Executive Summary — Ephesians Language Package (English → Czech)

Why it matters

Ephesians extends the Romans baseline into new, higher-risk territory for the Czech Language Package. The governing hazard documented across Romans — a largely secular readership colliding stable, well-formed Bible-tradition vocabulary with an unrelated, mundane secular meaning — intensifies here, and Ephesians adds a genuinely new failure mode: at least one term (μυστήριον/“tajemství”) whose ordinary Czech meaning runs in the opposite direction from Paul’s usage, rather than merely under-informing it. A second structural problem — one Czech word (“tělo”) forced to carry two opposite theological valences (σάρξ/flesh, negative; σῶμα/body, positive) with no orthographic signal to distinguish them — has no precedent in the Romans baseline at all. Getting this Language Package right therefore requires more active conceptual scaffolding, not just more careful word choice, than Romans did.

Key findings

• 117 terms are now fixed in assets/translation_memory.json: 34 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline, 83 newly introduced by Ephesians.
• 15 terms carry Critical risk (9 inherited: righteousness, salvation, resurrection, lord, son_of_god, father, god, holy_spirit, jesus; 6 new: flesh, made_alive_with_christ, raised_with_christ, body_of_christ, savior, mystery).
• 41 terms carry High risk (10 inherited, 31 new) — nearly triple the High-risk term count carried over from Romans alone, concentrated in the Election/Predestination, Church-as-Body, Unity, Mystery, Spiritual Warfare, and Household Codes doctrines.
• 56 terms total (Critical + High) trigger mandatory human theologian review under the escalation rules in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
• At the doctrine level (assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json), 3 of 9 curriculum doctrines are Critical-rated (Salvation by Grace through Faith, The Church as the Body of Christ, The Mystery of Christ Revealed) and 5 are High-rated (Election and Predestination, Unity of Jews and Gentiles, Spiritual Warfare, Household Codes, Walking in Newness of Life) — 8 of 9 doctrines require human theologian review, with only Gifts for Building Up the Church (Medium) requiring native-speaker-only review. Zero doctrines are Low-risk or automated-only, a materially higher-scrutiny profile than the Romans baseline.

Risks

• “Tajemství” (mystery) is the single highest-collision term identified in either curriculum. Ordinary Czech readers will default to “an intriguing withheld secret” (detective fiction, stage magic) — nearly the inverse of Paul’s “a plan now fully disclosed.” Every one of its four occurrences (1:9; 3:3–9; 5:32; 6:19) requires a mandatory disambiguating gloss, not optional first-use scaffolding.
• “Tělo” must silently carry both σάρξ and σῶμα. Unlike “Pán/pán” (where capitalization at least signals a distinction), there is no orthographic cue here; unglossed occurrences risk readers concluding either that the physical body is condemned or that the church-as-body metaphor is empty poetry.
• Household codes (5:21–33; 6:1–9) face bidirectional secular misreading. Contemporary Czech egalitarian norms make “podřídit se” liable to be read as endorsing domination (if isolated from 5:21’s mutuality and 5:25’s self-giving counterpart) or dismissed wholesale as culturally regressive; “otrok” carries genuine ethical weight requiring mandatory historical contextualization.
• Spiritual Warfare (6:10–20) faces a folklore-trivialization risk unique to this letter. “Ďábel” risks being read through the domesticated, comic Czech “čert” folk figure (St. Nicholas Day customs) rather than as Paul’s real personal spiritual adversary — the opposite collision direction from most terms in this Language Package.
• Unity of Jews and Gentiles (2:11–22) carries acute local historical weight beyond ordinary translation difficulty, given the Holocaust’s devastation of Czech Jewish communities; “jeden nový člověk” is a stronger claim than the Romans baseline’s parallel doctrine and must not be presented as erasing Jewish covenant identity.
• Cult-rendering contamination risk: the Watchtower Society’s Czech Překlad nového světa is in active circulation and shapes surrounding renderings to blunt Christ’s deity/lordship and to reframe “mystery” and household submission along organizational-hierarchy lines; no curriculum material may echo these patterns (see analysis/05_translation_landscape.md §4).

Opportunities

• The union-with-Christ compounds of 2:1–10 (made alive, raised, seated with Christ) give this curriculum a chance to teach the core passage’s “but God” turn narratively and memorably, provided the “spolu” (together with) component is never dropped.
• The Czech indigenous Reformation heritage (Hus, Comenius, Czech Brethren) offers a thin but genuine bridge resource for Salvation by Grace, Gifts for Building Up the Church, and Walking in Newness of Life — usable if not assumed as active background knowledge.
• Existing Czech translation consensus is a strength on several fronts: all mainstream translations (ČEP, BKR, B21, JB) preserve the reality-claim of spiritual warfare (6:12) without demythologizing it, and all preserve the grace/works contrast at 2:8–9 without softening — this curriculum can build directly on that consensus rather than fighting it.
• The armor-of-God passage (6:10–20) reuses already-fixed Critical/High baseline nouns (spravedlnost, víra, spasení) inside a vivid, culturally resonant martial-historical register, offering a low-lexical-risk vehicle for reinforcing three of the curriculum’s highest-priority terms simultaneously.

Recommended actions

1. Mandate the “tajemství” gloss at every occurrence, with no first-use-only exception — this is the single highest-priority enforcement rule in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md and should be spot-checked at 100% in Phase 2 QA, not sampled.
2. Require context-sensitive tělo disambiguation as a hard validation gate, not a style preference — no segment containing “tělo” should pass automated validation without a resolved σάρξ/σῶμα tag.
3. Bind Ephesians 5:21–25 and 6:1–9 as single non-severable teaching units in all downstream curriculum material to prevent isolated-verse misreadings of the household codes in either direction (domination or dismissal).
4. Route all 8 Critical/High-rated doctrines to human theologian review by default; reserve native-speaker-only review for Gifts for Building Up the Church, and confirm reviewer capacity is scaled to the ~56-term theologian-review load before Phase 2 batch processing begins.
5. Confirm the ČEP version_id for YouVersion deep links before Phase 2 hyperlink generation, and back-propagate it to the Romans baseline per analysis/05_translation_landscape.md §5.1, to keep both curricula’s citation infrastructure consistent.

See assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, and analysis/05_translation_landscape.md for full supporting detail behind every figure and finding cited above.