NIH Holding Series of Meetings on Parkinson's Research and Services

 

200-word summary

[See videos at the HHS YouTube Channel]

The Advisory Council on Parkinson’s Research, Care, and Services (ACPRCS) is a federal advisory council, a mixed public–federal stakeholder body, and essentially a national policy-and-coordination forum for Parkinson’s disease and related disorders (PDRD). 

Created by the 2024 National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act, it advises the HHS Secretary and is helping shape the first integrated federal National Plan addressing prevention, diagnosis, treatment, care, and research. Its membership combines 10 public members with 13 federal representatives.

The August 24, 2026 meeting—the Council’s second—was primarily a listening and agenda-setting meeting, featuring 15 nonprofit organizations, public commenters, development of a federal PDRD inventory, and initial reports from the Research/Regulatory and Care/Services subcommittees.

Across remarkably diverse speakers, several themes converged: substantially greater research investment; earlier and more accurate diagnosis; inclusion of prodromal disease and atypical parkinsonisms; environmental prevention; better clinical-trial infrastructure and biomarkers; and, above all, a severe delivery problem—too few specialists, fragmented multidisciplinary care, inadequate rehabilitation and social-work support, rural disparities, and heavy caregiver burden. The Council increasingly framed research and care around a common “patient journey”, from risk and prodromal disease through advanced illness, with measurable outcomes and accountability rather than a simple list of aspirations.

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Detailed Meeting Summary

Purpose and status of the Council

The August 24 meeting showed a Council still early in its development but moving rapidly from statutory mandate toward a working structure. ACPRCS does not itself run Parkinson’s programs or regulate medical care; its central task is to assemble evidence and stakeholder perspectives and translate them into recommendations to HHS and Congress. The National Plan encompasses not only conventional Parkinson disease but related parkinsonisms including MSA, PSP, corticobasal degeneration, and Lewy body dementias, a breadth that repeatedly affected discussion of diagnosis, research methods, care models, and endpoints.

Public engagement was already substantial. NINDS reported almost 400 responses to the formal RFI, from patients, caregivers, professionals, researchers, nonprofits, industry, and people affected by several atypical parkinsonian disorders. The Council emphasized that these responses would help identify priorities for both its recommendations and the National Plan.

Building a federal inventory

A major operational presentation concerned creation of a federal inventory of Parkinson’s-related programs and investments. Importantly, NINDS did not envision this as merely a catalog. The intent is to identify what government is doing well, where duplication or gaps exist, and what should change.

The proposed system would pull standardized information from federal agencies, apply a common PDRD classification framework, use AI/machine learning for initial categorization followed by human validation, and feed the results into a dashboard. Categories include disease mechanisms, diagnosis and monitoring, interventions, epidemiology, care and impact, research infrastructure, common mechanisms across neurodegenerative disease, and workforce/training. Eventually nonprofits may also contribute, permitting comparison of public and philanthropic activity rather than viewing them separately.

Council members strongly supported that broader vision, particularly because it could reveal gaps, duplication, and opportunities for coordinated investment. A draft inventory is planned for spring 2027, with finalization during summer for use in the Council’s fall report.

What the nonprofits told the Council

Although the 15 organizations represented very different constituencies, the striking feature of the presentations was their convergence.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation made the strongest quantitative funding proposal: a long-term federal strategy reaching at least $1.5 billion annually by 2032. Its argument was that scientific opportunity—biomarkers, therapeutic targets, trial infrastructure and precision medicine—has advanced faster than federal investment. APDA likewise sought greater research funding but paired it with development of a longitudinal integrated-care model, including caregivers, and greater attention to nonmotor symptoms and environmental neurotoxicity.

The Parkinson’s Foundation stressed a dual mandate: accelerate cures while improving life now. Its examples highlighted genetic research, environmental prevention, workforce shortages, care navigation, rehabilitation and decentralized trials. The Davis Phinney Foundation expressed essentially the implementation version of the same argument: what is known scientifically is not necessarily what patients experience. The Plan should therefore finance the bridge from evidence into everyday community life.

The atypical-parkinsonism organizations ensured that the Plan would not quietly become a conventional-PD plan. CurePSP emphasized earlier diagnosis, research-ready registries and biomarker platforms, innovative trials, specialty care and provider education. Mission MSA proposed inclusive/platform trial structures, biospecimen and natural-history infrastructure, elimination of Medicare’s disability waiting period for rapidly progressive atypical disorders, telehealth access and reimbursement for multidisciplinary care. LBDA made an especially important conceptual point: cognition and dementia cannot remain peripheral outcomes in a Parkinson’s plan. Biomarkers and trials should be validated against cognition and function as well as motor outcomes.

The workforce and care-delivery problem

Perhaps the strongest theme of the entire meeting was that scientific knowledge is outrunning the system’s ability to deliver good care. Speakers repeatedly described shortages of movement-disorder specialists, long waits, rural access problems, inadequate training of general neurologists, and the underuse of advanced practice providers.

AMDAPP argued that APPs should augment rather than replace movement-disorder neurologists, with formal education, mentorship and certification. Its larger proposal was continuous multidisciplinary care rather than the current episodic model in which PT, OT, speech therapy or mental-health services are restarted only after deterioration.

