01 Executive Summary — 2 Peter (English → Burmese)

The bottom line: 2 Peter can be faithfully translated into Burmese using established Judson-tradition vocabulary, but this short letter concentrates an unusually high density of doctrinal collision risk with Burmese Theravada Buddhism — higher, term-for-term, than the Romans baseline this pipeline extends.

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Why it matters

2 Peter’s own argument is that the gospel rests on verified history and Spirit-given Scripture, not on invented legend (1:16) or private religious insight (1:20-21) — and it makes this argument using vocabulary (divine nature, carried along by the Spirit, Tartarus, the Lord’s coming) that sits directly on top of Burmese Buddhism’s most load-bearing categories: rebirth, karma, meditative attainment, and cyclical cosmology. A mistranslation here does not create minor confusion — in at least ten places, it can invert the letter’s own doctrine into its Buddhist opposite (e.g., a “divine nature” heard as innate Buddha-nature; a “hell” heard as temporary Naraka; a “coming” heard as Metteyya’s cyclical arrival).

Key findings

• 99 terms cataloged in assets/translation_memory.json: 22 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline package, 77 newly proposed for this curriculum.
• 20 Critical-risk and 33 High-risk terms (53 of 99, ~54%) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — a substantially higher proportion than the Romans baseline.
• 21 of 22 named doctrines (10 Critical, 11 High) in assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json route to mandatory human theologian review; only one (Mockers and the Last Days, Medium) routes to native-speaker-only review. Zero doctrines are automated-only.
• The single highest-severity new risk is ငရဲ (Tartarus/hell), which doubles as the standard Burmese term for Naraka, a temporary karma-exitable realm — the same class of risk the baseline already flags for salvation/nirvana and resurrection/rebirth, now extended to judgment itself.
• ဘုရားဇာတိ (divine nature), the letter’s own theological centerpiece (1:3-4), is simultaneously this curriculum’s most exportable and most easily misheard phrase, colliding with both deva/Brahma-realm attainment and innate “Buddha-nature” folk intuitions.
• Two gaps were identified in the baseline Romans package itself — repentance (μετάνοια) and love/agapē (ἀγάπη) — both flagged for retrofit into the baseline, since both concepts are equally present and equally under-served there.
• The curriculum elevates Prophet and Prophecy from the baseline’s Low risk to High risk, because 2 Peter (unlike Romans) makes the inspiration of prophecy its central epistemic claim (1:19-21) and its corruption its central polemical target (2:1).

Risks

• Syncretistic drift on repeated exposure: several crowded terms (ပညာ/knowledge vs. paññā, ချစ်ခြင်းမေတ္တာ/love vs. mettā, ခန္တီ-adjacent patience vs. khanti) risk gradual doctrinal reinterpretation across a multi-lesson curriculum if fencing notes are attached only once rather than at every occurrence.
• Christological softening: 2 Peter 1:1’s Granville Sharp construction (“our God and Savior Jesus Christ”) is a known target of doctrinally-biased renderings (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses New World Translation) that split one Person into two referents; any borrowed phrasing from non-anchor sources risks importing this error.
• Judgment-cosmology collapse: the Tartarus/hell, Day-of-the-Lord, and new-heavens-new-earth doctrines are each independently vulnerable to being absorbed into Burmese Buddhism’s cyclical, karma-driven cosmology (Naraka, kappa cycles) unless each carries its own standing translator note.
• Provisional citation infrastructure: the recommended YouVersion version ID (232) is unverified against the live catalog and must be confirmed before any hyperlink is published.

Opportunities

• 2 Peter’s own polemic against “cleverly devised myths” (1:16) and “private interpretation” (1:20) gives the curriculum a built-in, textually-grounded opportunity to directly address — rather than avoid — the syncretism risks named above, turning each collision point into a teaching moment the text itself anticipates.
• The letter’s virtue chain (1:5-8) and closing exhortation (“grow in grace and knowledge,” 3:18) offer a natural bridge to explicitly contrast grace-enabled Christian growth with merit-based Buddhist self-cultivation, reinforcing rather than competing with the Romans baseline’s existing grace-versus-merit teaching architecture.
• Retrofitting repentance and love/agapē into the baseline Romans package (as recommended) will improve consistency and doctrinal fidelity across both curricula simultaneously.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 53 Critical/High-risk terms and all 21 Critical/High-risk doctrines to mandatory human theologian review in Phase 2, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json and the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
2. Attach standing (not one-time) translator fencing notes for every occurrence of the ten new Critical-risk terms, especially ဘုရားဇာတိ, ငရဲ, ကြွလာတော်မူခြင်း, and ဝိညာဉ်တော်၏ဦးဆောင်တိုက်ဆောင်မှုကိုခံရ.
3. Confirm the provisional YouVersion version ID (232) against the live catalog before publishing any 2 Peter hyperlink.
4. Submit repentance (နောင်တရခြင်း) and love/agapē (ချစ်ခြင်းမေတ္တာ) for formal retrofit into the baseline Romans translation memory in a subsequent Phase 1 pass.
5. Proceed to Phase 2 segment translation using the dual-load procedure specified in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md (baseline Romans TM + this curriculum’s 2 Peter TM, in that order).

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This summary reconciles exactly with assets/translation_memory.json (99 terms), assets/bible_term_registry.json (98 entries), and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (risk_summary: Critical 10, High 11, Medium 1, Low 0; 21 doctrines requiring theologian review, 1 requiring native speaker review, 0 automated-only) produced earlier in this Phase 1 pipeline.