Core Glossary
Core Glossary — 1 John
This glossary consolidates every load-bearing term identified in analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, drawn from every chapter of 1 John (1:1 through 5:21). Terms already present in the baseline Romans Language Package (translation_memory.json / bible_term_registry.json) reuse the baseline’s recorded English rendering exactly, marked [BASELINE REUSE] below. New terms specific to 1 John are marked [NEW] and are proposed for addition to the shared translation memory going into Phase 2.
Risk tiers follow the baseline’s three-category framework: False-Friend Drift (a strong competing secular/legal/pop-culture meaning silently displaces the theological sense), Denominational Contest (English-speaking Christian traditions disagree), and Obsolescence/Cultural Erosion (the word is rare or has faded in force). A term may carry more than one risk type simultaneously.
| Term (English) | Original / Transliteration | Chapter(s) | Category | Risk Tier | Risk Type(s) | Rendering Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| God | θεός / theos | 1-5 (throughout) | God | Critical | Post-Christian erosion | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “god” entry unchanged. |
| Jesus | Ἰησοῦς / Iēsous | 1-5 | Christology | Critical | Denominational/register | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “jesus” entry unchanged. |
| Son of God | υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ / huios theou | 3, 4:15, 5 | Christology | Critical | Post-Christian erosion | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “son_of_god” entry unchanged; 1 John’s confessional test (4:15, 5:5) intensifies its centrality. |
| Messiah / Christ | Χριστός / Christos | 2:22, 4:2, 5:1 | Christology | Medium | Pop-culture pejorative | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “messiah” entry unchanged. |
| Holy Spirit / Spirit | πνεῦμα (ἅγιον) / pneuma (hagion) | 3:24, 4:1-6, 4:13, 5:6-8 | God | Critical | Post-Christian erosion | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “holy_spirit” entry unchanged; note 1 John often uses the shortened “his Spirit” / “the Spirit” without the full title — same doctrine applies. |
| faith / believe | πίστις / πιστεύω / pistis / pisteuō | 4:16, 5:1, 5:4-5, 5:10, 5:13 | Faith | High | False-friend drift | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “faith” entry unchanged. |
| righteousness / righteous | δικαιοσύνη / δίκαιος / dikaiosynē / dikaios | 2:1, 2:29, 3:7, 3:10 | Salvation | High/Critical | False-friend drift | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “righteousness” entry unchanged (TM records High; term registry records Critical — apply both notes). |
| sin | ἁμαρτία / hamartia | 1:7-10, 2:1-2, 3:4-9, 4:10, 5:16-18 | Sin | High | Trivialization / guilt-averse culture | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “sin” entry unchanged; 1 John’s “sin is lawlessness” (3:4) sharpens the definition further. |
| fellowship | κοινωνία / koinōnia | 1:3, 1:6-7 | Church | Medium | False-friend drift (academic/professional “fellowship”) | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “fellowship” entry unchanged; structurally central to this curriculum’s “Fellowship with God and One Another” doctrine. |
| law | (implied in “lawlessness,” ἀνομία) / nomos-family | 3:4 | Covenant | Medium | Post-Christian erosion | [BASELINE REUSE] Related to baseline “law” entry; John’s “lawlessness” (anomia) needs the baseline’s Mosaic/moral-order background supplied. |
| adoption / children of God | τέκνα θεοῦ / tekna theou (distinct Greek term from Paul’s huiothesia) | 3:1-2, 3:10, 5:2 | Salvation | Low/Medium | Complementary-metaphor clarification | [BASELINE REUSE, extended] Related to baseline “adoption” (Low); note the birth/family-likeness emphasis (John) complements rather than replaces the legal-adoption emphasis (Paul). |
| prophet / false prophet | προφήτης / ψευδοπροφήτης / prophētēs / pseudoprophētēs | 4:1 | Covenant | Low/Medium | Pop-culture dilution | [BASELINE REUSE, extended] Use baseline “prophet” entry; extend to “false prophet” for the Testing the Spirits doctrine. |
| incarnation (“come in the flesh”) | ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα / en sarki elēlythota | 4:2-3 (cf. 1:1-3, 3:5, 3:8) | Christology | Critical | Post-Christian erosion | [BASELINE REUSE] Use baseline “incarnation” entry unchanged; directly tied to the antichrist doctrine’s defining test. |
| love (noun/verb) | ἀγάπη / ἀγαπάω / agapē / agapaō | 2:5, 2:15, 3:1, 3:11-18, 4:7-21, 5:1-3 | Love/Salvation | Critical | [NEW] | False-friend drift |
| God is love | ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν | 4:8, 4:16 | God/Love | Critical | [NEW] | False-friend / cultural inversion |
| God is light | ὁ θεὸς φῶς ἐστιν | 1:5 | God | Medium | [NEW] | Post-Christian erosion |
| light / darkness | φῶς / σκοτία / phōs / skotia | 1:5-7, 2:8-11 | Sanctification | Medium | [NEW] | Post-Christian erosion |
| walk | περιπατέω / peripateō | 1:6-7, 2:6 | Sanctification | Low-Medium | [NEW] | Obsolescence |
| blood (of Jesus) | αἷμα / haima | 1:7 | Salvation | Medium | [NEW] | Secularized/clinical drift |
| cleanse | καθαρίζω / katharizō | 1:7, 1:9 | Confession/Forgiveness | Medium | [NEW] | Obsolescence (ritual-purity background) |
| confess (sin) | ὁμολογέω / homologeō | 1:9 | Confession/Forgiveness | High | [NEW] | Culturally counter-current (guilt-averse therapeutic norms) |
| confess (Christ) | ὁμολογέω / homologeō | 2:23, 4:2-3, 4:15 | Christology | High | [NEW] | Same word, distinct sense from “confess (sin)“ |
| forgive | ἀφίημι / aphiēmi | 1:9 | Confession/Forgiveness | Medium-High | [NEW] | Works-based misreading risk |
| faithful and just (of God) | πιστὸς καὶ δίκαιος / pistos kai dikaios | 1:9 | Confession/Forgiveness | High | [NEW, extends baseline “righteousness”] | Denominational/forensic nuance |
| advocate (Christ as) | παράκλητος / paraklētos | 2:1 | Assurance | High | [NEW] | False-friend drift (social/political activist sense) |
| propitiation / atoning sacrifice | ἱλασμός / hilasmos | 2:2, 4:10 | Salvation | Critical | [NEW] | Obsolescence + caricature risk |
| commandment(s) | ἐντολή / entolē | 2:3-8, 3:22-24, 4:21, 5:2-3 | Ethics | Medium | [NEW] | Autonomy-culture resistance |
| new/old commandment | ἐντολὴ καινή / παλαιά | 2:7-8 | Ethics | Medium | [NEW] | Requires OT background |
| love the world / world (negative sense) | κόσμος / kosmos (negative) | 2:15-17 | Overcoming the World | High | [NEW] | False-friend drift |
