I wonder if Dr Frazer would favour taking a leaf out of Keir Starmer’s book and applying an ‘AI’ program to our Bibles? (Meditation, Life and Work January).

David’s penitential Psalm 51 with its drastic emphasis on his wickedness could be deleted (plus several other similar psalms). After all, David was basically a good guy and ‘hard-wired for goodness’. Mind you, original sin has a way of sneaking into many Psalms, so AI could well eliminate far more than explicit confessions of innate sinfulness. There are eleven different words used of such human sinfulness. AI would track them down.

Isaiah and Jeremiah are both rather top-heavy with tirades on original wickedness in the Lord’s people, as well as those not among the favoured nation. Both of them would benefit from AI editing, leaving about a fifth of the originals. Unfortunately, AI would also have to delete some key verses from the well-loved Isaiah 53 on the Messiah’s suffering and the reason for it.

The Apostle Paul’s agonising struggle with his (original) sin in Romans 7:7-20 has led to great problems in saints’ lives and needs deleting. And dear aged John’s first chapter of his first letter definitely must go too – along with quite a bit more.

The word ‘holy’ would need to be dropped from the entire Bible, and probably even the title ‘God’! Certainly the words ‘righteousness’, ‘redemption’, ‘justification’ and ‘sin’ would have to go – absolutely essential for the first eight chapters of Romans.

The results from AI’s purging of original sin and concentrating on ‘Original Blessing’ would produce a drastically slimmed down Bible. However, be warned, if we let AI loose, we could well lose both the Apostle’s Creed as well as the Nicene Creed – they would no longer make sense. There’s no telling what might happen to the word ‘Christianity’! I suspect we would have to find a completely new name for our ‘faith’.

David Searle, Errol, Perthshire