How Ask works
Ask is a way into the Atlas, not a replacement for it. It finds the Atlas texts that bear on your question and shows you where each part of the answer comes from, so you can read the evidence yourself.
Three kinds of answer
- Atlas guide. For some questions the Atlas has a short guide, written in advance from listed sources. Every quotation in a guide is checked word for word against the cited text each time the Atlas is built, and every citation opens the passage it names. A guide whose sources change is withdrawn until someone checks it again. Guides say whether a specialist has reviewed them; at present none has.
- Quoted from Atlas records. Otherwise Ask quotes the sentences from Atlas entries, study notes and passages that match your question best, and names each one. It does not paraphrase them or add to them.
- No answer. When the Atlas’s sources do not contain enough to answer, Ask says so and shows the closest mentions. It also says when a question touches material the Atlas does not yet hold, such as festivals and their origins.
Kinds of evidence
Scripture, an ancient historian, a church’s teaching and a modern scholar’s conclusion are different kinds of thing. Ask labels each source with one of these:
- Scripture
- The biblical text itself, in a named translation.
- Ancient source
- A text written in or near the period it describes (here, Josephus). It is evidence, with its own author, purpose and limits.
- Early Christian writing
- A Christian text outside the Bible.
- Word study
- A dictionary entry for a Greek or Hebrew word: what the word can mean, not what it must mean in every passage.
- Translation choice
- How a translation renders the original, and why translations differ.
- Manuscript variant
- Where manuscripts or printed editions differ in wording.
- Church teaching
- What a church or tradition teaches, in its own documents. A statement of belief, not of historical fact.
- Scholarship
- A modern scholarly reading or reconstruction, with the reference to check.
- Atlas entry
- An Atlas reference entry (a tradition, a person, a place, an order), with its own sources and review status.
- Atlas summary
- A summary written for the Atlas from the evidence listed with it. It is an inference, not a source, and is labelled with its review status.
How it searches
Ask matches the words of your question, after removing small words and endings, and it also matches meaning: words that appear in the same passages of the Atlas’s own texts are treated as related (a method called latent semantic analysis). Names of people, places and traditions count for more when the question is about them. A short, hand-written list links everyday words to the words the texts use (for example “Christmas” to “Nativity”). Nothing is learned from outside the Atlas.
On this device, and offline
- Ask finds and assembles every answer in your browser. No language model is used, and your question is not sent to any service to be answered.
- The first question downloads Ask’s index (about 1.3 MB). After that, Ask works offline.
- Passage text comes from the Scripture Library. Passages you have read, or downloaded under Offline reading, show their text offline; others show their reference with a link.
- A version that writes a summary with a hosted model, checked against the same sources, has been prepared but is not switched on.
What stays private
- Questions you type here are put in the page address after a “#” (
/ask/#q=…) so that Back and sharing work. Browsers never send that part of an address to a server, so the question does not reach Christian Atlas’s hosting (Cloudflare) or its logs. It does stay in this browser’s history, like any address. - Links you share carry the question after “#” too. Whoever opens the link sees the question in it.
- Older links of the form
/ask/?q=…, and the home-page form when JavaScript is switched off, send the question to the server in the request, where Cloudflare may record it in its request logs like any web address. Ask then moves the question after “#” so that it is not sent again. - Following a source to another page of the Atlas does not pass on your question: the part after “#” is never included in the referring address, and other sites receive only the Atlas’s address (christianatlas.org), as set by its referrer policy.
- Ask stores nothing about you and has no accounts, analytics or tracking. The “Search the Atlas by name” link opens the ordinary search page without your question.
Reviewed and unreviewed
- Each answer says what kind it is. Prepared guides say whether a specialist has reviewed them; at present none has.
- Under a quoted record, Ask shows its review status in plain words: Primary text, Checked against its sources, or Draft, not yet reviewed by a specialist. Much of the Atlas’s study material was drafted with AI assistance and is labelled as a draft until a specialist has reviewed it.
- Automatic checks (that every quotation is word for word in its source, and every citation opens a real passage) are not scholarly review, and Ask never presents them as such.
What Ask cannot do
- It cannot know what is not in the Atlas: most writings of the Church Fathers, the Dead Sea Scrolls, festivals, current events.
- It can rank a less relevant passage highly, or miss a relevant one. Every answer lists what it searched; read the passages in context.
- It does not decide between traditions. Where Christians disagree, it shows the evidence each side cites.