| world (positive missional sense) | κόσμος / kosmos (positive) | 2:2, 4:9, 4:14 | Salvation | High | [NEW] | False-friend drift |
| world (neutral sense) | κόσμος / kosmos (neutral) | 4:17, 4:1 (partially) | — | Medium | [NEW] | Disambiguation needed |
| lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life | ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκός κτλ. | 2:16 | Overcoming the World | Medium | [NEW] | Narrowed sense (“lust” = sexual only) + obsolescence (“pride of life”) |
| antichrist | ἀντίχριστος / antichristos | 2:18, 2:22, 4:3 | Incarnation/Antichrist | Critical | [NEW] | Pop-culture/false-friend drift |
| anointing | χρίσμα / chrisma | 2:20, 2:27 | Testing the Spirits | High | [NEW] | Denominational contest |
| truth / lie | ἀλήθεια / ψεῦδος / alētheia / pseudos | 1:6, 2:4, 2:21-22, 4:6, 5:20 | Testing the Spirits | Medium | [NEW] | Post-truth relativizing drift |
| little children / children (address) | τεκνία / παιδία / teknia / paidia | 2:1, 2:12-14, 2:18, 2:28, 3:2, 3:18, 4:4, 5:21 | Pastoral address | Low | [NEW] | Obsolescence |
| children of God (family/birth sense) | τέκνα θεοῦ / tekna theou | 3:1-2, 3:10, 5:2 | New Birth | Medium | [NEW, related to baseline adoption] | Complementary metaphor |
| born of God | γεγέννηται (ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ) / gennaō | 2:29, 3:9, 4:7, 5:1, 5:4, 5:18 | New Birth | Critical | [NEW] | Denominational/cultural-identity coding |
| sin is lawlessness | ἁμαρτία (ἡ ἀνομία) / hamartia / anomia | 3:4 | Sin | High | [NEW, extends baseline “sin”] | Obsolescence |
| devil | διάβολος / diabolos | 3:8, 3:10 | Overcoming the World | Medium | [NEW] | Trivializing caricature |
| practices sin / practices righteousness (“cannot sin”) | ποιῶν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν / ποιῶν τὴν δικαιοσύνην | 3:4-10 | New Birth | High | [NEW] | Internal-consistency risk |
| seed (of God) | σπέρμα / sperma | 3:9 | New Birth | Low-Medium | [NEW] | Agricultural-metaphor unfamiliarity |
| lay down one’s life | τὰς ψυχὰς θεῖναι / tas psychas theinai | 3:16 | Love for the Brethren | Low-Medium | [NEW] | Background needed |
| bowels of compassion / compassion | σπλάγχνα / splanchna | 3:17 | Love for the Brethren | Low | [NEW] | Obsolescence |
| confidence / boldness | παρρησία / parrēsia | 3:21, 4:17, 5:14 | Assurance | Medium | [NEW] | False-friend drift (self-esteem sense) |
| test the spirits | δοκιμάζω τὰ πνεύματα / dokimazō | 4:1 | Testing the Spirits | Medium | [NEW] | Cultural-pluralism tension |
| spirit of God / spirit of error | πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ / πνεῦμα τῆς πλάνης | 4:1-6 | Testing the Spirits | Medium-High | [NEW] | Psychologizing drift |
| overcome | νικάω / nikaō | 4:4, 5:4-5 | Overcoming the World | Medium | [NEW] | Brand/self-help dilution |
| only Son / only begotten | μονογενής / monogenēs | 4:9 | Christology | High | [NEW, extends baseline “son_of_god”] | Denominational translation contest |
| testify / testimony / witness | μαρτυρέω / μαρτυρία / martyreō / martyria | 4:14, 5:6-10 | Assurance | Medium | [NEW] | Related-word false-friend (“martyr”) |
| Savior | σωτήρ / sōtēr | 4:14 | Salvation | High | [BASELINE-LINKED, NEW entry] | False-friend drift (generic secular “savior”) |
| perfect / perfected | τέλειος / τελειόω / teleios / teleioō | 2:5, 4:12, 4:17-18 | Love/Assurance | High | [NEW] | False-friend drift |
| abide / remain | μένω / menō | 2:6, 2:24, 2:27-28, 3:6, 3:9, 3:14-15, 3:17, 3:24, 4:12-16 | Fellowship/Assurance | High | [NEW] | False-friend drift + obsolescence |
| fear | φόβος / phobos | 4:18 | Assurance | Medium | [NEW] | Clinical/psychologizing drift |
| punishment | κόλασις / kolasis | 4:18 | Assurance | Low-Medium | [NEW] | Under-connection risk |
| brother | ἀδελφός / adelphos | 2:9-11, 3:10-17, 4:20-21 | Love for the Brethren | Medium | [NEW] | Literal-vs-technical-sense confusion; gender-inclusivity question |
| judgment / day of judgment | κρίσις / krisis | 4:17 | Assurance | Medium | [NEW] | Pop-culture (“Judgment Day”) drift |
| liar | ψεύστης / pseustēs | 1:10, 2:4, 2:22, 4:20 | Testing the Spirits | Low | [NEW] | Minimal |
| eternal life | ζωὴ αἰώνιος / zōē aiōnios | 1:2, 2:25, 3:14-15, 5:11-13, 5:20 | Assurance | High | [NEW, extends baseline “salvation”] | Denominational contest |
| water and the blood (testimony) | τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα / to hydōr kai to haima | 5:6-8 | Assurance | Medium-High | [NEW] | Genuine interpretive ambiguity + sacramental denominational contest |
| sin unto death | ἁμαρτία πρὸς θάνατον / hamartia pros thanaton | 5:16-17 | Sin/Assurance | High | [NEW] | Genuine interpretive ambiguity + pastoral sensitivity |
| idols | εἴδωλα / eidōla | 5:21 | Testing the Spirits | High | [NEW] | False-friend drift (celebrity “idol” pop culture) |
| know (settled/relational) | οἶδα / γινώσκω / oida / ginōskō | 2:3-5, 5:13-20 | Assurance/Testing the Spirits | Medium | [NEW] | Two Greek verbs collapse into one English word |
| Word of Life | ὁ λόγος τῆς ζωῆς / ho logos tēs zōēs | 1:1 | Incarnation | High | [NEW, linked to baseline “incarnation”] | Post-Christian erosion (“Jesus as myth”) |
| joy | χαρά / chara | 1:4 | Fellowship | Low | [NEW] | Minor confusion with shallow “happiness” |
Risk Tier Summary (1 John-specific new terms only, excluding baseline-reused terms)
| Tier | Count | Representative Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 5 | love, “God is love,” propitiation/atoning sacrifice, antichrist, born of God |
| High | 15 | confess (sin), confess (Christ), forgive, faithful and just, advocate, commandment(s), love the world (negative kosmos), world (positive kosmos), anointing, sin is lawlessness, practices sin/righteousness, only Son/only begotten, Savior, perfect/perfected, abide/remain, eternal life, sin unto death, idols, Word of Life |
| Medium | 20 | God is light, light/darkness, blood, cleanse, new/old commandment, world (neutral kosmos), lust of flesh/eyes/pride of life, truth/lie, children of God (family sense), devil, seed of God, confidence/boldness, test the spirits, spirit of God/error, overcome, testify/testimony, brother, judgment/day of judgment, water and the blood, know (settled/relational) |
| Low / Low-Medium | 8 | walk, little children, bowels of compassion/compassion, lay down one’s life, seed (agricultural image), liar, punishment, joy |
(Counts approximate due to some terms spanning adjacent tiers; see individual rows above for precise assignment and reasoning.)
