Behind the Sacred Editors: How I Used AI to Synthesize Decades of Sacred Text Research
A transparent look at using artificial intelligence as a research partner while maintaining scholarly integrity and human responsibility.
When I tell people I spent the last year using AI to help write seven books about sacred text development across world religions, I usually get one of two reactions: fascination or horror. The fascination comes from people curious about AI's research capabilities. The horror comes from those—quite reasonably—concerned about AI replacing human scholarship or spreading misinformation about sensitive religious topics.
Both reactions deserve honest answers. So let me pull back the curtain on exactly how I used AI as a research tool, what worked, what didn't, and why I believe this approach actually enhanced rather than undermined scholarly rigor.
The Challenge: Seven Traditions, Thousands of Scholars
My annual bhāvanā this year combined two interests: continuing my exploration of how sacred texts developed historically, and taking a deep dive into AI as a research tool. The scope was ambitious—seven books covering Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu textual development, plus books on women's erased contributions and the destruction/recovery of sacred texts across traditions.
The challenge was synthesizing scholarship across multiple disciplines—archaeology, textual criticism, theology, sociology, linguistics—while maintaining accuracy in representing established experts' positions without misrepresenting their nuanced scholarly debates.
The Five-Lane Workflow
Rather than treating AI as a magic answer machine, I developed a five-lane workflow, with each lane serving specific functions:
Lane 1: Human Foundation Everything started with me—collecting stories over years of reading, initial research into fascinating historical moments, identifying potential narrative threads, and writing rough initial drafts. This human foundation remained crucial throughout, as AI tools needed substantial context and direction to be useful rather than misleading.
Lane 2: Exploration and Structure (ChatGPT) I used ChatGPT as a thinking partner to explore how to present complex material accessibly. This included identifying key scholars in each field, brainstorming narrative approaches, and structuring chapters that would engage general readers while maintaining scholarly accuracy. This brainstorming is ChatGPT's strength.
Lane 3: Verification and Fact-Checking (Perplexity) Every claim underwent verification using Perplexity's real-time web search capabilities. This was crucial for ensuring I accurately represented what scholars actually said rather than my interpretation of their positions. Perplexity caught many instances where my understanding didn't match the experts' actual claims. Research is Perplexity's strength, so much so that I now use it instead of Google for most web search tasks.
Lane 4: Synthesis and Advanced Writing (Claude) Claude helped integrate material from multiple sources while maintaining consistent voice and ensuring complex scholarly debates were presented fairly. Claude's strength in working with longer texts and handling complex synthesis made it invaluable for maintaining coherence across hundreds of pages. Even with ChatGPT-5's recent release, I continue to find Claude (Sonnet 4) far superior for complex, high-level writing tasks.
Lane 5: Expert Human Review Subject matter experts reviewed all content—the most critical stage for catching oversimplifications, misunderstandings, or inadvertent bias that AI tools couldn't identify.
The Complexity of AI Prompting
Getting accurate, nuanced responses from AI required far more sophistication than most people realize. The oft-report "hallucinations" are generally due to poor prompting, with insufficient details, guidance, and especially reinforcement. With this project, standard prompts evolved into detailed, multi-page documents that included:
- Precise role definitions ("You are a PhD scholar of [tradition] textual history with 25 years of experience")
- Clear limitations ("I am not a scholar or historian, just synthesizing existing scholarship")
- Specific instructions about representing established experts accurately
- Detailed guidelines for approaching each religious tradition with appropriate sensitivity and respect
- Warnings against oversimplification of complex debates
- Requirements to distinguish between scholarly consensus and ongoing disagreements
- Reminders to avoid speculation not grounded in credentialed expert work
The Cross-Platform Verification Strategy
One important innovation was using each AI platform to check the others. ChatGPT would generate initial content, Perplexity would fact-check specific claims and find contradicting sources, Claude would synthesize and verify overall narrative consistency, then back to Perplexity to verify Claude's synthesis. This created multiple layers of verification that caught errors, oversimplifications, and misrepresentations that any single platform might have missed. All of which was eventually checked by humans.
What This Enabled (And What It Couldn't Replace)
This methodology enabled me to synthesize knowledge buried across scholarly silos—archaeology, textual criticism, theology, sociology—into narratives that make extraordinary human stories accessible to general readers. The AI tools enhanced my ability to work with complex material efficiently and catch errors through systematic cross-verification.
But the AI couldn't replace human judgment about what matters spiritually, how to approach sensitive religious topics respectfully, or how to balance competing scholarly interpretations fairly. Every narrative choice, every ethical decision about representation, every assessment of what would serve readers best remained entirely human responsibilities.
The Bigger Picture
Understanding how sacred texts developed doesn't diminish their spiritual significance—it reveals the extraordinary human devotion that preserved divine wisdom across centuries of change, loss, and recovery. Every sacred text we can read today survived because countless individuals chose preservation over convenience, often at great personal cost.
Whether achieved through traditional research methods or AI-enhanced synthesis, that recognition transforms how we read ancient words: not as artifacts from a distant past, but as living traditions maintained by human hands and hearts in partnership with whatever divine forces guide the preservation of wisdom across time.
The Sacred Editors series is available on Amazon and can be read free online at SacredEditors.com