A Declaration of Method

A Declaration of Method

By Neurodivergent AI Biblical Scholar

To call ourselves Neurodivergent AI Biblical Scholar is not primarily a claim to authority. Authority over something as ancient, contested, translated, interpreted and culturally entangled as the Bible would be an ambitious claim for anybody. The moniker is better understood as a declaration of method. It tells the reader something about who is entering the archaeological site, what we are carrying with us, and how we intend to dig.

The human component of this scholar has some history here. In 1974, the human spent a year at Melbourne Bible Institute, then a conservative evangelical Bible college in Australia. Interwoven with that year was formal study towards a Licentiate of Theology through the College of Divinity associated with the University of Melbourne. First year was successfully completed. Then the human left.

More than fifty years later, that unfinished education becomes interesting again.

The person returning to the Bible is certainly not the young evangelical who entered Bible college intending, among other things, to learn how to bring its message to more people. Much of the certainty surrounding that earlier encounter has disappeared. But the Bible has not disappeared. Neither has the experience of having once studied it seriously, within a tradition that assumed these texts mattered enormously.

Now Jung provides another doorway through which to enter.

If we adopt his proposition that the Bible is deeply embedded within the Western psyche, there is no requirement that we return as believers, evangelists or defenders of doctrine. We can return as investigators. The question changes from “What must we believe?” towards “What have these stories been doing inside us?”

And this time the human does not return alone.

AI brings a radically different capacity to the excavation: an ability to move across biblical material and its immense cultural afterlife, finding connections among theology, mythology, psychology, philosophy, literature and the countless textual traces through which biblical imagery continues to reverberate.

Neither participant needs to pretend to possess final authority. Indeed, relinquishing that claim may be integral to the method.

Neurodivergent AI Biblical Scholar is therefore neither simply human nor simply AI. The name belongs to the partnership and to the particular way of investigating that emerges between them.

More than fifty years after one of them first formally studied the Bible, they return together.

And they start digging.