Notes for Phase 2 Routing
- All Critical-tier new terms above (love, “God is love,” propitiation, antichrist, born of God) require human theologian review for every occurrence, per the baseline’s escalation rules, and should be added to
doctrine_risk_registry.jsonas new doctrine entries or sub-entries under this curriculum’s eight named doctrines. - The three-way disambiguation of kosmos (“world”) — positive missional object of God’s love, negative opposing value-system, neutral present-age sense — is the single most pervasive recurring semantic-range issue in 1 John and should be flagged as a standing cross-reference rule in Phase 2 AI instructions, analogous to the baseline’s handling of “called” across Romans 1:1/1:7/8:28-30.
- Menō (“abide”) and teleioō (“perfect/perfected”) are 1 John’s two most frequent technical terms outside “love” itself and should receive the same consistency-across-documents treatment the baseline requires for Romans 1:16-17, 8:28, and 10:9-10 (see baseline
12_ai_translation_requirements.md, “Theological Consistency Rules Across Documents”). - “Antichrist” and “confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh” (4:2-3) should always be treated as a linked pair in review routing, since correcting the pop-culture antichrist caricature depends on restoring the specific incarnation-denial test John himself supplies.
This glossary extends, and does not contradict, the baseline Romans Language Package. All baseline-reused terms carry forward their recorded rendering, risk tier, and notes unchanged.
Critical Risk Terms
God
Approved rendering: God
Transliteration: God
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Rejected alternatives: a higher power (a common, deliberately vague contemporary substitute, e.g. in recovery-program language), the universe (a New-Age-influenced impersonal substitute, e.g. ‘the universe has a plan for you’)
Original: θεός
Category: God
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, risk tier aligned to baseline bible_term_registry.json’s Critical rating rather than the baseline TM’s Medium rating.] Contemporary spiritual-but-not-religious culture often substitutes deliberately vague or impersonal alternatives for a personal, specific, self-revealing God. 1 JOHN EXTENSION: John’s own polemic against teachers who redefine God’s nature (4:8, 16, ‘God is love’) shows the danger of importing an outside definition into God’s name is not new; guard against ‘a higher power’/‘the universe’ substitutes with the same vigilance the baseline requires.
Jesus
Approved rendering: Jesus
Transliteration: Jesus
Doctrine: Lordship of Christ
Rejected alternatives: Jesus (as a casual interjection/expletive, entirely secularized and disrespectful usage)
Original: Ἰησοῦς
Category: Christology
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] Otherwise stable proper name; popular ‘historical Jesus’ framings quietly strip out divine claims. 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1:1’s insistence on Jesus’s real, historical, touchable humanity (‘heard… seen… touched’) sharpens the baseline’s caution by adding the opposite-direction risk: some readers may deny his full humanity rather than his divinity.
Son Of God
Approved rendering: Son of God
Transliteration: Son of God
Doctrine: Sonship of Christ
Original: ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ
Category: Christology
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] Must not read as metaphorical, adoptive, or honorary sonship. 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John makes confession of this exact title (4:15; 5:5) the letter’s central test of authentic faith, and denial of it the defining mark of ‘antichrist’ (2:22-23) — raising the stakes against metaphorical or honorary readings.
Messiah
Approved rendering: Messiah
Transliteration: Messiah
Doctrine: Messianic Promise
Rejected alternatives: a messiah complex (a pop-psychology pejorative term for grandiose self-importance)
Original: Χριστός
Category: Christology
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: denial that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is made the specific test distinguishing true believers from antichrist figures (2:22), raising the stakes of getting this term’s positive sense right beyond the baseline’s pop-psychology caution alone.
Holy Spirit
Approved rendering: Holy Spirit
Transliteration: Holy Spirit
Doctrine: Sanctification
Rejected alternatives: good vibes / positive energy (vague contemporary spiritual substitutes for a specific, personal, divine Person)
Original: πνεῦμα (ἅγιον) / τὸ πνεῦμα αὐτοῦ
Category: God
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John often uses the shortened form ‘his Spirit’ (4:13) rather than the full title, slightly increasing the risk that wellness-culture substitutes will be imported since the fuller title’s explicit divine-Person signal is absent; anchor to the full Trinitarian doctrine on first use in this letter.
Righteousness
Approved rendering: righteousness
Transliteration: righteousness
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: self-righteous / holier-than-thou (the dominant connotation ‘righteous’ now carries in casual usage — smug, judgmental superiority)
Original: δικαιοσύνη / δίκαιος
Category: Salvation
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged; risk tier aligned to baseline bible_term_registry.json’s Critical rating.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: adds a distinct application at 2:1 (Christ’s own righteousness qualifying him as advocate) and at 3:7-10 (‘practices righteousness’ as a habitual-life-pattern test of new birth); both must avoid the ‘self-righteous/smug’ connotation.
Incarnation
Approved rendering: incarnation
Transliteration: incarnation
Doctrine: Incarnation
Original: ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα (cf. ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο)
Category: Christology
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, risk tier aligned to baseline bible_term_registry.json’s Critical rating.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John raises the stakes by making denial of Christ’s real, historical, bodily ‘coming in the flesh’ the explicit litmus test separating the Spirit of God from ‘the spirit of antichrist’ (4:2-3) — must be stated plainly against any contemporary reduction of Jesus to a purely symbolic or ‘spiritual’ figure.
