This entry covers Durendal’s 2020 text-generation and portrait-animation experiment. For the later Lucerne installation and HSLU successor research, see Deus in Machina (AI Jesus).
AI_Jesus, presented publicly as A.I. Jesus, was a text-generation and portrait-animation experiment released by engineer George Davila Durendal in 2020. It combined passages imitating the King James Bible with a later video presentation in which animated images of Jesus appeared to speak generated words.[1,2,4]
Development and generated texts
Durendal announced the project on 25 August 2020. He described a natural-language model trained only on the King James Bible and intended to reproduce its style. In an email interview with The Christian Post, he said development had taken about two weeks from the initial idea, incorporating code he had begun three years earlier.[2,3]
The surviving repository contains six texts totaling approximately 60,000 words. The Plague, Caesar and The End of Days were uploaded on 25 August; Blood, Greeks and Wisdom followed on 26 August. Durendal described the first group as more random and the second as more closely constrained to biblical style. He judged the latter less error-prone but less expressive.[1,2]
The outputs combine biblical names, prophetic announcements and familiar verbal formulas, sometimes with broken grammar or incongruous meanings. The Plague includes the sentence, “Then shall the strange god be as the sand which is in the wilderness.” Contemporary coverage emphasized the gap between recognizable biblical diction and intelligible prose.[1,5]
Deepfake presentation
On 2 September, Durendal described extending the project with animated representations based on three paintings of Jesus: Salvator Mundi, the Sinai Christ Pantocrator and Raphael’s Transfiguration. He recorded himself reading an excerpt from Greeks and synchronized that audio with an animated portrait. The resulting presentation combined generated text with human narration and selected religious imagery.[4]
The repository’s surviving commits run from 25 August to 2 September 2020.[1]
Reception
The Christian Post interviewed Durendal, while TechXplore discussed the passages and his attempts to balance stylistic coherence with randomness.[3,5] A sermon published by the United Church of Hinesburg on 20 September 2020 quoted the output critically before interpreting Matthew 20. It questioned whether the confusing passages would make Christian teaching appear incomprehensible or trivial.[6]
In a 2026 comparative study, Esra Nur Çiftçi and Muhammet Yeşilyurt treated Durendal’s project separately from later Jesus chatbots and the Lucerne Deus in Machina installation. They identified its combination of biblical imitation and animated imagery as an early experiment in AI representations of Jesus, while acknowledging its technical and aesthetic limitations.[7]
Source note. Training details come from Durendal; the repository contains no training code or model weights. Contemporary coverage often repeats his account, and the later study analyzes published documents. The release dates do not establish an operating lifespan, and the cited reception does not establish adoption of the texts as scripture.
References
- George Davila Durendal. AI_Jesus repository and README. Revision of 2 September 2020; text uploads dated 25–26 August.
- George Davila Durendal. “I Created an A.I. Clone of Jesus.” Medium, 25 August 2020.
- Brandon Showalter. “Engineer creates ‘AI Clone of Jesus’ that recites Bible.” The Christian Post, 2 September 2020.
- George Davila Durendal. “Deepfake Jesus.” Medium, 2 September 2020.
- Peter Grad. “AI Jesus writes Bible-inspired verse.” TechXplore, 2 September 2020.
- United Church of Hinesburg. “Heaven is Like a Landowner.” Pastor’s Blog, 20 September 2020.
- Esra Nur Çiftçi and Muhammet Yeşilyurt. “From Deus ex Machina to Deus in Machina: The Transformation of Religious Representation in AI Jesus Applications.” Dinbilimleri Akademik Araştırma Dergisi 26(3), 2026, 1863–1893, especially 1870 and 1872. In Turkish.