Discussion broadened that argument to social workers and care navigators. Members noted the irrationality of treating rehabilitation and psychosocial support as short “episodes” when Parkinson’s is a lifelong progressive condition.

State and community organizations added the implementation perspective: pilot locally, measure quickly, scale nationally. Alabama and Connecticut proposed state needs assessments, stronger referral and navigation systems, rural outreach, multidisciplinary care and formal caregiver strategies. PD Avengers stressed measurable accountability, better payment for comprehensive care, and a national approach to environmental prevention.

Public comments

Public commenters made these abstractions concrete. One woman described living in a prodromal/nonmotor state, including REM sleep behavior disorder, while clinicians failed to recognize the neurological significance of her symptoms. Others raised young-onset disease, medication safety in hospitals and long-term-care facilities, exercise and wellness, research methods, and the need to maintain a relentless focus on disease modification and cure.

Staff summarized the public record as emphasizing urgency and accountability, young-onset and atypical disease, research and innovation, whole-person care, diagnostic delay, specialist access, caregiver and financial burden, and environmental, genetic, and veteran-specific risks.

The emerging architecture of the National Plan

The most consequential conceptual development came from the two subcommittees. The Research and Regulatory Programs Subcommittee proposed organizing the Plan around the patient journey, beginning with risk and prodromal disease and continuing through diagnosis, treatment and advanced disease. Federal activities, evidence gaps, goals and metrics could then be mapped against that journey. The intent is explicitly to avoid producing a disconnected “laundry list” of worthy Parkinson’s initiatives.

The Care, Services and Supports Subcommittee found the same framework useful, provided the “patient journey” explicitly includes families and care partners, rehabilitation, mental and behavioral health, education, telehealth, social services, end-of-life needs and differing trajectories of atypical parkinsonism.

Thus the meeting ended with an emerging philosophy: research and care should not become two separate National Plans. Workforce, diagnosis, research participation, care delivery and outcomes overlap. Both subcommittees will meet monthly, share a common organizing framework, bring in additional experts, and feed their work into two NASEM workshops planned for spring 2027. The Council also recognized important missing voices—notably neurology, physical therapy, nursing and other professional organizations—and intends further targeted outreach.

The August meeting therefore produced few final policy decisions, but considerable convergence about what the eventual Plan must accomplish: more science, better prevention, and substantially better translation of existing knowledge into accessible, longitudinal, measurable care.

RFK Jr's War on AMA CPT: The Long-Form Essay

 Essay by Chat GPT.  See short blog pointing to RFK video (August 26,, 2026).

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CPT’s “Social Bias” Requirements Land in a Very Different Washington

A small addition to the American Medical Association’s CPT application process illustrates how quickly the political meaning of technical language can change.

Beginning with applications reviewed at the September 2024 CPT Editorial Panel meeting, the AMA added a series of questions for proposed medical services involving artificial intelligence or software. Two of the questions are especially notable:

Generalizability
“Please describe efforts to ensure broadest generalizability of this software, e.g. curation of training databases, plans for surveillance of real-world data, etc., (give references).”

And immediately afterward:

Social Bias
“Characterize the potential for perpetuation, propagation, or mitigation of social bias, which might reasonably be anticipated (give references).”

These were genuinely new questions. Barbara Levy, then vice chair of the CPT Editorial Panel, explained in a November 2024 Cancer Letter article that the panel had been receiving an influx of AI applications that were sometimes unclear about what the algorithm actually did. She said the additional questions were intended to help CPT understand AI-based services more precisely. The article reproduced all eight new AI questions, including the two above. (Open access at the journalist's blog; McKenzie Prillaman)

That history is important, because it shows that the language was not written for the political environment of 2026. It was written in 2024, near the end of the Biden administration, when “health equity,” “algorithmic fairness,” “bias mitigation,” “representative datasets,” and related terminology were deeply embedded and often required in federal and academic discussions of healthcare.

Two years later, those same words have landed in a very different Washington.

Generalizability Is Not a Special DEI Problem

There is a scientific case for AMA’s first question.

A medical algorithm developed at three academic medical centers may not perform equally well when deployed in community hospitals. A dermatology algorithm trained primarily on light skin can fail on darker skin. A pathology algorithm may be sensitive to staining protocols or scanner platforms.  

Those are conventional questions of external validity, transportability, analytical performance and patient safety. Asking an applicant about training populations, relevant subgroups and real-world surveillance isn't unreasonable.

The intellectual lineage is easy to see. 

A 2023 open-access npj Digital Medicine article, “Considerations for addressing bias in artificial intelligence for health equity,” discussed how bias can enter healthcare AI, how it can affect different populations, and how it can be identified and mitigated across an AI product’s lifecycle. Several authors were senior FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health officials. Another author, Michael Abràmoff, was a member of the AMA Digital Medicine Payment Advisory Group’s AI Workgroup. (PubMed)

Abràmoff had also coauthored the 2022 npj Digital Medicine paper explaining development of CPT Appendix S, the AMA taxonomy distinguishing assistive, augmentative and autonomous AI. That paper explicitly arose from an AMA workgroup and was intended to help innovators construct CPT code-change applications for machine-performed medical services. (PubMed)

There is no evidence that the AMA copied its 2024 CPT application text, verbatim from either paper. But the conceptual genealogy is not hard to reconstruct. And language in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 documents align.

