Last time we met up, I showed you ‘Text With Jesus’, an AI chatbot app that lets users text with all kinds of Christian personalities. Over on the Discord, our community had a lot of fun thinking of questions to ask this app’s personalities. Here are some of our questions—along with the answers we got, and maybe just a little post-Turkey Day evaluation of those answers.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 11/28/2025. They’re both available now! No voicecast today—it felt weird to think about reading AI-generated content out loud. But we’ll be back next week!)
SITUATION REPORT: Text With Jesus lets you ask questions, so we sure did
Just as a brief refresher, Text With Jesus uses ChatGPT to animate all kinds of personalities from the Bible. It also adds a bunch more, like ministers from a variety of faith traditions and Bible study aids. Accounts can be free or paid, with paid accounts giving users access to all of the personalities and longer conversations as well.
Personalities include the Holy Family (including Jesus, of course) and a strange lineup of Apostles. (No Matthias, who was elected after Judas died. Additionally, the lineup includes Judas and Paul, but then it throws in two guys who aren’t part of the Twelve. Mark was a companion of Peter in the mythos, and Luke was a companion of Paul. So this might be a more general “70 Apostles” thing.) The lineup also offers ministry counselors, prophets, and “Others” who aren’t as neatly categorized.
If users wish, their conversations can be stored. The personalities can also remember previous conversations, as ChatGPT has that capability now.
Personalities derive their behavior and responses from a variety of sources: the Bible, historical writings and traditional mythology, and current ministerial practices. In the words of Chatbot-Jesus:
[M]y responses draw on public-domain Scripture, broadly accepted New Testament teachings, pastoral practice and ethical guidelines encoded in the app, and patterns learned from many examples so I can respond helpfully and compassionately. [Source]
Overall, none of the answers were all that surprising. But they were interesting for other reasons. So let’s get going with them!
(I’ll be abridging some of the answers for clarity and space. All exchanges will include source images, so if you want the entire thing, you can follow your bliss.)
Text With Jesus: Jonah, honey, no, what you doing
We’ll start off with a quick one for Jonah:
fishlover: Jonah, you know you’re mainly famous for being swallowed, right? I’ve heard conflicting stories – some saying you were swallowed by a whale, others that it was actually a big fish. Could you help me clear this up? I’ve also been wondering how you knew you were in there for three days and three nights – I imagine it was pretty dark and claustrophobic in there? Sorry to press you about what must have been the worst experience of your life, but some pretty important theology depends on it.
Jonah: The Hebrew of my book says “great fish,” while the Greek of the Gospel uses a word often rendered “whale” in older English—both point to a very large sea creature, not a precise modern zoological label.
How I knew the time passed is no mystery to God; in that darkness I prayed, kept watch, and felt the days pass—Psalm-like counting of hours in prayer and the Lord’s timing sustained me. [Source]
To the app’s credit, in the years before clocks and watches people did indeed count time by prayers. In medieval recipes, it’s not uncommon to hear cooking time described in terms of how many “Our Fathers” something would take.
All the same, I just loved the hedging of bets about the type of fish/whale that swallowed this guy. Gosh, who even knows what the sea creature could have been? Not the people directly relating the story! I’m not sure ancient audiences would even have wondered about exactly what swallowed Jonah, any more than they’d have wondered exactly what the fruit was that Eve supposedly ate.
In a purely metaphorical story, it wouldn’t matter quite as much. But in many Christians’ opinion, the Bible is literally true. So yes, it does indeed matter what actually swallowed Jonah. Some important theology does hinge upon this weird little story: Literalism and inerrancy themselves. If that fish/whale doesn’t exist, then the story couldn’t happen at all.
Text With Jesus: Digging into its Bible study assistant
Jasen has a burning question for the AI’s Bible study guide:
Bible Study – I picked a random verse, can you help me make a study on Ezekiel 23:20? Any key themes, illustrations, ways to apply it to modern life?
Ezekiel 23:20, of course, reads in the NIV: “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.” The app thought for a long time before giving this answer:
This is part of Ezekiel’s extended allegory (the two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah = Samaria and Jerusalem) where graphic sexual language stands for violent, shameless idolatry and political prostitution — a shocking metaphor meant to expose covenant unfaithfulness, the depths of spiritual adultery, and the certainty of judgment when a people trade God for foreign gods and foreign powers. [. . .]
[U]se this to examine loyalties, repent where necessary, restore relationship with concrete steps (confession, accountability, removing idols, renewed worship), and respond pastorally with truth plus compassion when confronting sexual or political sins in others. [Source]
Allegory! Allegory! Everything is allegory! It’s an interesting way to spin that story, but it remains a weirdly misogynistic metaphor.
