About half of Americans, when asked, report that they don’t read the user manual for new technical devices they acquire. Although I suspect that many people are like me – I read them sometimes, and then only partly. If there is a “quick user guide” I will often look at that. These are helpful quick summaries with just the critical bits of information you need. But often I give it a go by myself and then only consult the guide for troubleshooting. I do this partly because I want to see how intuitive the device or app is.

But of course there are situations where this approach is not adequate, especially when assembling something complex or using an entirely unfamiliar and complicated piece of technology. In these situations I find, most of the time (with a few happy exceptions) that the instructions are terrible. Sometimes they were clearly written by someone for whom English is a second language. Or the instructions are entirely pictoral (I guess to be language neutral). Other times it seems they were written by engineers who lack the ability to communicate effectively their arcane craft to the general public. I think this is why many people try to bypass the instructions – they are often terrible and frustrating.

In industry, however, this option may not exist. Further, the instructions may need to be highly technical, which is great if you are already an expert but may be challenging for most users.

This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture. Large language model AIs, like Chat GPT, can “read” material and then answer questions about that material, or even give a summary. I have used Chat GPT to analyze a scientific study, then asked it to find specific information within the study or explain certain findings, and it does pretty well. The idea, therefore, is to feed an entire technical user manual into an LLM and then ask it specific questions or have it give a summary or perhaps step-by-step guide.

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Let me start out by saying that I think the answer to that question is no – but this requires lots of clarification. This was, however, the discussion here, while although poorly informed, does raise some interesting questions. This is a Tik Tok video of a popular podcast which is mainly personalities chatting. The host, Logan, asks the question of whether or not it is possible that Jesus was essentially a con artist – a charismatic speaker who essentially started a cult of personality, and may or may not have believed his own rhetoric about being the son of God.

I think the question touches on something interesting, although historical context is critical. As I have discussed before, I think the evidence for a historical Jesus is thin. In the end, it doesn’t really matter because what is clear is that the mythology of Jesus evolved in a typical way involving all the elements known to fuel such mythologies. There were many stories of Jesus which are mutually exclusive, involving wildly different archetypes and story details. The themes followed the mythology themes that were already prominent in that time and place. The story evolved in a pattern of obvious embellishment. Eventually a canon was imposed from the top down, and all other versions became heresy and actively destroyed. What is left is almost entirely mythology, and the question of whether or not the life of a real person is in the mix is mostly irrelevant (from a historical point of view).

Unfortunately this renders the Logan conversation mostly irrelevant also, one giant non sequitur. Everyone in the conversation assumes that the details in the New Testament are historically accurate (if not the interpretation of those details), but that assumption is not justified. So the conversation takes the form of – could those details be the result of a charismatic con artist, or do they require an actual son of God.

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