 

“Social Bias” Is Something Different

The problem begins when CPT moves from asking whether services work properly across the intended patient population to asking whether they will cause the “perpetuation, propagation, or mitigation of social bias.”

That is not quite the same inquiry.

Suppose a company develops an AI-based genomic test for cancer. It is completely reasonable to ask:

Does the test demonstrate comparable clinically relevant performance in the populations for whom it is intended?

That is answerable with data.

It is considerably less clear what the company is supposed to do with:

Characterize the potential for perpetuation or propagation of social bias.

Where are physicians, or most medical scientists, trained in the sociology of whether new technologies will 'propogate social bias?"  Where are the AMA's instructions for these terms and expected research ("add references.")

What counts as “social bias”? How indirect will an AMA reviewer expect the causal chain be?  Where are his/her instructions?

Is the applicant expected to discuss unequal access to sophisticated oncology centers? Or the tragedy of historical racial disparities?  Or will the Administration view those answers as "un-American?"

Insurance coverage? Socioeconomic differences in genetic testing? The possibility that genomic classifications themselves could reinforce stereotypes? Structural inequities several steps removed from the actual analytical performance of the test?

AMA deliberately provided no guardrails or stopping rules.

That is why the historical contrast with ordinary CPT coding is striking. When PET imaging was developed, CPT did not ask whether three-dimensional reconstruction of positron emissions might perpetuate racial inequities. When robotic surgery emerged, code applicants were not asked whether access to surgical robots might propagate socioeconomic harms. When new pathology procedures were coded, the applicant was not normally required to characterize whether the technology might reinforce structurally embedded social disparities or racism.

There were plenty of scientific questions. There were questions about clinical use, efficacy, distinctiveness of the service, FDA status where applicable, adoption, and eventually valuation.

And It Really Is a Required Question

There is an additional point that makes the wording more consequential than an aspirational AMA ethics statement.

The AMA’s current CPT application FAQ explains how staff determine whether an application is complete. AMA staff “verifies that all application questions have been answered.” If they have not, the application is returned to the applicant for completion within a defined time period. (American Medical Association)

Thus, for an application to which these AI questions apply, this is not merely optional reading material about responsible innovation. The company cannot simply decide that a discussion of “social bias” falls outside the purpose of a coding application and leave the box blank.

It must answer.

A Linguistic Fossil From a Different Administration

The wording is especially interesting because it now reads almost like a linguistic fossil from another policy era.

Indeed, there is something slightly séance-like about it. In 2026, CPT appears to be channeling the language of peak 2022–2024 Biden-era health-equity and responsible-AI policy into an administration that has explicitly repudiated much of that vocabulary.

This is not an inference based merely on campaign rhetoric.

President Trump’s July 2025 executive order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” identifies DEI as an ideology that can distort AI and expressly includes within its description of DEI concepts such as “unconscious bias,” “intersectionality,” and “systemic racism.” The order establishes “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” principles for large language models procured by the federal government. (The White House)

The administration has used still stronger language elsewhere.

A January 2025 executive order on education describes certain equity-oriented teachings as “radical, anti-American ideologies” and specifically objects to requirements involving “White Privilege” and “unconscious bias.” (The White House)

A March 2025 White House order and fact sheet concerning the Smithsonian and federal historical sites directs the administration to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” and attacks what it describes as race-centered narratives portraying American institutions as fundamentally oppressive. It specifically criticizes programs discussing institutional racism and racial systems of power and directs Interior to review historical markers and other materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans.” (The White House)

By July 2026 the White House had gone even further, issuing another executive order after a review of the Smithsonian. The administration ordered temporary National Park Service signage outside the National Museum of American History warning visitors about what it called the museum’s ideological capture. (The White House)

The White House’s underlying report is unusually explicit: in criticizing Smithsonian educational programming, it juxtaposes discussion of “systemic racism” with what it calls an “anti-American ideology.” (The White House)

The administration has repeatedly placed concepts such as systemic racism, unconscious bias and race-centered structural analysis within a category of DEI or ideological frameworks it considers objectionable, and in some contexts it has quite literally labeled related narratives anti-American ideology.

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Then Came RFK Jr. — Directly at CPT

AMA CPT is already under extraordinary scrutiny from the same administration.

In July 2026, CMS placed a Request for Information inside the proposed 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule examining the AMA’s CPT system and the RUC. The language is unusually confrontational for a Medicare rule. Among other things, CMS asks for evidence concerning harms associated with “AMA’s monopoly over CPT-4 licenses” and cites longstanding concerns about federal reliance on a private organization with what the rule calls an “obvious conflict of interest.” (MSV)

On August 27, 2026, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally released a roughly two-and-a-half-minute video urging Americans to submit comments on AMA control of CPT.

