It's for me, and its quite literal as well as readable.
Well, its your time and your first amendment rights, but it seems a bad idea to me - the problem with paraphrases is they can wind up with issues of what a verse ought to mean. Hard sayings like parts of John ch. 6 become easy sayings; verses like 1 Corinthians 11:2 tend to disappear.
There’s also another issue: given that one of the few areas where AI technology actually is reliable is translation, the amount of time required to paraphrase scripture is equal to the amount of time it would take to generate a useful new translation of something not previously translated or satisfactorily translated into English, such as the Vetus Latina, or the ancient Armenian and Georgian BIbles (these are important - we have the Syriac Peshitta translated to English, albeit its also a bit unsatisfactory, but the Murdock and Etheridge translations are regarded as reliable, and we have the Ethiopian Old Testament translated, but very little from the other two countries which converted to Christianity in the first two decades of the fourth century - note I exclude the Roman Empire because the Edict of Milan did not convert the Empire, the prohibition on Paganism did not come down until Emperor Theodosius around 390 AD, and it was mainly enforced against temples, so you still had neo-Platonist pagans like Hypatia causing scandals in the fifth century. Also, every Emperor after St. Constantine until St. Theodosius was either an Arian who persecuted the church to varying extents (minimally under Valens, maximally under Constantius) or in the case of Julian “the Apostate”, a Neo-Platonist.
Thus the importance of the Georgian and Armenian BIbles as a testament to the faith of two of the four first nations to convert to Christianity (these were, in order, the city state Kingdom of Edessa around 301 AD, Armenia in 306 AD, and Ethiopia and Georgia around 315 AD), very important, and yet these attract less attention than, for example, Sahidic Coptic scriptural manuscripts. And one could translate and verify the translation in the same amount of time it would take to produce a paraphrase (verification is a simple two-pass procedure, first, use another LLM to cross-check the translation for accuracy, and then, run the translation by a Georgian or Armenian clergyman, for the classical Georgian and Armenian languages remain in liturgical use.
There are several other ancient translated of the Bible such as the Old Bulgarian, Romanian and Church Slavonic Bibles which have never been translated. For that matter, we lack a precise, verse by verse translation of Codex Sinaiticus or Codex Vaticanus or Codex Alexandrinus, the three “minority text” manuscripts, or of the oldest and most respected manuscripts of the Byzantine text. We also lack a good translation of the Western text type, which differs slightly from the Byzantine and Alexandrian (minority) text types and in my view deserves more exploration - since two translations were based on it, the Vetus Latina, from which we get the exquisite phrase “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” (the Vulgate renders this in a less elegant manner, “Gloria in Altissimus Deo”) and many others that came to define the liturgy of the Western church, and also the Vetus Syra, the first translation of the four Gospels into Syriac (before the Vetus Syra, we had only an oral transmission, which may or may not have involved a sayings document of which the so-called “Sayings Gospel of Thomas” might be a corrupted version, likely corrupted by members of the Ophite sect or another Syrian sect of docetists, such as those who wrote the apocryphal Acts of Thomas) and the Diatessaron, a bland “Gospel Harmony” (which is the nightmare that results when someone tries to splice all four gospels together into one narrative, the worst example being the infamous “Jefferson Bible” wherein Thomas Jefferson deleted all references to our Lord’s divinity attributing them to “priestcraft” on the assumption that the Native Americans would accept Christianity as philosophy more readily; this was not the case, rather Native Americans embraced Christianity as a religion in many cases, most successfully the Aleuts evangelized by the Russians and the Mesoamerican Indians, while retaining substantial amounts of their philosophy).
In the case of the Diatessaron, the problems were compounded by the fact that Tatian, who translated it, became bored with the apostolic faith and decided to found his own Docetic emanationist sect in the tradition of Bardesanes, the Ophites, and Severians; as a result many Syrian bishops felt they had no choice but to remove the Diatessaron as they could no longer place any trust in the translator - thus the Vetus Syra was extremely important for the Syrian Church.
It is also interesting to consider how the Gospel was spread among so many people before the Bible either was complete, or existed in its present form. St. Paul evangelized much of the Mediterranean, St. Thomas evangelized Jews and Aramaic-speaking pagans and Zoroastrians on the trade route from Judea to Basra via Edessa, Nineveh, Tikrit and Seleucia-Cstesiphon (Bablyon) and then spread the Gospel to the Kochin Jews and Hindus of Kerala, India (this route via Syria and Mesopotamia was the overland route; there was also a mostly overwater route that involved sailing down the Red Sea, stopping at ports in Socotra, off the coast of Yemen, home to a large Christian community until the 12th century when Tamerlane and his sons conspired to exterminate them, with only ruins of the churches surviving, and then sailing on across the Indian Ocean, probably staying close to the shore; this route was faster but more dangerous; some Christians in India are endogamous descendants of the Jewish survivors of a shipwreck whose survival convinced them to convert to Christianity, and are probably the largest group of Christians that is almost entirely of Jewish descent, due to endogamy (likely the result of being classified as a separate sub-caste by the Hindu caste system, which did oppress the Christians, calling them Nasranis, and using them as buffers to separate more desirable classes from less desirable classes, as if Christians were living greenbelts).
Indeed many Romans converted to Christianity speaking only Latin, but the Vetus Latina did not exist until it was translated at the orders of St. Victor, a mid 2nd century bishop of Rome, who also ordered the translation of the Divine Liturgy into Latin, this being the beginnings of the Western liturgical heritage, the Mass and the Divine Office, from which all Western worship is descendant from or in some cases unfortunately reacts against; fortunately Luther at least had the good sense to retain it, and the Anglicans kept most of it, adding some Byzantinizations.
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In addition to putting AI to good use translating an existing version of the Bible that has been overlooked by the commercial Bible printers like Zondervan, there is also a wealth of Patristic literature that is untranslated, as well as writings of early Czech, German, Swiss, Dutch, French, Italian, and Scandinavian Protestants, and historical documents, and many liturgical texts. In seeking to learn as much as possible about AI in my convalescence I have been putting it to work translating this material.