Salvation
Approved rendering: salvation
Transliteration: salvation
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: being saved (contested denominational shorthand — see notes), rescue (too generic a gloss on its own)
Original: σωτηρία (cf. σωτήρ, ‘Savior,’ 4:14)
Category: Salvation
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John’s use of the title ‘Savior’ (4:14, see ‘savior’ below) rather than the abstract noun raises the specific false-friend risk of contemporary generic secular usage; anchor explicitly to the unique, divine, once-for-all rescue.
Love
Approved rendering: love
Transliteration: love
Doctrine: God is Love
Rejected alternatives: romantic/erotic love (the dominant contemporary association), family affection, consumer preference (“I love this coffee”), the slogan “love is love” (contemporary shorthand for unconditional non-judgmental affirmation), sentimental Hallmark-card warmth
Original: ἀγάπη / ἀγαπάω
Category: Love
NEW TERM. The letter’s single most load-bearing and most overloaded English word; the core passage (4:7-21) is built entirely on it. John’s agapē is willed, self-giving, others-directed, and defined by God’s own cross-shaped initiative (4:10), not by feeling, preference, or generic tolerance. Requires explicit clarification on first substantive use in every document, on the same tier as the baseline’s ‘grace’ and ‘justification.‘
God Is Love
Approved rendering: God is love
Transliteration: God is love
Doctrine: God is Love
Rejected alternatives: a slogan permitting redefinition of God by whatever a given era or individual already means by ‘love’ (the dominant contemporary inversion of John’s own argument)
Original: ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν
Category: God
NEW TERM. The single most quoted and most culturally inverted line in the letter (4:8, 16). John’s argument runs: God’s self-giving, propitiation-providing action (4:10) DEFINES love. Contemporary usage runs the argument backward, using the phrase to define God by prevailing cultural sentiment (usually unconditional affirmation with no binding moral claim). Must never be quoted without this correction stated explicitly nearby.
Propitiation
Approved rendering: propitiation / atoning sacrifice
Transliteration: propitiation / atoning sacrifice
Doctrine: Propitiation and Atoning Sacrifice
Rejected alternatives: the popular caricature of an angry God appeased by a reluctant third party (inverts John’s point that both the sending and the propitiation are God’s own loving initiative)
Original: ἱλασμός
Category: Salvation
NEW TERM. Compounds obsolescence (‘propitiation’ is a nearly extinct word) with an inverting popular caricature. ‘Atoning sacrifice’ (NIV/NLT) is the safer default published rendering; the ‘God so loved… God sent’ logic (4:10) must be stated explicitly every time to prevent the caricature.
Antichrist
Approved rendering: antichrist
Transliteration: antichrist
Doctrine: Antichrist and False Teaching
Rejected alternatives: a single future cosmic supervillain (the dominant contemporary association from apocalyptic fiction, horror film, heavy-metal iconography, and internet conspiracy culture)
Original: ἀντίχριστος
Category: The Incarnation and Antichrist
NEW TERM. The single largest pop-culture false-friend risk in this curriculum. John’s own definition (2:22; 4:3) is present-tense, plural, doctrinal denial of Christ’s true identity — never use the word without restating this definition explicitly, on the same tier as the baseline’s ‘election’ and ‘providence.‘
Born Of God
Approved rendering: born of God
Transliteration: born of God
Doctrine: New Birth (Born of God)
Rejected alternatives: ‘born again’ as an evangelical political/cultural identity marker (the dominant American association), a self-achieved moral turnaround, reincarnation/cyclical rebirth cosmology (a false-friend risk for readers with Hindu/Buddhist background)
Original: γεγέννηται (ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ)
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM, extending the Romans baseline’s ‘effectual_calling’ doctrine note. A completed, God-caused new spiritual birth (2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:1, 4, 18), the root of the capacity to love and practice righteousness. ‘Born of God’ is safer than ‘born again’ but still risks the culture-war connotation once discussed; must be explicitly distinguished from a self-improvement narrative, a subculture label, AND from reincarnation cosmology, which is structurally opposite (a one-time act of God, not cyclical rebirth).
High Risk Terms
Father
Approved rendering: Father
Transliteration: Father
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Original: πατήρ
Category: God
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged, including its Catholic-priest-address ambiguity note and its caution about painful human father associations.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 3:1’s exclamation (‘what kind of love the Father has given us’) is a load-bearing pastoral moment; readers with negative father associations may need this handled with particular sensitivity given the verse’s emotional intensity.
Faith
Approved rendering: faith
Transliteration: faith
Doctrine: Faith
Rejected alternatives: faith in humanity / a leap of faith (secularized idioms meaning generic optimism or an unsupported gamble, not trust in a specific person)
Original: πίστις / πιστεύω
Category: Faith
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 5:1, 4-5, 10, 13 tie ‘faith/believe’ directly to the specific propositional confession ‘Jesus is the Son of God,’ reinforcing that the object of faith must always be recoverable from context rather than read as generic optimism.
Sin
Approved rendering: sin
Transliteration: sin
Doctrine: Universal Human Accountability
Rejected alternatives: sinfully delicious / my one sin (trivialized marketing and joking usage, e.g. dessert advertising)
Original: ἁμαρτία
Category: Sin
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John sharpens the trivialization/guilt-averse-culture warning by making confession of sin (1:9) and the acknowledgment that ‘if we say we have no sin… we deceive ourselves’ (1:8) central pastoral moves running directly against contemporary non-judgmental therapeutic norms.
Law
Approved rendering: law
Transliteration: law
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Original: νόμος (implied in ἀνομία, ‘lawlessness’)
Category: Covenant
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged, including doctrine label; risk tier aligned to baseline bible_term_registry.json’s High rating.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John does not use nomos directly but relies on the reader supplying its background to make sense of anomia (‘lawlessness,’ 3:4); the highly legalistic contemporary civil/criminal-law framework is a partial asset but must not be assumed to supply the specifically moral, God-ward sense. See ‘sin_is_lawlessness’ below.
Adoption
Approved rendering: adoption
Transliteration: adoption
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Original: (cf. τέκνα θεοῦ, ‘children of God’ — John’s own distinct term from Paul’s huiothesia)
Category: Salvation
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged; risk elevated from the baseline TM’s Low to High per baseline bible_term_registry.json’s own High rating and the 1 John curriculum’s registries.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: 1 John’s complementary birth-based vocabulary (‘born of God,’ ‘children of God’) intersects with the culturally loaded ‘born again’ identity-marker risk (see ‘born_of_god’ below); state that Paul’s legal/adoptive and John’s birth/family-likeness images describe the same reality from complementary angles, not competing ones.