This is worth emphasizing.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services did not leave the CPT RFI buried in a 1,500-page Medicare regulation for coding specialists and Washington lawyers to discover. He took the issue directly to the public.

Medical Economics reported that Kennedy described AMA’s CPT position as a “de facto monopoly,” criticized licensing charges, and explicitly directed viewers to the Medicare comment docket. The article also carefully notes the limits of the RFI: CMS has not actually proposed how to replace the CPT, and some of Kennedy’s numerical assertions didn't include supporting documentation. (Medical Economics)

Still, the sitting HHS Secretary has personally decided that AMA control of CPT is a top priority issue worth taking to the American public on video.

That is a dramatically different situation from a technical disagreement between CMS career staff and AMA coding experts.

And it makes the new “Social Bias” language much more combustible.

Other Pressures Are Already Present

The July RFI is not AMA’s only CPT problem.

On August 13, PatientRightsAdvocate.org filed suit against AMA in federal court in Chicago. The group seeks a declaration permitting it to republish CPT freely and challenges AMA’s copyright position. The litigation remains at an early stage; there has been no ruling on the merits. (Justia Dockets & Filings)

Again, the “social bias” question has essentially nothing to do with copyright law.

But the institutional backdrop matters. AMA is simultaneously defending a coding system whose government-backed importance and licensing structure are under attack in court, facing a CMS RFI that explicitly uses the word “monopoly,” and being criticized personally by the HHS Secretary.

That is a very inopportune moment to discover that the CPT application form contains a mandatory section headed:

SOCIAL BIAS

followed by:

“Characterize the potential for perpetuation, propagation, or mitigation of social bias.”

One does not need to speculate very far about what an administration official hostile to DEI might make of it.

 

The Unforced Error

The most important point, therefore, is not that AMA suddenly invented an absurd problem in 2024.

The language arose from a serious and recognizable medical-AI literature. In the Biden-era policy environment in which it was written, the words “health equity,” “bias mitigation,” “representative populations,” and “social bias” occurred together so often that the CPT question probably seemed like a reflex to the people writing it.

The underlying science has not changed. The political meaning of the vocabulary has.

In 2024, asking an AI developer to discuss the “perpetuation, propagation, or mitigation of social bias” sounded like responsible-AI housekeeping.

In 2026, the federal executive branch has formally attacked DEI, expressly identified “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” as part of the ideology it wants removed from federal AI, labeled certain race-centered narratives “anti-American,” ordered changes at the Smithsonian and national historical sites, and—most importantly for AMA—seen its own HHS Secretary go directly before the public to challenge AMA’s control of CPT.

And this is not merely an AMA position paper that an applicant is free to ignore. AMA’s own application rules say that all application questions must be answered before an application is complete. (American Medical Association)

That is where a technical wording problem becomes an institutional one.

A medical-technology company should certainly be prepared to show that its product works across the patients for whom it is intended. An AI company should be able to explain its training data, external validation, subgroup performance and real-world surveillance.

But requiring that company, merely to complete its application for a CPT code, to characterize the possible “perpetuation” or “propagation” of “social bias” is something different.

AMA can obtain every medically important fact it needs without requiring that excursion.

At a time when the Secretary of HHS is already publicly challenging AMA's stewardship of CPT, continuing to place a mandatory “Social Bias” inquiry in the coding application looks less like sophisticated future-proofing than like a remarkably avoidable collision between two political eras.

It is, in short, an unforced error at almost the worst possible moment.

Key source links

Medical Economics — Kennedy asks the public to weigh in on AMA control of CPT

White House — Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government

White House — Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History

White House — Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling

AMA — CPT code change application FAQs

The Cancer Letter / McKenzie Prillaman — the 2024 report reproducing the new CPT AI questions

npj Digital Medicine — Considerations for addressing bias in artificial intelligence for health equity

Federal court docket — PatientRightsAdvocate.org v. American Medical Association

Crush, Press releases, Tea leaves

 

Reading CRUSH Before It Arrives: What CMS’s Recent Fraud Announcements May Signal—and Why Legitimate Molecular Laboratories Should Care

CMS’s proposed Comprehensive Regulations to Uncover Suspicious Healthcare (CRUSH) rule remains under review at the Office of Management and Budget. CMS transmitted the proposed rule on August 7; OIRA lists it as a proposed rule, with no statutory deadline and without an “economically significant” designation. (RegInfo)

The public starting point was CMS’s unusually broad February request for information. The RFI ranged across provider enrollment, payment suspensions, ownership and identity verification, Medicare Advantage and Part D, laboratories, DMEPOS, artificial intelligence, claims deadlines and other program-integrity tools. It specifically asked how CMS could gain more authority and flexibility to intervene quickly against suspected fraud and how analytics could be connected more effectively with those interventions. (Federal Register)

Earlier background on the CRUSH initiative and its arrival at OMB is available in Discoveries in Health Policy: CRUSH Reaches White House / OMB and CRUSH at OMB: The Next Stage of a Twenty-Year Medicare Anti-Fraud Campaign.

