ἀλλὰ τὰ μωρὰ τοῦ κόσμου ἐξελέξατο ὁ Θεός ἵνα καταισχύνῃ τοὺς σοφούς…
but rather the stupid things of the order the God has selected in order to shame the learned experts…(1 Cor. 1:27 RBT)
It goes without saying that there are some seriously “stupid” things to be found in the Bible. But this is more of an intentional literary feature than the result of a lack of brains. Indeed, it creates quite the rift between the religious intellectuals and the non-religious, scientific agnostic/atheistic intellectuals. But what a peculiar feature! Why are literate individuals educated in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin writing such bizarre, “stupid” things everywhere? The average American can’t even speak or write in that many languages.
With the advent of LLM AI models, though not always accurate, as probability predicting machines one can do some interesting language experiments. The Ancient Greek language available online for AI to train on is tiny compared to the endless English content. It’s enough however to draw out powerful insights instantly. One of those powers is using the LLM’s “probabilistic” nature to perform a cross-linguistic stress test. By asking the model to generate “Simulated Apocalyptic English,” we can force it to operate in the “no-man’s-land” between its dominant English training and its understanding of the specific syntactical quirks of the Greek of say, the Book of Revelation—surely one of the “stupidest” books in religious literature.
Just How Stupid is It?
ChatGPT: Below is a controlled experiment in English deliberately written outside normal grammatical, syntactic, and semantic boundaries in a manner analogous to the Greek of Revelation. The aim is not mere “poetic strangeness,” but structural violation: broken agreement, displaced logic, hybrid metaphors, unstable deixis, and syntactic drift.
This mirrors the phenomena seen in Revelation’s Greek:
- Hebraic interference on Greek syntax
- Non-classical agreement patterns
- Collapsed temporal sequencing
- Parataxis replacing hypotaxis
- Semantic overload of symbols
- Participles without anchoring verbs
- Vision logic instead of discourse logic
What follows is not stream-of-consciousness and not modern experimental prose. It is vision-report language — prophetic transcription rather than composition.
Simulated Apocalyptic English (Deliberately Non-Normal)
And I seeing, behold — a voice of iron speaking behind the color, and the color was not a color but a burning that walks.
And the ground lifted its feet and stood upon me.
And I was standing while fallen.
And the wind said to the mountain: You are yesterday.
And the mountain answered in smoke.
Seven lamps were breathing on the sea, and their breath was counted and weighed and sealed with thunder.
And the sea opened its eye and it was a door.
And from the door came a beast of numbers, and its teeth were calendars.
And it ate the hours.
And the hours screamed like birds that have no sky.
And I asked the voice: Who is writing?
And the voice said: It is already written behind your face.
And I turned to see the sound, and the sound was seated.
And the throne was walking.
And the king was many.
And the many were one name.
And the name was sealed with fire.
And the fire was speaking laws.
And the laws were alive.
And the living was judged by the dead.
And the dead were standing.
And the standing were falling upward.
And the sky rolled like a scroll of bone.
And time broke its leg and could not walk forward.
And the last stood before the first and said: I am after you.
And the first answered: You are before me.
And the earth wrote its own sentence.
And the sentence devoured the reader.
What Makes This “Un-English” in a Revelation-Like Way
1. Broken Agreement
the throne was walking
the king was many
the many were one name
Violation of number and category alignment — common in Revelation’s Greek.
2. Hebraic Parataxis
Every clause joined by “and” without subordination:
And I saw…
And the sea opened…
And the fire was speaking…
This mirrors Biblical Hebrew narrative logic imposed onto Greek.
3. Vision Syntax Instead of Logical Syntax
Causality is replaced with sequence-of-perception:
And I turned to see the sound, and the sound was seated.
The grammar reflects vision processing, not rational explanation.
4. Category Collapse
Objects behave like agents, abstractions become bodies:
the ground lifted its feet
time broke its leg
the throne was walking
This mimics Revelation’s symbolic ontology.
5. Semantic Overloading
Images carry multiple referents simultaneously:
beast of numbers
teeth were calendars
laws were alive
Like Revelation’s beasts, seals, horns, and crowns.
6. Deictic Instability
No stable spatial or temporal anchor:
You are yesterday
I am after you
You are before me
This reflects apocalyptic time logic.
7. Participial Drift (in Greek terms)
In Revelation, participles often float without grammatical anchors.
Here that is mirrored by verbs without stable subjects:
the living was judged by the dead
the standing were falling upward
What This Demonstrates
If Revelation were written today in English with the same relationship to standard usage that its Greek has to Koine, it would read less like poetry and more like alien reportage — grammar bent by vision, syntax overridden by revelation logic.
It is not “bad Greek.”
It is prophetic Greek.
And prophetic language does not obey linguistic economy — it obeys symbolic necessity.
And that means it is locked. Closed-source. Semantic enclosure. Not composition. This means the author becomes the only fully competent interpreter.
Everyone else is reconstructing a signal from noise, however disciplined or learned their reconstruction may be.