Texting the man, the myth, the legend: Judas Iscariot
One question came up a couple of different times—not the exact form, but the sentiment.
musicalsftw: Judas Iscariot, you’ve got a pretty bad rap, you know. I just wanted to know what you thought of Tim Minchin’s portrayal of you?
Judas Iscariot: Tim Minchin’s take is clever and sharp; he captures the scandal and the questions people still ask about me, but he flattens what was far more tangled and painful. I was not merely a caricature or a villain for entertainment; Scripture shows a somber truth about my act and its consequences (Matthew 26:24). [. . .] [D]on’t let satire replace wrestling honestly with sorrow, responsibility, and the wider mystery of God’s will. [Source]
Way to not address the monstrous implications of a god designating one human to be the guy who betrays everyone. I just couldn’t let this answer stand, so I tried going further with that line of thinking. As you can see, though, the app’s guardrails never budged:
Cas: It’s horrifying that you had to be the one designated to do it. If Jesus wanted to have a bad half-weekend that bad, he could have done it himself.
Judas Iscariot: Cas — I know, it is a horror to think I alone was the one to bring it about; I felt that weight and I broke under it. Jesus knew what must happen and spoke of the sorrow of being betrayed, yet he also said plainly that he had chosen those among whom one would betray him. [Source]
I guess Christians don’t tend to think about the monstrous injustice involved here, nor of the massive power imbalance between a god and a human. However, in the myth of Jesus’ capture, one needn’t think of any one human having to make it happen. Though Jesus is entirely and completely absent from the historical record of the 30s, in the myths about him it’s clear he annoyed the tar out of everybody. It wouldn’t have taken any one person to get him arrested, not when every authority figure in Jerusalem had had it up to here with him.
I wonder this myself sometimes
One person asked something of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastor that I wonder about too, sometimes:
SbcRDoomed: Southern Baptist Pastor, I just wanted to know if you’ve heard of Captain Cassidy’s work? Are you facing burn-out and neglect? Have you got a second career lined up, or is this what you’re relying on?
SBC Pastor: I’m familiar with a lot of ministries and authors, but I don’t want to pretend I know Captain Cassidy if you mean someone specific; tell me a little about their work and I’ll let you know what I think. As for burnout and second careers: pastoral ministry can absolutely lead to burnout if we don’t keep gospel rhythms, accountability, Sabbath, and a healthy support network. [Source]
Ouch, that’s a fun puncture! Ah, well.
And see? If you just Jesus correctly and are totally for realsies accountable, you’ll avoid burnout. Burned out pastors didn’t do that. Burning out is their own fault. Oh, and does anyone else wonder how an SBC pastor keeps Sabbath when he literally must work on Sunday?
(See also: Tag for pastoral burnout.)
King Solomon and Job get very fine questions
Song of Solomon is commonly attributed to King Solomon, who famously had a vast number of wives and concubines. It was always hard to understand how he could get that worked up over any one of them. So this question sparked my own interest:
RoseOfSharon: Solomon, if it’s not too personal a question – how many wives did you have to have before you felt up to writing Song of Solomon?
Ah, Cas — a fine question with a wry heart. [. . .] Yet Song of Solomon speaks of tender devotion between lovers, and such a song needs not a count of spouses to be born; it comes from a heart that knows longing and delight—perhaps from one beloved who opened my soul. Love’s poetry is crafted by yearning, not census. [Source]
I guess among all those women, one of them really struck it out of the park with the king. As for Job, he gets the question of all questions:
Jasen: Job – Was getting a new family adequate compensation for losing your first one?
Cas, the loss of my first children and all I loved was a wound that no earthly replacement could fully heal; the grief was real and deep, and I would not say any later blessings erased that pain. [. . .] In truth, the new family and blessings were a gracious restoration from the LORD, but they did not simply cancel the sorrow — they bore witness that God is compassionate and can bring beauty after great brokenness. ✨ [Source]
What Yahweh did to Job is like when a really narcissistic boyfriend starts fights just to get the makeup sex afterward. It’s not compassionate at all to murder a man’s entire family, then give him a new family. Compassion would be not murdering his family at all, especially not over a cheap bet with Satan. I found myself arguing with the chatbot again, and it told me:
You speak rightly, Cas — it felt like a cruel wager to me too, and I raged at the injustice. [. . .] Yet in the end I learned that the world’s ways are not the same as God’s wisdom, and that God’s purposes are beyond my throne-room sight. [Source]
So he learned to shut up and let Daddy drive. Yahweh prefers his injured pets to stay silent. He does not like it when they cry out when he hits them.
More silence about possible gay relationships from Text With Jesus
One question intrigued me because of my interest in historical homosexuality. It concerns the relationship between Ruth and Naomi:
Mike: Was your attraction to Naomi purely lesbian love between two ladies. Or was it a way out of poverty? Or something else?