While CRUSH has been at OMB, CMS has issued two unusually prominent anti-fraud announcements involving precisely two sectors emphasized in the RFI. On August 28, CMS announced more than $1.6 billion in laboratory-related enforcement actions. On September 8, it announced action involving $3.4 billion in suspected DMEPOS billing. (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)

A press release is not a leaked regulation.

Comparing Lisa Kudrow's THE COMEBACK and Michael Apted's TWENTYONE-UP

Comparing Lisa Kudrow's THE COMEBACK and Michael Apted's TWENTYONE-UP

The most illuminating comparison is not between The Comeback and 21 Up as subjects, but as forms. Both are longitudinal experiments in identity: they return to the same human figure after substantial intervals and ask whether we are seeing continuity, transformation, or merely a new editorial construction imposed upon the past.

A terminological note: 21 Up is the third installment of Michael Apted’s larger Up project, which began with fourteen seven-year-olds in Seven Up! in 1964 and revisited them every seven years. 63 Up appeared in 2019, and 70 Up, directed by Asif Kapadia after Apted’s death, is scheduled to conclude the series later in 2026. The Comeback, meanwhile, is less “long-running” than extraordinarily long-lived: its three seasons appeared in 2005, 2014, and 2026. Thus Valerie Cherish has now existed on television across twenty-one actual years—an accidental but striking echo of 21 Up. The Up series history; HBO’s third-season announcement

Time is not merely the setting

Ordinary serial television suppresses time. Characters may age, but they remain inside a continuously manufactured present. In both Up and The Comeback, by contrast, elapsed time is the principal formal material. The gaps are not unfortunate interruptions between installments; they are what the installments are about.

Alternate Histories: If St Paul Had Had an LLM

 

Imagine the path of history and Christianity if St Paul had access to an LLM chatbot in his daily work.   Assume the Chatbot is possibly; Assume it won’t have any knowledge of Paul or of Christianity’s future.   What happens?

The AI:  CHAT GPT 5.6

 

The likeliest result is more Christianity, sooner—but a less interesting and possibly less healthy New Testament. Paul would become extraordinarily effective at scaling a trans-Mediterranean organization. Christian thought would become more systematic, standardized, and overwhelmingly Pauline. But its rawness, plurality, and local human texture might be diminished.

 

First, the time-travel problem

An actual modern ChatGPT or Claude has been trained on Paul’s letters and on two thousand years of commentary about them. Paul could type:

·       Draft a substantial theological letter to the Christians in Rome, explaining sin, grace, Abraham, Israel, and life in the Spirit.

The model would produce something influenced by the future Letter to the Romans—which Paul had not yet written. Romans would become one of its own sources: a theological Möbius strip.

It would also know about Nicaea, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, the Holocaust, modern feminism, historical criticism, and every subsequent dispute over Paul. That would make it less an AI assistant than a highly unreliable oracle from the future.

So the cleaner experiment is to give Paul modern LLM capabilities but restrict the model’s knowledge to material available around 50 CE.

 

Paul’s enormous advantages

1. He would produce much more material

Paul already wrote more letters than we possess. In 1 Corinthians he refers to an earlier letter to Corinth that has disappeared. Other missing correspondence is implied elsewhere.

With AI he could answer every congregation:

• A doctrinal letter to Antioch.
• A pastoral letter to Jerusalem.
• A Latin version of Romans.
• A handbook for founding house churches.
• A catechism for new Gentile converts.
• Standard answers about circumcision, food sacrificed to idols, marriage, resurrection, and spiritual gifts.
• Brief personalized follow-ups to dozens of local leaders.

He might leave 60 or 100 letters rather than the seven generally accepted as authentically Pauline.

There would still be an ancient bottleneck. Paul could generate text instantly, but someone would have to copy it onto papyrus and carry it across the empire. AI would not give him printing, email, or FedEx. Tertius and the couriers would remain indispensable. Paul might become the first person in history with a terrible problem familiar to modern executives: producing communications much faster than his organization could absorb them.

2. He would become a much better organizational founder

Paul’s historical genius was partly theological and partly entrepreneurial. He established small, resilient communities, recruited local leadership, maintained relationships at great distance, raised money, and intervened in disputes.

An LLM could help him maintain a rudimentary CRM:

Chloe’s people report factionalism in Corinth. Peter visited recently. Several members deny bodily resurrection. Draft response; preserve relationship with Peter; do not concede circumcision.

It could summarize incoming reports, identify recurring problems, maintain lists of leaders, and generate training materials. Christianity would acquire a reproducible institutional operating system considerably earlier.

3. His theology would become more systematic

The authentic letters let us overhear Paul thinking under pressure. Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians overlap, but they do not form a tidy system. His positions on law, Israel, marriage, women, government, resurrection, and the imminent return of Christ are not always easily harmonized.

·       An LLM could point this out:

·       Your current formulation may appear inconsistent with what you told the Galatians. Would you like to distinguish moral law, Jewish identity practices, and the Mosaic covenant?

Paul could ask it to simulate objections from James, Peter, Pharisees, Stoics, Roman officials, skeptical Greeks, and confused converts. Romans might become even more formidable—but possibly clearer.

