Executive Summary: 1 John (English → Bodo)

Why it matters: 1 John’s vocabulary of interiority — abiding, being born of God, testing spirits, love that casts out fear — sits closer to Bodo’s lived, currently-practiced religious life (Bathouism’s aniconic sijou-plant worship and Kherai puja’s doudini trance-possession; Brahma Dharma’s Sanskritized merit-and-liberation ethic) than Romans’ more forensic vocabulary did. Getting this letter right in Bodo isn’t a lexical exercise — it’s a discipleship intervention into categories Bodo believers already use every week.

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Key findings

• 28 doctrines mapped across all 5 chapters, none silently skipped. 10 Critical + 11 High = 21 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review; 6 require native-speaker review; 1 (pastoral address/style) is automated-review-only.
• 74 terms tracked in the 1 John term registry; 26 Critical + 22 High = 48 terms require mandatory theologian review — nearly two-thirds of the entire glossary, a substantially higher risk-density than Romans produced for a book one-third its length.
• The letter’s two identity-statements — “God is Light” (1:5) and “God is Love” (4:8, 16) — are the single highest-stakes renderings in the curriculum: Bodo’s copula grammar must be confirmed to carry ontological force, not mere comparison, before any deployment.
• “Testing the spirits” (4:1-6) is the sharpest cultural-collision point identified anywhere in this Language Package family: Bodo village life already has a live discernment practice (Kherai trance authentication) that must be displaced, not supplemented, by the letter’s sole valid test — confession of Christ’s true incarnation.
• Three genuine conceptual gaps (not wrong-existing-words, but missing categories) recur: eternal life as a present, knowable possession (5:13), the directional inversion of propitiation (God provides the sacrifice, 2:2/4:10), and non-cyclical new birth (born of God, not “reborn”).

Risks

• Highest risk: मूर्ति (“idols,” 5:21) defaults to a narrow, carved-image sense that would let Bathou’s aniconic sijou-plant devotion appear untouched by the letter’s closing warning unless teacher notes explicitly extend it.
• Systemic risk: बलि (propitiation) and साफ (cleanse) are both doctrinally correct register-words that already carry a live, opposite-direction meaning in household ritual practice; every occurrence needs the qualifying phrase, with zero tolerance for shortcuts.
• Regional-political risk: जिनाय (“overcome/victory,” 2:13-14; 4:4; 5:4-5) risks unconscious militant/territorial resonance given the Bodoland Territorial Region’s armed-struggle history.
• Consistency risk: दुनिया (world) carries two opposed Johannine senses in one short letter with no morphological marker distinguishing them — a single missed sense-flag could invert 4:9’s meaning.

Opportunities

• 4:18’s “perfect love casts out fear” is this curriculum’s clearest apologetic bridge: it speaks directly into the anxious, propitiation-driven posture that structures traditional Bathou/Kherai practice, offering a resolution the source tradition has no equivalent for.
• 5:13’s present-tense assurance (“that you may KNOW you have eternal life”) is a sharp, positive point of contrast with both Bathouism’s this-life-only orientation and Brahma Dharma’s effort-dependent मोक्ष — worth foregrounding pedagogically, not just translating carefully.
• Reuse of baseline-established roots (फोराय-, बिनय-, थाखा-, सोर, बेंसे) for every new 1 John compound keeps this curriculum lexically continuous with Romans, reducing the total new-vocabulary burden on learners moving between the two books.

Recommended actions

1. Lock three terms before any Phase 2 translation of chapters 1, 4, or 5 begins: the “God is Love”/“God is Light” copula construction, “testing the spirits,” and the idols/aniconic-devotion teaching-note extension — all three require theologian sign-off first, per 08_core_glossary.md and 05_translation_landscape.md.
2. Verify the BSI Bodo Bible’s own rendering of 1 John 1, 2, 4, and 5 verse-by-verse, and confirm the book-name form (provisionally “1 योहन”) and the YouVersion version ID/code, before citation tooling goes live.
3. Route the entire core passage (4:7-21) for mandatory theologian review as a block, regardless of which individual term triggers apply — it is the curriculum’s theological anchor and its highest doctrinal-density zone.
4. Brief Phase 2 translators explicitly on the forbidden-substitution deltas unique to this book (जोनोम-leakage into “born of God,” प्रायश्चित्त for propitiation, bare साफ for cleansing, subordinationist glosses on “true God”) in addition to the inherited Romans forbidden list.

See analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, analysis/05_translation_landscape.md, and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json / assets/bible_term_registry.json / assets/translation_memory.json for full supporting detail.