Confess Sin
Approved rendering: confess (sin)
Transliteration: confess (sin)
Doctrine: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
Rejected alternatives: self-acceptance language that drops the category of sin (a contemporary non-judgmental therapeutic norm)
Original: ὁμολογῶμεν (τὰς ἁμαρτίας)
Category: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
NEW TERM. Honest, specific acknowledgment of sin to God, the stated condition for forgiveness and cleansing (1:9). The correct contemporary English sense of ‘confess’ (admitting wrongdoing) actually matches this verse — the risk is cultural, not lexical: non-judgmental therapeutic norms actively discourage guilt-admission language. MANDATORY SENSE-TAG: must be explicitly distinguished from ‘confess (Christ)’ below, since the SAME English word carries an opposite theological direction elsewhere in this letter.
Confess Christ
Approved rendering: confess (Christ)
Transliteration: confess (Christ)
Doctrine: The Incarnation and Antichrist
Rejected alternatives: a guilt-admission frame imported from the word’s dominant everyday sense
Original: ὁμολογεῖ (τὸν Ἰησοῦν)
Category: Christology
NEW TERM. A public, positive, identity-affirming creedal declaration of Jesus’s true divine identity (2:23; 4:2-3; 4:15). Contemporary English ‘confess’ defaults overwhelmingly to admitting wrongdoing. MANDATORY SENSE-TAG: readers must be alerted that this letter uses the identical verb for two theologically opposite directions (confessing Christ vs. confessing sin, see above) and must not default only to the guilt sense.
Forgive
Approved rendering: forgive
Transliteration: forgive
Doctrine: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
Rejected alternatives: a works-based reading in which the sincerity of confession itself becomes the meritorious act that earns forgiveness
Original: ἀφῇ (ἀφίημι)
Category: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
NEW TERM. God’s judicial release of confessed sin (1:9), grounded in God’s own character and Christ’s finished work, not human merit. Must state this explicitly to prevent a subtly works-based misreading.
Faithful And Just
Approved rendering: faithful and just
Transliteration: faithful and just
Doctrine: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
Rejected alternatives: ‘just’ read only in its punitive, adversarial courtroom sense
Original: πιστὸς καὶ δίκαιος
Category: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
NEW TERM, extends baseline ‘righteousness.’ God’s own trustworthy, righteous character as the GROUND of his forgiveness of confessed sin (1:9). Easily lost if ‘just’ is heard only as a demand for punishment rather than the basis for mercy toward the confessing believer.
Savior
Approved rendering: Savior
Transliteration: Savior
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: a generic secular rescuer-figure (e.g. ‘a team savior,’ ‘the office coffee machine is my savior’)
NEW TERM. Christ’s title as the unique, divine, world-encompassing rescuer (4:14), extending the baseline ‘salvation’ entry. Contemporary generic secular usage dilutes the title’s exclusivity; must be anchored to the specific, divine, once-for-all rescue.
World Positive
Approved rendering: world (positive sense)
Transliteration: world (positive sense)
Doctrine: Overcoming the World
Rejected alternatives: flattening to the neutral geographic/demographic sense of ‘the world’
Original: τὸν κόσμον (positive sense)
Category: Overcoming the World
NEW TERM. The whole created human family as the object of God’s saving love (4:9, 14; 2:2, ‘the whole world’). One of three distinct senses of kosmos in this letter; MANDATORY SENSE-TAG: requires per-occurrence disambiguation from the negative and neutral senses below.
World Negative
Approved rendering: world (negative sense)
Transliteration: world (negative sense)
Doctrine: Overcoming the World
Rejected alternatives: flattening to the neutral geographic/demographic sense of ‘the world’
Original: τὸν κόσμον (negative sense)
Category: Overcoming the World
NEW TERM. The organized system of values opposed to God, which believers are commanded not to love (2:15-17) — the identical English/Greek word as the positive sense above, opposite valence. This three-way kosmos disambiguation is the single most pervasive recurring semantic-range issue in 1 John.
Anointing
Approved rendering: anointing
Transliteration: anointing
Doctrine: Anointing of the Holy Spirit
Rejected alternatives: contemporary charismatic/Pentecostal ‘the anointing’ as a special, sometimes marketed, elite/celebrity-adjacent empowering resting on particular gifted leaders
Original: χρίσμα
Category: Testing the Spirits
NEW TERM. DENOMINATIONAL CONTEST, same tier as the baseline’s ‘grace’/‘sainthood.’ John’s own point (2:20, 27) is egalitarian: ALL believers, not a spiritual elite, possess Spirit-given discernment. State this explicitly against the narrower celebrity/elite-charisma usage common in some contemporary Christian media.
Children Of God
Approved rendering: children of God
Transliteration: children of God
Doctrine: New Birth (Born of God)
NEW TERM, complements the Romans baseline ‘adoption’ entry (using huiothesia’s legal/adoptive emphasis). John’s tekna theou emphasizes the birth/family-likeness dimension of the same reality (3:1-2, 10; 5:2) rather than displacing Paul’s legal-adoption emphasis; state the complementarity explicitly. Elevated above the baseline’s Low tier because it intersects with the culturally loaded ‘born again’ identity-marker risk.
Sin Is Lawlessness
Approved rendering: sin is lawlessness
Transliteration: sin is lawlessness
Doctrine: Sin Defined as Lawlessness
Rejected alternatives: ‘lawlessness’ read through its contemporary civil-unrest/anarchic news-media connotation
Original: ἁμαρτία (ἡ ἀνομία)
Category: Sin
NEW TERM, extends baseline ‘law’/‘sin.’ John’s own explicit definition (3:4): sin is fundamentally rebellion against God’s revealed order, not merely isolated wrongdoing. Needs a plain-language gloss tying back to the baseline ‘law’ entry’s Mosaic/moral-order sense.
Practices Sin Righteousness
Approved rendering: practices sin / practices righteousness
Transliteration: practices sin / practices righteousness
Doctrine: New Birth (Born of God)
Rejected alternatives: a claim of literal sinless perfection
Original: ποιῶν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν / ποιῶν τὴν δικαιοσύνην
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. A habitual, characteristic life-pattern (3:4-10), not a single isolated act. The closely related ‘cannot sin’ (3:9) must be explicitly reconciled with 1:8-10’s realistic acknowledgment that believers do sin, following the durative (‘keep on sinning’) reading of ESV/NIV/NLT rather than the older KJV/NASB absolute-sounding wording.
Advocate
Approved rendering: advocate
Transliteration: advocate
Doctrine: Christ’s Advocacy and Intercession
Rejected alternatives: a social/political activist or cause-promoter (the dominant contemporary sense, e.g. ‘a climate advocate’)
Original: παράκλητον
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. Christ’s ongoing heavenly ministry of pleading the believer’s case before the Father (2:1), the specific legal-defense-counsel image. Readers should be told this is the same Greek word (paraklētos) applied to the Spirit’s distinct ministry in John’s Gospel — two complementary applications, not interchangeable titles.