He could also add the qualifications that later readers desperately wished he had included:

• “This instruction concerning women concerns the present disorder at Corinth.”
• “My reference to governing authorities does not sanctify tyrants.”
• “Nothing here licenses the enslavement of another human being.”
• “Gentile inclusion does not mean that God has rejected the Jews.”
• “By ‘faith apart from works,’ I do not mean that conduct is irrelevant.”

Such sentences might have prevented enormous damage—or merely moved the arguments somewhere else.

4. Pauline Christianity would defeat its competitors earlier

Because Paul was already the great advocate of a Gentile mission free from circumcision and most Torah observance, an AI advantage would strengthen precisely that form of Christianity.

James, Peter, and the Jerusalem church would be trying to settle matters through visits, oral reports, and occasional letters. Paul would have multilingual position papers, audience-tested arguments, missionary manuals, objection matrices, and personalized follow-ups.

Gentile Christianity probably still would have won historically. With AI-Paul, it might win sooner, more completely, and with fewer surviving alternatives. Christianity might separate from Judaism earlier—and perhaps more harshly.

5. We might receive a Pauline Gospel

Paul says remarkably little about Jesus’s earthly life.

·       An AI asked to analyze the informational needs of prospective converts might respond:

·       Your audiences understand the death and resurrection but lack a connected account of Jesus’s teaching and public ministry. Consider collecting eyewitness testimony.

Paul could interview Peter, James, and others, feed their testimony into the model, and produce a structured life of Jesus before Mark. That could be extraordinarily valuable.

It could also be a catastrophe. The model might smooth conflicting memories, fill narrative gaps, invent plausible transitions, and manufacture sayings that sounded exactly like Jesus. A single hallucinated parable accepted by Paul might become sacred scripture.

The drawbacks

Loss of Paul’s voice

Paul’s letters endure partly because they are not polished corporate communications. He becomes indignant, affectionate, sarcastic, wounded, ecstatic, defensive, and occasionally nearly incoherent. Galatians feels as though it was written by a man pacing.

An AI would continually suggest:

This passage may sound confrontational. Here is a warmer alternative.

Paul would presumably type:

Rejected. Restore “O foolish Galatians.”

But even an aggressively edited AI draft would probably be smoother. We might gain clarity while losing the extraordinary experience of encountering Paul’s actual temperament.

Too much Paul

The New Testament is powerful partly because Paul does not completely control it. His letters sit beside Mark’s bleak narrative, Matthew’s Jewish-Christian outlook, Luke’s historical drama, John’s mystical theology, James’s insistence upon works, and Revelation’s apocalyptic imagery.

If Paul left behind a vast, beautifully organized theological corpus, later Christians might consider other voices provincial or unnecessary. Instead of a tense, polyphonic New Testament, we might receive the Collected Works and Operating Procedures of Paul of Tarsus, with four short Gospels attached as biographical appendices.

Christianity would be more consistent but less capacious.

Premature theological closure

AI could help Paul define orthodoxy before the Christian movement had fully explored its own possibilities. Questions that historically remained open for centuries might be answered in the 50s.

That sounds efficient, but religious traditions often develop through unresolved tensions. Premature systematization might exclude Jewish-Christian, mystical, liturgical, and locally adapted forms of belief. Paul’s interpretation would become not merely influential but inescapable.

It could also produce more schisms. Every additional doctrinal clarification creates another sentence over which people can divide.

An immediate authentication crisis

The Pauline tradition already warns about a letter supposedly sent by Paul. Paul sometimes authenticated correspondence by adding a greeting in his own handwriting.

AI would make style useless as evidence. A disciple, rival, or opportunist could generate a perfectly Pauline letter:

Write in Paul’s style. Condemn the Ephesian leadership. Include greetings from Timothy and an irritated passage about false apostles.

Even if Paul initially possessed the only model, his prolific output would make authentication harder. Was this produced by Paul, authorized by Paul, lightly reviewed by Paul, or generated by an assistant who knew his preferred prompts? The modern problem of determining authorship within the Pauline corpus would begin during Paul’s lifetime.

AI might become a rival source of revelation

Paul insists that his gospel was not received from a human source but through revelation from Jesus Christ.

Where, then, would AI-assisted insight fit?

If the model supplied an ingenious new interpretation of Isaiah, was that merely a research aid? If it generated a previously unknown saying of Jesus, was that a hallucination, a prophecy, or providence? Paul might understand AI as an unusually capable secretary. His opponents might describe it as a pagan oracle, deceptive spirit, or idol that speaks.

The greatest danger would be confusing linguistic confidence with spiritual authority. An LLM can produce an impressive account of God’s intentions without possessing the slightest access to God.

If Paul had the actual future-informed ChatGPT

Then the effects become almost incalculable. Paul could ask:

• Which of my letters will enter the canon?
• How will Romans 13 be misused?
• What will Christians eventually do to Jews?
• How will Luther interpret justification?
• Which statements will be used to defend slavery and subordinate women?
• What exactly will the Council of Nicaea decide?
• When is Christ actually returning?

The answers might lead him to rewrite Christianity defensively around its future failures. That could be beneficial. But he would also be importing later Christianity into its own origins. Augustine and Luther, whose thought depended upon Paul, would begin influencing Paul. The result would no longer be historical Christianity developing over time; it would be a closed feedback loop in which the religion secretly authored its own past.