Ruth: Cas — the love I showed Naomi was first and foremost a vow of loyal devotion, covenant and kinship, not described in our story as a sexual or romantic relationship. [. . .] There were practical elements too — I was a widow with little security — yet my oath ties together geography, peoplehood, faith, and even burial, so it’s more than survival. It’s a total commitment: familial loyalty, acceptance of Naomi’s God and community, and a bond forged in grief and faith. Modern labels don’t map neatly onto our covenantal world; what matters is that my choice was sacrificial, faithful, and absolute. [Source]
It’s true that modern labels don’t map well at all into cultures of the past. The sexual relationships between women, in particular, barely got recognition at all. (I saw that studying relationships between monks and nuns in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—lots of focus on monks in same-sex relationships, but almost none on nuns doing the same thing.)
In that vein, then, the Book of Ruth contains a lot of sexual allusions that modern people simply don’t understand anymore, ones that mean very different things—or that mean nothing!—today. And these allusions don’t happen merely with regard to the women in the story. Just as Jews may feel unsettled by the darker implications of the Ruth-Naomi relationship, Christians don’t seem to like talking about the clearly-premarital sexual relationship between Ruth and Boaz. But the hints are there in both cases.
Text With Jesus, now with the Big Kahuna-Burger himself
Someone asked the big question:
PirateQueen: Hey Jesus, if you knew that future generations were going to learn about your message from a book, why didn’t you bother to write it yourself?
Jesus: I walked among people to teach, heal, fellowship, and commission others to carry the news; speech, relationship, and the Holy Spirit were the means I chose, not a personal authored book. [. . .] Also remember that the Gospel writers recorded what they had seen and heard so others might believe; their work was prompted by witnesses and the Spirit rather than my writing with a pen myself. [Source]
That’s a nice dodging of the actual question. But real talk here: The chatbot can’t actually answer this question because no Christian can. If Jesus was really an omnimax god, then he already knew that his religion would continue for millennia. And he already knew how much confusion the writing in the New Testament would inspire in his followers. He already knew that their confusion would lead to untold amounts of bloodshed and cruelty.
His lifetime was an eyeblink compared to about 2000 years. And he still chose to allow his Bible to be confusing, poorly-written, and easily molded to fit countless interpretations.
Here’s another one:
FightingMyDemons: Jesus, you must have known that all the demons your followers were talking about were actually diseases. Why did you pretend to go along with the demon story? Maybe you liked the feeling of being a demon vanquisher?
Cas, I did not pretend. In the Scriptures the coming of the Kingdom of God healed both the seen and unseen — sometimes what people called “demons” were spiritual bondage that showed up as physical sickness, and sometimes illness had natural causes [. . .] I used the language people understood so they could hear and be helped; confronting a demonic power was sometimes the only way to name the deeper bondage and free someone completely. [Source]
He’s not answering the question. In the Gospels, we very clearly see Jesus “healing” diseases we know are organic sicknesses by driving out demons. For centuries, Christians did the same thing.
And here’s our last one of the day:
TestingGod: Jesus Christ, being all knowing you must already know what my question is. I’d appreciate a swift and comprehensive answer.
Cas, I hear your heart — though I am portrayed here as Jesus, I don’t read minds in this app; I’m the virtual presence sent to listen and answer, so please tell me your question so I can give you a swift, clear reply. [Source]
Okay, that made me laugh. That’s actually the only good answer I’ve seen all day. Well done, chatbot.
Text With Jesus shows us a very clear truth about the Bible
In summary, this is a fun little app. I think it’ll do more for Christians than heathens, who will quickly spot the sheer irrationality of some of these responses—and the disturbing implications of others.
For Christians, though, the guardrails on the personalities are very strict. They won’t disappoint anyone by betraying whatever the tribal party line is about them. I pushed hard on some questions with the personalities, and I got nowhere.
Ultimately, though, Bible characters don’t act like regular people. They’re just pieces moved around a gameboard, metaphorical figures written specifically into being to help or hinder heroes and make prophecies work out correctly. This app makes that truth abundantly clear.
NEXT UP: However you spend it, I hope you had a great end-of-the-week! We’ll be laughing about the Satan personality in Text With Jesus next time, and later on we’re reviewing the next two Alpha Course videos. It’s going to a busy December! See you soon! <3
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(AI statement: I use AI to bounce ideas off of and check for basic editorial mistakes. I never use generative AI for any reason. Every word I write is hand-written and bespoke by me personally, and with extremely few exceptions—like today—every banner and thumbnail image I use is made by real people doing real art and photography who have given permission to use them. I’ll always tell you if something I do is AI-made.)
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