Spirit Of Error
Approved rendering: spirit of God / spirit of error
Transliteration: spirit of God / spirit of error
Doctrine: Testing the Spirits
Rejected alternatives: psychologized ‘differing perspectives’ framing of doctrinal disagreement
Original: τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ / τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς πλάνης
Category: Testing the Spirits
NEW TERM. Two opposed spiritual sources behind competing doctrinal claims about Christ (4:1-6) — a real spiritual-conflict framework, not merely an intellectual disagreement. Contemporary discourse tends to psychologize doctrinal disagreement; state the spiritual-conflict framing explicitly.
Only Begotten Son
Approved rendering: only Son / only begotten Son
Transliteration: only Son / only begotten Son
Doctrine: The Incarnation and Antichrist
Rejected alternatives: a created or originated-in-time sonship (a misreading some readers draw from ‘only begotten’)
Original: τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ
Category: The Incarnation and Antichrist
NEW TERM, extends the baseline’s Critical-risk ‘son_of_god’ entry. Visible denominational/translation contest: ‘only begotten’ (KJV/Nicene tradition) vs. ‘one and only’ (modern translations, favored to avoid a created-Son inference). State plainly that monogenēs means unique/one-of-a-kind and that ‘begotten’ names an eternal relationship, not a point of origin — directly relevant given the Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation leverages the older rendering to support a created-Son Christology, which this curriculum must not echo.
Perfect Perfected
Approved rendering: perfect / perfected
Transliteration: perfect / perfected
Doctrine: God is Light and God is Love
Rejected alternatives: flawless, error-free performance (the dominant contemporary sense of ‘perfect’)
Original: τέλειος / τελειόω
Category: God is Light and God is Love
NEW TERM. Reaching full maturity or intended completeness (2:5; 4:12, 17-18), NOT flawless performance. Central to ‘perfect love casts out fear’ (4:18), among the most popularly misapplied lines in the letter — frequently misread as a self-help promise that flawless human love eliminates anxiety, inverting John’s point that God’s completed love removes dread of judgment.
Abide
Approved rendering: abide / remain
Transliteration: abide / remain
Doctrine: Fellowship with God and One Another
Rejected alternatives: ‘I can’t abide him’ — the one surviving casual idiom, nearly inverted from John’s sense (cannot tolerate vs. permanent, mutual, loving indwelling)
Original: μένω
Category: Fellowship with God and One Another
NEW TERM. Permanent, mutual, relational indwelling between God and the believer, one of the letter’s most frequent technical terms (over 20 occurrences, e.g. 2:6, 24, 27-28; 3:6, 9, 14-17, 24; 4:12-16). ‘Lives in’/‘remains in’ is the safer contemporary default; wherever ‘abide’ is retained it must be explicitly reglossed. Affirm real relational mutual indwelling while avoiding language suggesting an ontological blurring of the Creator-creature distinction (this curriculum does not adopt the Local Church movement’s ‘mingling’ theology reading of this vocabulary).
Eternal Life
Approved rendering: eternal life
Transliteration: eternal life
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: mere unending duration detached from present, qualitatively new life
Original: ζωὴ αἰώνιος
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM, extends the Romans baseline’s ‘assurance_of_salvation’ denominational-contest note. A qualitatively new, God-given life already possessed by believers now (5:11-13), not solely a future hope. English-speaking traditions disagree on whether present-tense knowable assurance is fully available now (5:13’s plain claim) or remains properly provisional until final judgment (Catholic/Orthodox and some other traditions). State 1 John’s own claim while transparently noting this range.
Sin Unto Death
Approved rendering: sin unto death
Transliteration: sin unto death
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: false certainty in either direction (that a specific known sin is unforgivable, or that no sin has serious consequence)
Original: ἁμαρτία (πρὸς θάνατον)
Category: Sin
NEW TERM. AMBIGUITY HANDLING REQUIRED plus pastoral sensitivity. A genuinely debated interpretive category (5:16-17), possibly a specific, unrepented, apostatizing sin distinct from ordinary sins believers commit and confess. Handle against inducing scrupulosity or false confidence.
Idols
Approved rendering: idols
Transliteration: idols
Doctrine: Warning Against Idolatry
Rejected alternatives: an admired celebrity performer (the dominant contemporary media sense, e.g. televised talent-competition ‘Idol’ programs, ‘K-pop idols’)
Original: τῶν εἰδώλων
Category: Testing the Spirits
NEW TERM. Any rival object of ultimate devotion displacing God (5:21), the letter’s closing warning. State explicitly that ‘idol’ names anything, not necessarily a literal statue, that displaces God as the object of ultimate trust — distinct from the celebrity sense, and without extending the warning as a verdict on other traditions’ devotional image-use (e.g. Hindu murtis, Buddhist devotional images), which is beyond this curriculum’s scope.
Word Of Life
Approved rendering: Word of Life
Transliteration: Word of Life
Doctrine: The Incarnation and Antichrist
Rejected alternatives: Jesus as myth, legend, or metaphor (contemporary post-Christian ‘historical Jesus’ framing)
Original: ὁ λόγος τῆς ζωῆς
Category: The Incarnation and Antichrist
NEW TERM. Identifies the letter’s subject matter with the eternal, pre-existent, now historically-manifested Christ, grounding the letter’s eyewitness claims (1:1-3, ‘heard… seen… touched’). Reuses the Romans baseline’s ‘incarnation’ logic; state the historical, bodily, touchable claim plainly.
First Loved
Approved rendering: he first loved us
Transliteration: he first loved us
Doctrine: God is Love
Rejected alternatives: a mutual or human-initiated love in which God’s love merely responds to ours
NEW TERM. The passage’s entire causal logic compressed into one clause (4:19): divine love is always logically and temporally prior; human love for God and others is responsive, not initiating. Parallels the Romans baseline’s caution about ‘calling’ (God calls; the person does not self-select).
Medium Risk Terms
God Is Light
Approved rendering: God is light
Transliteration: God is light
Doctrine: God is Light
Rejected alternatives: a vague ‘good vibes’/positive-energy metaphor
Original: ὁ θεὸς φῶς ἐστιν
Category: God
NEW TERM. Structural parallel to ‘God is love’ (1:5) with a weaker competing contemporary meaning; risks flattening into mood-metaphor rather than John’s specific claim about moral purity, truthfulness, and self-disclosure, tied concretely to fellowship and confession (1:5-7).