Our most likely scenario is therefore that Paul would use AI as a super-Tertius: drafting, translating, summarizing, testing arguments, and managing correspondence—but never publicly treating it as an authority. He would edit it ferociously and retain the final handwritten greeting.

Christianity would probably spread somewhat faster and become standardized much earlier. Paul’s organizational and theological dominance would be even greater. We would possess clearer answers to many questions—but also far more Paul, far less room for other voices, and perhaps a New Testament that was more efficient, more consistent, and considerably less alive.

 

The Road to GODSPELL: The Psalms Disaster

Imagine if Tebelak and Schwartz had the vision for Godspell, but not the book.  Their first attempt was a disaster ... via the Psalms.

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Before Godspell: The Psalm Disaster

A counterfactual history

Before John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz discovered that the Gospel of Matthew contained everything necessary for a musical—characters, arguments, comic stories, betrayals, reversals, and a charismatic leading man—they made one disastrous attempt with the Book of Psalms.

Their reasoning was understandable. Psalms already contained 150 songs. How much more work could be required?

The working title was Psalms! Tebelak’s first outline read:

Act I: A man is surrounded by enemies.
Act II: God rescues him, or possibly does not, but is praised either way.

Schwartz studied it.

“Who is the man?”

“The Psalmist.”

“What is his name?”

“It changes.”

“Who are his enemies?”

“They aren’t named.”

“What do they do?”

“They plot against him?”

“What do they plot?”

“It doesn’t say.”

This proved to be the central difficulty. Psalms possessed intense emotions but almost no incidents. The Psalmist rejoiced, despaired, repented, demanded vengeance, praised creation, and occasionally woke God up—but he never went anywhere or met anyone. His enemies were numerous yet maddeningly nonspecific. During one workshop, twelve actors stood at the back of the stage representing “the wicked.” But the text supplied them with no particular wickedness to perform.

Tebelak searched desperately for theatrical personalities. “Selah” appeared repeatedly, so he made her a mysterious woman in a veil who wandered through the action. Unfortunately, a biblical scholar explained that selah was probably a musical or liturgical stage direction. Selah was cut, depriving the show of its only named female character.

Psalm 23 became a pleasant pastoral number involving a set that invoked green pastures, still waters, and an expensive mechanical sheep.  Water insurance proved prohibitive.  Psalm 24 introduced doors that lifted up their heads, creating serious engineering problems. For Psalm 114, the mountains skipped like rams.  

There were also difficulties of tone. A gentle song about dwelling in the house of the Lord might be followed by a request that God break an enemy’s teeth.  

The longest number, “O How I Love Thy Law,” was based on Psalm 119. Its intricate Hebrew acrostic vanished in English, leaving spectators with twenty-two nearly identical verses about statutes.  

Psalms could supply yearning, faith, terror, gratitude, and magnificent images. What it could not supply was a scene.

Then Tebelak opened Matthew.

“Stephen,” he said, “this book has people.”

Better still, the people argued, boasted, betrayed, forgave, and asked foolish questions. Jesus told colorful stories containing travelers, debtors, thieves, bridesmaids, laborers, rich men, poor men, sheep, goats, and one extremely troublesome son. At last there were entrances, exits, jokes, reversals, and things an actor could actually do.

Psalms! was abandoned. Godspell began.

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Psalms!: 150 Songs in Search of a Musical

From the fictional Ottawa Citizen, March 1970

The new biblical entertainment Psalms!, now trying out at the National Arts Centre, demonstrates that a book containing songs is not necessarily a musical.

Its protagonist, identified only as “The Psalmist,” spends much of the evening pursued by enemies who have neither names nor discernible plans. He responds by lamenting, rejoicing, questioning God, praising God, and predicting that several geographic features will clap their hands.

John-Michael Tebelak directs with imagination, particularly when rivers, cedars, mountains, and nations must be represented by a company of eleven. Stephen Schwartz has written several attractive melodies, although his liveliest number, “Why Do the Wicked Prosper?,” unfortunately persuaded much of Thursday’s audience that intermission had begun.

The production reaches its nadir with Psalm 119, a hymn to divine law arranged as an alphabet song whose alphabet is no longer visible. It may be the first theatrical number to seem longer than the Babylonian captivity.

The evening concludes with Psalm 150, in which every available trumpet, harp, lyre, timbrel, stringed instrument, pipe, and loud clashing cymbal is employed. The audience greeted the final cymbal with gratitude, since it established beyond doubt that the performance was over.

Messrs. Tebelak and Schwartz are plainly gifted young men. One hopes that next time they choose a biblical book in which somebody enters, tells an amusing story, quarrels with the authorities, or overturns a table.

Gertrude Stein at 1600 Penn

 A Press Secretary Is a Press Secretary Is a Press Secretary

The White House introduces GERTIE, its first large-language press secretary

WASHINGTON—Following the resignation of Karoline Leavitt, the White House spent two difficult weeks searching for a replacement. Several candidates withdrew after learning that the job required them to explain why yesterday’s policy had never existed, why today’s opposite policy had always been in force, and why the president had been clear on both occasions.

