you to adapt the text I am including here, which is written for beginners to the Bible, to my specific use case. Some of the advice given here is probably bad advice for me. Some of it just needs to be reworked for me. Moreover, some of the things that you know about me should probably be included in the instructions, because they will directly help you to help me. Do include those things.

Step 4. Use the output. Take the output, read it to make sure it’s correct, edit it to taste, then paste it into the Project Instructions area (in other words, following these instructions).

Then go ahead and use that project for any Bible study questions you might have.

You’ll love it. You’re welcome.