Purpose
The goal of this tool is to aid the church in the study of God’s Word and to more easily encounter the many brilliant writings that have blessed the church for centuries.
The Scriptures themselves and the Spirit of God are fully sufficient for your knowledge of the truth of Jesus Christ and your sanctification in holiness. And by the wonder of God’s perfect plan, the Bible is already available to you in a multitude of English translations. My hope is that this tool helps you along in that journey of knowing God by what he has revealed to us through Christ in the Scriptures, and that your growth in understanding would lead to an increase in holiness as you live your life, fully pleasing to the Lord Christ.
My desire follows Paul’s words in his letter to Titus, that you would increase in your “knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness.”
For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord and may please Him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.
The Name
Achaia is named for the region at the southern end of Greece. It appears in the New Testament a handful of times. I originally chose this name because I’ve been mispronouncing it all my life as Uh-Kay-Aye, which sounds like AI. In my search for a better name, I came across the account of Apollos as he visited Achaia. There, he was a great help to the believers because he was “proving from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 18:28, BSB).
If this tool does nothing else for you besides point you to Jesus as the Christ, remind you of the beauty and joy of the Gospel, proclaim to you the forgiveness of sins, and comfort you in the hope of eternal life, then I will consider it a success.
How Achaia Uses Artificial Intelligence
There are many good reasons to be skeptical of “artificial intelligence.” However, AI is well-suited for rapidly finding and summarizing large chunks of information, acting essentially as a glorified search engine. If a large language model (LLM) is given access to a trusted source of information and safeguards are put in place to ensure it only draws upon that information, it can be of benefit to its users.
That is my goal for this project: to use emerging technologies to provide more access to the treasures of church history.
In short: Achaia is a library first. The AI is used as a research assistant that finds and summarizes what is already in the library. It is not used as a source of teaching.
The Library
Achaia’s library is made up of writings the church has read, tested and kept over many centuries. It includes the early church fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans, and later commentators and preachers, along with the Bible itself in several translations and in Greek and Hebrew. Every book was chosen and added on purpose, and you can open and read any of them in full in the reader.
What Happens When You Ask a Question
- The assistant searches the library. When you ask something, an AI language model (the same kind of technology behind ChatGPT) doesn’t answer straight away. It first looks things up in Achaia’s library: passages from the writers, the text of Scripture, commentaries on a verse, and dictionaries of the original languages.
- It reads what it found. If it hasn’t found enough, it searches again.
- It writes an answer from those passages only. It is told to say nothing from its own general knowledge. Every statement about what an author teaches, and every verse it quotes, must point back to a passage it found.
Safeguards
- Every point is footnoted. Each statement in an answer ends with a number, like [3]. Tap the number and you’ll see the exact passage it came from. Open it, and you’re taken to that place in the book, where you can read it in context.
- No outside material. The assistant is told not to add anything from its own memory, and to credit each point to the author who actually wrote it.
- It says when the library is silent. If the library doesn’t address your question, the assistant is told to say so rather than fill the gap.
- One exception: translation. If you ask for a fresh translation of a Greek or Hebrew passage, the assistant draws on its own grasp of grammar and sentence structure to put the words together. The meaning of each word still comes from the standard dictionaries in the library, and those are footnoted. The translation notes also cite commentators where they discuss the passage.
What It Can’t Promise
AI models can make mistakes. Even with these rules, one may sometimes summarize a passage poorly or blur two authors together. That’s why every point carries its footnote: the answer is a guide into the sources, never a replacement for them.
Privacy
The answers are written by AI models hosted by an outside service, Ollama Cloud. Your question and the passages found for it are sent there to write the answer. Ollama states that it handles this content only while answering your request, doesn’t keep it afterwards, and never uses it to train AI models. Its full policy is at ollama.com/privacy. Searching the library and reading answers aloud run on our own servers. Your saved conversations are kept on Achaia’s own server.