Light Darkness
Approved rendering: light / darkness
Transliteration: light / darkness
Doctrine: God is Light
Rejected alternatives: a mood-metaphor for ‘good vibes vs. bad vibes’
Original: φῶς / σκοτία
Category: Sanctification
NEW TERM. A structuring moral-spiritual dualism describing one’s whole manner of life and relationship to God (1:5-7; 2:8-11), not isolated deeds or feelings.
Blood Of Jesus
Approved rendering: blood of Jesus
Transliteration: blood of Jesus
Doctrine: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
Rejected alternatives: horror/violence media associations, clinical/medical usage
Original: τὸ αἷμα (τοῦ Ἰησοῦ)
Category: Salvation
NEW TERM. Christ’s sacrificial death as the objective ground of ongoing cleansing from sin (1:7), inseparably linked to propitiation (2:2; 4:10). Must be tied explicitly to the Old Testament sacrificial background.
Cleanse
Approved rendering: cleanse
Transliteration: cleanse
Doctrine: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
Rejected alternatives: merely psychological ‘feeling clean’
Original: καθαρίζει
Category: Confession and Forgiveness of Sin
NEW TERM. Ongoing, present-tense cleansing from sin’s guilt and defilement (1:7, 1:9), grounded in Christ’s blood and received through confession. The Old Testament ritual-purity background should be briefly supplied.
Commandment
Approved rendering: commandment
Transliteration: commandment
Doctrine: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
Rejected alternatives: externally imposed legalistic obligation (the dominant reading in contemporary autonomy-prizing culture)
Original: ἐντολή
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. A binding charge from Christ linking love for God to love for fellow believers (4:21; 2:3-8; 3:22-24). Reuses the Romans baseline’s ‘obedience_of_faith’ caution: state that obedience flows from having been loved first (4:19), not bare legal imposition.
New Old Commandment
Approved rendering: new commandment / old commandment
Transliteration: new commandment / old commandment
Doctrine: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
Original: ἐντολὴν καινήν / παλαιάν
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. John’s deliberate paradox (2:7-8): the love command is both ancient (Leviticus 19:18) and newly embodied in Christ’s example. Requires supplying Old Testament background most readers will not independently know.
World Neutral
Approved rendering: world (neutral sense)
Transliteration: world (neutral sense)
Doctrine: Overcoming the World
Original: τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ / ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ
Category: Overcoming the World
NEW TERM. The present created order/age in which believers currently live (4:17; 4:1 partially) — a third, more neutral sense distinct from both the positive (4:9) and negative (2:15-17) senses used elsewhere in the same letter.
Lust Flesh Eyes Pride Of Life
Approved rendering: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life
Transliteration: lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life
Doctrine: Overcoming the World
Rejected alternatives: ‘lust’ narrowed to sexual desire only (the dominant contemporary sense)
Original: ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονεία τοῦ βίου
Category: Overcoming the World
NEW TERM. A threefold summary of worldly desire (2:16): disordered bodily appetite, visually-triggered covetousness, and status-seeking self-display. ‘Pride of life’ is archaic and needs a plain-language gloss.
Truth Lie
Approved rendering: truth / lie
Transliteration: truth / lie
Doctrine: Testing the Spirits
Rejected alternatives: ‘your truth’/‘my truth’ post-truth relativizing usage
Original: ἀλήθεια / ψεῦδος
Category: Testing the Spirits
NEW TERM. Doctrinal and relational integrity vs. falsehood (1:6; 2:4, 21-22; 4:6; 5:20). John’s sense is confidently objective and propositional; must be distinguished from contemporary subjectivized usage.
Devil
Approved rendering: devil
Transliteration: devil
Doctrine: Overcoming the World
Rejected alternatives: a cartoonish Halloween caricature (red suit, horns, pitchfork), a figure of speech (‘devil’s advocate,’ ‘speak of the devil’)
Original: ὁ διάβολος
Category: Overcoming the World
NEW TERM. A real, personal, malevolent spiritual being opposed to God, active ‘from the beginning,’ whose works Christ came to destroy (3:8). Contemporary secular trivialization must not be assumed retained; state plainly as real and personal.
Confidence Boldness
Approved rendering: confidence / boldness
Transliteration: confidence / boldness
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: generic psychological self-esteem/self-assurance (the dominant contemporary sense)
Original: παρρησία
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. Unashamed, forensic standing before God grounded in Christ’s finished work (3:21; 4:17; 5:14), not self-generated optimism. Pair with an explicit ‘before God’ qualifier every time.
Test The Spirits
Approved rendering: test the spirits
Transliteration: test the spirits
Doctrine: Testing the Spirits
Rejected alternatives: open-ended personal discernment or relativistic pluralism (‘all paths are valid’)
Original: δοκιμάζετε τὰ πνεύματα
Category: Testing the Spirits
NEW TERM. An active, discerning responsibility of the whole believing community (4:1) against a fixed doctrinal criterion — does the teaching confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh? — not passive credulity or open-ended personal intuition.
Overcome
Approved rendering: overcome
Transliteration: overcome
Doctrine: Overcoming the World
Rejected alternatives: the ‘Nike’ athletic brand association, generic self-help ‘overcoming adversity’ willpower language
Original: νενικήκατε / νικάω
Category: Overcoming the World
NEW TERM. Believers’ settled spiritual victory over false teaching and the world (4:4; 5:4-5), grounded in ‘he who is in you is greater,’ not self-effort. Tie explicitly to the Spirit and to faith rather than willpower-driven achievement.
Testify Witness
Approved rendering: testify / testimony / witness
Transliteration: testify / testimony / witness
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: ‘martyr’ (related noun) drifted to ‘one who dramatizes suffering’
Original: μαρτυροῦμεν / μαρτυρία
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. The apostolic circle’s eyewitness testimony (4:14) and God’s own threefold testimony through the Spirit, water, and blood (5:6-10). The courtroom-witness sense is a genuine contemporary asset; flag the related noun ‘martyr’s drift as a minor family-word caution.
Fear
Approved rendering: fear
Transliteration: fear
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: a clinical/psychological anxiety category to be managed via self-help techniques
Original: φόβος
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. Dread of condemnation/punishment before God, displaced by mature love and confident assurance (4:18) — a specific relational, forensic fear, not reverence or generic anxiety.
Brother
Approved rendering: brother
Transliteration: brother
Doctrine: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
Rejected alternatives: a literal biological sibling only
Original: ἀδελφός
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. A fellow member of the believing community (2:9-11; 3:10-17; 4:20-21), addressed with family-intimacy language. State the inclusive, whole-community sense explicitly, since the masculine grammatical form may read to some contemporary readers as excluding women.
