Executive Summary — 1 Corinthians (English → Czech)

Why it matters

1 Corinthians extends the Czech Romans Language Package into genuinely new territory. The Romans baseline’s core finding — that Czech’s dominant translation risk is low biblical literacy, not a rival religious framework — still holds for most of this letter. But 1 Corinthians introduces something the Romans baseline never had to handle: a live, still-practiced competing theological framework. The Czech phrase “Tělo Kristovo,” spoken at the elevation of the Host in every Czech Catholic Mass, collides directly with this letter’s Lord’s Supper (ch. 11) and Body of Christ (ch. 12) material. A second, comparably severe risk — “láska,” which defaults overwhelmingly to romantic love in ordinary Czech — governs the letter’s climactic chapter 13. Getting these two risks right (and knowing which of the ten assigned doctrines depend on them) determines whether this curriculum teaches sound doctrine or quietly imports either Catholic sacramental theology or a greeting-card sentiment where Paul intended something else entirely.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed: all 16 chapters analyzed; every chapter maps to at least one of the 17 doctrines tracked in assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, with chapter 9 explicitly logged as reviewed/no-new-gap rather than silently skipped.
• 95 glossary terms are now tracked in assets/translation_memory.json for this curriculum (31 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 64 newly introduced by 1 Corinthians).
• 42 of those 95 terms (44%) are Critical or High risk (14 Critical + 28 High) and require translation-memory-exact enforcement with mandatory glossing.
• 17 doctrines are tracked, of which 11 (4 Critical + 7 High) require mandatory human theologian review — a higher theologian-review proportion (65%) than typically expected for a book whose base vocabulary is otherwise well-established in Czech Bible tradition.
• New risk pattern absent from Romans: three terms (tělo Kristovo, tělo a krev Páně, Večeře Páně) collide with live Czech Catholic liturgical usage — not a mere absence of meaning, but a specific competing meaning that must be actively fenced.
• New severity-comparable risk: “láska” (agapē) carries the single strongest secular-default association of any term in either the Romans or 1 Corinthians glossary (romantic/erotic love), rivaling “milost” and “spasení” in required remediation intensity.
• New reverse-direction risk: “démon” is at risk of being read as fiction (horror/folklore genre) rather than flattened into secular abstraction — the opposite failure mode from most terms in this Language Package.
• New sect-collision risks identified and must-not-echo flagged: Jehovah’s Witnesses’ “mučnický kůl” (cross), two-class resurrection doctrine, and subordinationist Christology; Latter-day Saints’ use of 15:29 as proxy-baptism warrant. None of these existed as identified risks in the Romans baseline.

Risks

• Doctrinal conflation risk (Critical): without explicit disambiguation, readers may conflate 1 Corinthians 11’s sacramental “tělo Kristovo” with 1 Corinthians 12’s corporate-church sense — or import Real Presence/transubstantiation doctrine the curriculum has not itself asserted.
• Sentimentalization risk (Critical): “láska” in chapter 13 may be read, and taught, as a message about romantic relationships rather than Paul’s self-giving, action-defined ethic — undermining the entire “Love as the Greater Way” doctrine.
• Contemporary-controversy contamination risk (High): head covering (11:2-16) and women’s silence (14:34-35) are live flashpoints in secular Czech public discourse and risk being read through the current European hijab debate or gender-egalitarianism debate rather than Paul’s first-century context.
• Trivialization risk (High): “démon” (10:20-21) risks being read as harmless horror-genre fiction, undercutting the seriousness of Paul’s claim about real spiritual powers behind idol worship.
• Sect-echo risk (High): any inadvertent adoption of Jehovah’s Witness or LDS renderings/glosses would introduce doctrinal error this curriculum must specifically guard against, unlike the Romans baseline which faced no comparable sect-collision exposure.
• Archaism-blindness risk (High): “smilstvo” (5:1; 6:13, 18) risks the same museum-piece failure mode already documented for “spasení” — recognized vocabulary with no live moral content for a secular reader.

Opportunities

• Paul’s own creedal definition (15:3-5) is a built-in teaching aid: unlike most Critical-risk terms in the Romans baseline that must be explained from nothing, “gospel” and “resurrection” in the core passage arrive with Paul’s own content already supplied — this curriculum can lean on the text itself rather than only supplementary explanation.
• Cross-tradition resonance points identified in 04_comparative_theology.md (Jewish chesed/ahava, Islamic rahma, Jewish herem as an anathema anchor, Jewish/Orthodox/older Czech Catholic head-covering practice as a non-Islamic comparative anchor) can be used pastorally to build bridges without collapsing genuine doctrinal distinctives.
• The letter’s practical, situational chapters (7-10, 14, 16) offer low-to-medium risk, concrete, relatable teaching material that can build reader confidence before tackling the Critical-risk chapters (11-13, 15).
• Established ČEP/Bible21/Jeruzalémská bible comparison set (per 05_translation_landscape.md) gives Phase 2 translators a ready-made triangulation method for every hard verse identified, reducing first-pass error rates on the highest-risk passages.

Recommended actions

1. Load both the Romans baseline and 1 Corinthians translation_memory.json files together for every Phase 2 session; never treat the 1 Corinthians TM as a standalone replacement.
2. Apply mandatory theologian review to all 11 Critical/High doctrines and all 42 Critical/High terms, with zero exceptions for the Tělo Kristovo cluster (chs. 10-12), love (ch. 13), resurrection (ch. 15), and the contested worship-order passages (11:2-16; 14:34-35).
3. Enforce the collision-vs-absence remediation distinction established in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md: fence collision-risk terms (tělo Kristovo, láska, démon, zahalení hlavy, anathema) against a specific wrong meaning; scaffold absence-risk terms (jazyky, chrám Boží, smilstvo) from zero. Do not apply the wrong strategy to either category.
4. Bake the cult/sect non-echo list into every automated QA pass, not just human review: reject any output containing “mučnický kůl,” any two-class resurrection framing, or any 15:29 proxy-baptism endorsement before it reaches a human reviewer.
5. Standardize the YouVersion citation convention (ČEP, version ID 509, book code 1CO) across this curriculum and retroactively into the Romans package, closing the version-ID gap the Romans baseline left open.
6. Preserve, never resolve, the interpretive ambiguity in 11:29, 11:2-16, 14:34-35, and 6:9-11 at every layer of translated and teaching material, consistent with the non-resolution stance documented across 05_translation_landscape.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.