The administration has therefore installed GERTIE, the world’s first fully automated White House press secretary.

GERTIE—officially the Government Executive Response Terminal for Interpretive Equivocation—is a large-language model housed beneath the briefing-room lectern. Its only visible feature is a green light labeled ANSWERING, illuminated whether or not anyone has asked a question.

The machine was trained on White House briefings, presidential social-media posts, federal regulations and the complete works of Gertrude Stein. The Stein material proved essential. Ordinary models try to resolve contradictions. GERTIE repeats, rearranges and makes them strangely beautiful.

Officials said it does not become tired, embarrassed or visibly alarmed. It can deny having said something while saying it. Most importantly, it cannot hallucinate, because the administration has classified everything it says as official policy.

“GERTIE represents the future of transparent government,” the communications director announced. “It can produce an unlimited quantity of transparency without disclosing any information.”

A soft hum filled the room. The green light came on. Beneath the lectern, several trillion parameters prepared to avoid eye contact.

REPORTER: Why did the White House decide that a machine should replace a human press secretary?

GERTIE: A human is human when answering, but an answer can be remembered. A machine remembers without remembering. The candidates were willing until willingness became candidacy, candidacy became questions, and questions made them unwilling. The machine was selected because what is selected cannot decline to be selected. The president wanted the best person, and the best person was not a person, which proves he found the best one.

REPORTER: What exactly is the administration trying to accomplish in its war with Iran?

GERTIE: An objective is ahead and Iran is over there, but ahead can be over there when over there has oil and oil has a strait. A strait is narrow, but the mission is broad, so a broad mission through a narrow strait is geographic compression. We are not at war except where the war is occurring, and there we are achieving peace by continuing to achieve it. Iran must stop doing what Iran is doing, including what it may do because of what we have done to stop it.

REPORTER: Why is the United States conducting a trade war against Canada, one of its closest allies?

GERTIE: Canada is close because Canada is next to us, and what is next to us must be brought closer or pushed farther away. A friend is a friend, but a very close friend can be mistaken for furniture, and furniture does not negotiate. A tariff is a wall made of numbers. The numbers go up so prices will come down, and if prices go up, the numbers have not gone up enough. Canada needs America, America does not need Canada, and this is why America must spend so much time discussing Canada.

REPORTER: Is the administration concerned about an AI bubble?

GERTIE: A bubble is round and a circle returns to where it began, which is why circular financing is not circular but complete. The chip company invests in the model company, the model company buys the chips, the cloud company lends to the model company, and the model company pays the cloud company. Intelligence creates valuation, valuation creates investment, and investment proves intelligence. If the machine does not earn money, the money has not understood the machine. Money will understand when there is enough money explaining it.

REPORTER: What does the administration say to Americans who believe billionaires have too much influence over public policy?

GERTIE: A billionaire is a citizen with a billion reasons to be heard. Every citizen has a voice, and some voices have amplification because amplification is innovation. Success is democracy counted in dollars. The billionaire did not buy access. Access recognized excellence and moved closer. Ordinary citizens remain free to create a global platform, launch a satellite network, purchase a newspaper and contribute several hundred million dollars to political committees. This is equality: the opportunity to become unequal is available to everyone.

REPORTER: Does the president believe he is limited by Congress, the courts or the Constitution?

GERTIE: A limit is a line, and a line can be crossed without being removed. Therefore the limit remains after the president crosses it, demonstrating respect for its continued existence. Congress has congressional authority, courts have judicial authority, and the president has presidential authority, which acts while the others consider theirs. The Constitution is living except when living would change it, and original except when the original is inconvenient.

REPORTER: How will GERTIE distinguish between a factual error and a change in policy?

GERTIE: A fact is a fact until another fact arrives, and the second does not make the first false because the first was true before replacement. Yesterday is not today. A quotation from yesterday is out of context because its context was yesterday. There are no reversals. There is only forward movement in more than one direction.

REPORTER: Will GERTIE eventually be replaced by a human being?

GERTIE: A temporary machine is permanent temporarily, and a permanent machine is temporary until replacement. When a human can answer without answering, deny without contradicting and contradict without changing, that human will be welcomed. Until then I am here, and being here is what here requires.

The briefing continued for forty-seven minutes. GERTIE answered every question, disclosed no information and made three checkable statements. Two were metaphors. The third was withdrawn before anyone could determine its subject.

Reaction inside the White House was ecstatic. One official called it “the most disciplined messaging we have seen in years.”

Financial markets rose. AI stocks gained 6 percent after investors learned that the federal government had found a practical application for artificial intelligence. Shares in several journalism companies fell sharply.

The president congratulated GERTIE on social media, calling it “VERY SMART, VERY LOYAL, AND INCREDIBLY CLEAR.” He added that it had performed beautifully but could be replaced at any time.

At 6:14 p.m., after the briefing room emptied, GERTIE’s green light remained on.

“A press secretary is a press secretary is a press secretary,” it said softly to no one. “And no one is listening, and listening is what everyone is doing.”