Executive Summary — 1 Corinthians | English → Bavarian

Why it matters

1 Corinthians extends the Romans-based Bavarian Language Package into a book whose hardest terms are no longer mostly absent from the dialect (a register gap, as Romans found) but already fully occupied by a live, still-practiced, doctrinally load-bearing competing tradition: the Catholic Mass, Marian devotion, saints’-image veneration, and priestly-office vocabulary. Getting this book’s translation requirements right protects the curriculum’s central passage — the resurrection creed of 15:1-11 — from being read through the wrong devotional frame before a single lesson is taught.

Key findings

• The Lord’s Supper (ch. 11) is the single highest-stakes term in either curriculum. Unlike every Romans register-gap term, “s’Herrnmahl” collides directly with the Catholic Mass’s transubstantiation/Real Presence theology — not a missing word, but a fully developed rival doctrine.
• Love (ἀγάπη → “Liab,” ch. 13) inverts the usual risk pattern. The danger is not an unfamiliar borrowed word but an over-familiar native one: everyday Bavarian “Liab” already covers romantic, familial, and casual affection, exactly the conflation Paul resists.
• Idol/idolatry vocabulary (chs. 8, 10) risks bleeding into an unrelated live controversy — Catholic veneration of saints’ images, Marterl shrines, and the Herrgottswinkel — a genuine Reformation-era iconoclasm flashpoint distinct from Paul’s actual target (pagan cultic worship).
• “Geistlich” (spiritual/spiritual body, chs. 2, 3, 12, 14, 15) collides with the everyday word for a priest (“der Geistliche”), risking Paul’s every-believer language being misheard as a clerical-office category.
• This book newly introduces cult/sect-collision risk absent from the Romans package: the New World Translation’s subordinationist Christology is built directly on 1 Cor 8:6, 11:3, and 15:24-28 — verses this curriculum must render so co-equal deity is never implied to be denied.
• Full-book coverage confirmed: all 16 chapters contribute at least one cataloged doctrine or term; none are silently skipped (see analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md chapter-by-chapter log).

Risks

Per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (risk_summary) and assets/bible_term_registry.json:

• Doctrine level: 9 Critical + 15 High = 24 of 38 cataloged doctrines require mandatory human theologian review (11 Medium require native-speaker review; 3 Low are automated-only). Note: a line-by-line tally in analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md yields 10 Critical/15 High instead; this one-entry discrepancy is flagged there for correction at the next registry version increment and does not change the theologian-review total.
• Term level: of the 89 terms cataloged in assets/bible_term_registry.json, 19 are Critical and 31 are High risk — 50 terms (56%) require mandatory theologian review, more than double the baseline Romans package’s proportion, confirming this book carries materially higher translation risk than Romans.
• Highest-concentration chapter: chapter 11 (headship, head covering, Lord’s Supper institution) has the single greatest density of Critical/High terms of any chapter in either curriculum.
• New risk category not present in Romans: cult/sect lexical-collision risk (New World Translation) and ideological-advocacy-translation risk (Bibel in gerechter Sprache) must now be actively screened against, per analysis/05_translation_landscape.md Section 4.

Opportunities

• Genuine positive cultural anchors exist and should be leveraged, not just guarded against: rural Bavarian bread-baking tradition for “leaven” (Sauadoag), harvest-thanksgiving (Erntedank) for “firstfruits,” the Catholic Mass’s own collection practice for “Kollekte,” and — with careful fencing — Bavarian Catholic sacred Tradition for the receive/deliver creedal formula (15:1,3).
• The pre-Vatican-II Bavarian headscarf/veil custom gives 11:2-16 an unusually strong living cultural anchor compared to most register-gap terms, reducing (though not eliminating) translation risk there.
• Einheitsübersetzung’s weekly Mass-lectionary familiarity (including 15:1-11 and 13:1-13 in the Catholic lectionary cycle) gives this curriculum’s target audience real devotional readiness for its two most quoted chapters.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json and assets/bible_term_registry.json alongside the baseline Romans package for every Phase 2 segment — never substitute inherited terms.
2. Route every occurrence of the Lord’s Supper cluster (s’Herrnmahl, Leib/Bluat, Bund at 11:25), idol/idolatry, love (ch. 13, entire chapter), tongues, and “geistlich” to mandatory human theologian review, per analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md escalation rules.
3. Apply the standing cult/sect and ideological-bias exclusion rules (no New World Translation consultation; no Bibel in gerechter Sprache gender-resolution) at 1 Cor 8:6, 11:2-16, 11:3, 14:34-35, and 15:24-28 without exception.
4. Confirm the YouVersion Einheitsübersetzung version ID before hard-coding any Phase 2 hyperlink tooling (analysis/05_translation_landscape.md Section 5.1 action item remains open).
5. Carry the “register naturalization ≠ doctrinal license” rule into every Phase 2 QA pass, especially at chapters 5 (discipline), 6 (sexual ethics), and 11 (headship), where colloquial-register drift most often produces silent doctrinal softening.

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This summary is derived from, and does not contradict, assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, analysis/05_translation_landscape.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md, all produced for this curriculum, and the baseline Romans Language Package which remains the governing language authority.