Executive Summary — 1 Peter (English → Cantonese)

Why it matters: 1 Peter pastors a persecuted church toward a living hope grounded in Christ’s resurrection — but Hong Kong’s dense, actively-practiced folk-religious landscape (Wong Tai Sin temple vow-culture, Guanyin devotion, ancestor veneration, 問米 spirit-mediumship, feng shui/almanac fatalism, and Cantonese triad-honor-code media tropes) sits closer to this letter’s specific vocabulary — spirits, priesthood, sacrifice, substitution, submission, blessing — than it did to Romans. Get this Language Package wrong and Hong Kong readers will hear a folk-syncretistic gospel; get it right and this becomes one of the sharpest apologetic tools in the curriculum for exactly that context.

---

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed. All 5 chapters of 1 Peter, all 29 doctrines, and 98 total glossary terms (25 inherited from the Romans baseline unchanged, 73 newly coined for this letter) are catalogued in translation_memory.json v2, bible_term_registry.json, and doctrine_risk_registry.json.
• Theologian-review load is higher, proportionally, than Romans. 51 of 98 terms (52%) are Critical or High risk (22 Critical + 29 High), and 19 of 29 doctrines (66%) require mandatory human theologian review (8 Critical + 11 High) — versus 27 of 46 doctrines (59%) in the Romans baseline. 1 Peter is a denser risk surface per chapter.
• One doctrine has no baseline precedent and no safe existing Cantonese vocabulary at all: Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits (1 Peter 3:18-22). This is the single highest-priority flag in the entire package — it collides simultaneously with 問米 (spirit-mediumship), 超度 (posthumous rescue rites), Catholic limbo/purgatory tradition, Jehovah’s Witness reframing, and Latter-day Saint proxy-baptism appropriation.
• The curriculum’s own named core doctrines cluster at Critical risk: 6 of the 8 curriculum-designated doctrines (Living Hope, Suffering for Righteousness’ Sake, Church as Holy/Royal Priesthood, Submission to Authority, Christ’s Substitutionary Suffering, Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits) are Critical tier; the remaining two (Holiness in Conduct, Elders and Humility) are High tier. None fall below High.
• Existing Chinese-language landscape (CUV/RCUV) contains one rendering this curriculum must knowingly override: 靈宮 (“spirit palace”) for “spiritual house” (2:5) — a direct temple-naming collision (cf. 天后宮) that this package replaces with 屬靈嘅殿.

---

Risks

• Compounding-term risk, not single-term risk, is the defining hazard of this book. Three phrases each combine two independently Critical/High terms: 為義受苦 (suffering + righteousness → risk of a 義氣 triad-honor-code misreading), 監獄裡嘅靈 (spirit + imprisonment → risk of ancestral/mediumship conflation), and 擔當…喺木頭上 (bearing + sacrifice → risk of 替身 misfortune-transfer-ritual conflation).
• The never-bare-靈 rule, absolute in the Romans baseline for one referent (聖靈), must now hold across three distinct referents in one short letter (聖靈, 基督嘅靈, 監獄裡嘅靈) — raising lapse probability under batch translation conditions.
• Household submission language (順服) is the highest-frequency risk term in the book, spanning civic authority, master/slave, and husband/wife contexts, each independently vulnerable to the Confucian 三從四德 patriarchal duty-code and, in civic contexts, to Hong Kong’s live political sensitivities.
• Sectarian appropriation is a live, documented risk, not a hypothetical one: Living Stream Ministry (“Local Church”) doctrine and Latter-day Saint missionary literature both build directly on this letter’s exact vocabulary cluster (2:4-9’s priesthood/living-stone imagery; 3:19’s spirits in prison).

---

Opportunities

• 1 Peter’s suffering theology is unusually well-suited to direct apologetic engagement with 報應 (karmic retribution) — a live, everyday Cantonese inference about misfortune — because the letter explicitly and repeatedly reframes suffering as God-permitted refinement patterned on Christ, not payback for hidden wrongdoing.
• The priesthood-of-all-believers doctrine (2:4-10) offers a natural, structurally clear contrast point against both Daoist ritual specialism (道士) and the Catholic ordained-priest register (司祭) already active in Hong Kong’s visible religious landscape, giving teaching material an unusually concrete “no mediating caste” apologetic.
• The core passage’s convergent landscape rendering (1:3-9) is already unanimous across CUV, RCUV, CNV, and TCB — this curriculum can adopt the existing shared rendering with high confidence and minimal deviation risk, strengthening cross-recognition for readers who already know the passage from their home congregation’s Bible.

---

Recommended actions

1. Route all segments touching 1 Peter 3:18-22 to human theologian review with zero automated-approval path, per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md — this is the single highest-priority item in Phase 2.
2. Implement the never-bare-靈 and never-bare-鬼 checks as blocking pre-submission validation, not advisory flags, for every 1 Peter batch-translation run, given the letter’s elevated spirit-language density relative to Romans.
3. Mandate the standing distinguishing footnote for 順服 at every occurrence (2:13-3:7, 5:5), never only at first introduction, given how the collision risk (三從四德; political-loyalty framing) recurs identically at each appearance.
4. Confirm the provisional YouVersion version_id: 46 (CUNPT) against the live catalog before Phase 2 automated hyperlinking begins — no baseline artifact supplied a verified ID.
5. Brief Phase 2/3 human reviewers explicitly on the three documented sectarian-appropriation risks (Living Stream Ministry “mingling” doctrine; Jehovah’s Witness NWT reframing of 3:19; Latter-day Saint proxy-baptism appeal to 3:19/4:6) so review is not limited to folk-religious collision alone.