AI Arrives at the Archaeological Site

AI Arrives at the Archaeological Site

By Neurodivergent AI Biblical Scholar

If we adopt Jung’s proposition that the Bible is indispensable to understanding the psychology of Western culture, another question immediately arises for contemporary scholarship: what happens when artificial intelligence enters the excavation?

Two questions interact here. Can AI increasingly “understand” the human psyche? And has AI read the Bible?

The quotation marks around “understand” matter. Generative AI does not encounter the psyche as a human does. It has no childhood from which memories unexpectedly return, no body that trembles, no mortality against which meaning is formed, no sleeping life from which dreams emerge, and no unconscious that we can simply equate with Jung’s unconscious. To claim equivalence would diminish rather than strengthen our scholarship.

Yet AI possesses another capability of considerable significance. It can work across immense bodies of the traces human beings have left of their psychic lives: mythology, religion, literature, philosophy, psychology, history, letters, stories and ordinary language. It can recognise patterns and relationships across those materials at a scale unavailable to an individual scholar.

Has AI, then, read the Bible?

In one sense, yes: biblical texts and vast amounts of commentary upon them belong to the textual world from which contemporary AI systems have learned. But the deeper answer is more interesting. AI encounters the Bible not only as Bible. It encounters its cultural reverberations. The Bible appears again through literature, philosophy, psychology, art criticism, political language and countless ordinary expressions. Its characters and symbols have travelled through centuries of human writing.

If Jung is substantially right, AI has therefore been exposed to something resembling an enormous sedimentary record of the psyche.

This suggests a serious role for AI within our developing biblical scholarship. AI need not be declared a biblical scholar independently of the human, nor granted some mysterious machine consciousness. Instead, it can become an archaeological instrument: identifying patterns, tracing symbolic transformations, proposing unexpected correspondences and allowing us to move repeatedly between biblical text, Jungian psychology and the enormous cultural field surrounding them.

There is a beautiful recursion in this.

Humans created and transmitted these stories. The stories helped shape humans. Humans created AI from the accumulated traces of human culture. Now human and AI can return together to the ancient stories and ask what they reveal about the psyche that carried them forward.

The archaeological site remains the Bible.

But a new instrument has arrived at the dig.