Hates
Approved rendering: hates
Transliteration: hates
Doctrine: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
Rejected alternatives: trivialized casual usage (‘I hate Mondays’), intensified political/social usage (‘hate speech,’ ‘hate crime’)
NEW TERM. Active hostility or, at minimum, failure of active love toward a fellow believer, treated by John as functionally equivalent to hatred of God himself (3:15; 4:20). Neither casual nor political-discourse registers map cleanly onto this specific moral-theological claim.
Judgment Day
Approved rendering: day of judgment
Transliteration: day of judgment
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: apocalyptic-disaster-film/video-game pop-culture associations
Original: τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῆς κρίσεως
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. The real, future, final divine accounting of all people (4:17), a fixed eschatological reference, not a metaphor. Anchor explicitly to the letter’s pastoral purpose (assurance, not dread) given v.18’s immediate move to casting out fear.
Water And Blood
Approved rendering: the water and the blood
Transliteration: the water and the blood
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Rejected alternatives: an unambiguous single referent presented as settled fact
Original: τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. AMBIGUITY HANDLING REQUIRED. Physical/historical testimony (alongside the Spirit) corroborating Christ’s saving mission (5:6-8); the precise referent (baptism-and-crucifixion; John 19:34’s flow of blood and water; a rhetorical merism) is genuinely debated. Present leading options without overclaiming; note the sacramental-vs.-low-church denominational dimension. Separately, this curriculum follows the modern critical-text consensus omitting the Comma Johanneum at 5:7-8 (the KJV’s added explicit Trinitarian clause, absent from the earliest manuscripts) and does not use this verse as a Trinity proof-text, while noting some KJV-loyal traditions read it differently.
Revealed Manifested
Approved rendering: was revealed / was manifested
Transliteration: was revealed / was manifested
Doctrine: The Incarnation and Antichrist
Rejected alternatives: ‘manifested’ as archaic-sounding wording (obsolescence)
NEW TERM. God’s love and Christ’s coming are historically enacted, visible, datable events (4:9; 3:5, 8), not abstract sentiment. ‘Revealed’ is the safer contemporary default; ‘manifested’ (KJV/ESV) should be reglossed where retained.
False Prophet
Approved rendering: false prophet
Transliteration: false prophet
Doctrine: Testing the Spirits
Rejected alternatives: secular ‘tech prophet’/‘prophet of doom’ dilution (a separate, lower-stakes risk already covered by the baseline ‘prophet’ entry)
NEW TERM. One who speaks falsely under a claim of Spirit-inspiration (4:1), read alongside ‘test the spirits.’ Distinguished from the baseline’s secular-dilution caution for ‘prophet’ generally.
Know Settled Relational
Approved rendering: know (settled / relational)
Transliteration: know (settled / relational)
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. English collapses two distinct Greek verbs (oida: settled, factual certainty; ginōskō: relational, experiential knowledge) into one word ‘know.’ Not a false-friend risk, but worth a technical note for closer word-study content distinguishing 2:3-5’s relational ginōskō from the climactic confident oida-dominant assurance statements of 5:13, 18-20.
Low Risk Terms
Fellowship
Approved rendering: fellowship
Transliteration: fellowship
Doctrine: Christian Fellowship
Rejected alternatives: a fellowship (the dominant contemporary secular sense: an academic, research, or professional grant/appointment, e.g. ‘a postdoctoral fellowship,’ ‘a Rhodes Scholarship fellowship’)
Original: κοινωνία
Category: Church
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, risk tier Low per baseline bible_term_registry.json.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: given 1 John states fellowship as the letter’s own explicit purpose (1:3-4) and structural pillar for the ‘Fellowship with God and One Another’ doctrine, the academic/professional-grant false-friend risk should be actively flagged in practice even though the formal risk tier remains Low by baseline convention.
Prophet
Approved rendering: prophet
Transliteration: prophet
Doctrine: Inspiration of Scripture
Rejected alternatives: a tech prophet / prophet of doom (secular usage for a confident forecaster or a pessimistic commentator)
Original: προφήτης / ψευδοπροφήτης
Category: Covenant
[INHERITED FROM ROMANS PACKAGE, unchanged.] 1 JOHN EXTENSION: extended to ‘false prophet’ (4:1), one who speaks falsely under a claim of Spirit-inspiration; read alongside ‘test_the_spirits’ below, not confused with the baseline’s secular ‘tech prophet’ dilution.
Walk
Approved rendering: walk
Transliteration: walk
Doctrine: God is Light
Rejected alternatives: literal ambulation
Original: περιπατέω
Category: Sanctification
NEW TERM. Hebraic idiom for one’s whole manner of life and conduct (1:6-7; 2:6). Mildly archaic (obsolescence); ‘live’ is the safer contemporary default gloss where the traditional idiom is not deliberately retained.
Little Children
Approved rendering: little children
Transliteration: little children
Doctrine: Fellowship with God and One Another
Rejected alternatives: a literal age description or condescension
Original: τεκνία / παιδία
Category: Fellowship with God and One Another
NEW TERM. John’s characteristic pastoral term of affection and address to his whole congregation (2:1, 12-14, 18, 28; 3:2, 18; 4:4; 5:21). Mildly archaic but low drift risk once understood as pastoral address.
Seed Of God
Approved rendering: seed of God
Transliteration: seed of God
Doctrine: New Birth (Born of God)
Original: σπέρμα (αὐτοῦ)
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. God’s own life/nature implanted in the believer at new birth (3:9), producing the capacity for practicing righteousness. Agricultural metaphor requiring brief explanation but no significant false-friend risk.
Lay Down Ones Life
Approved rendering: lay down one’s life
Transliteration: lay down one’s life
Doctrine: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
Original: τὰς ψυχὰς θεῖναι
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. Christ’s own self-sacrifice as the positive standard believers imitate (3:16), contrasted with Cain’s hatred of Abel (3:12). Requires supplying Genesis 4 background most readers know only vaguely.
Compassion
Approved rendering: compassion
Transliteration: compassion
Doctrine: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
Rejected alternatives: the literal ancient ‘bowels of compassion’ physiological image
Original: τὰ σπλάγχνα
Category: Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth
NEW TERM. Genuine, felt compassion (not merely notional acknowledgment) as the necessary root of practical love (3:17). The ancient physiological metaphor is obsolete and should simply be modernized.
Punishment
Approved rendering: punishment
Transliteration: punishment
Doctrine: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
Original: κόλασιν
Category: Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life
NEW TERM. Deserved retributive penalty for sin, the specific dread in view in 4:18. Plain word; main risk is under-connecting it to the forensic logic of propitiation (4:10) rather than treating it as free-floating dread.
Liar
Approved rendering: liar
Transliteration: liar
Doctrine: Testing the Spirits
Original: ψεύστης
Category: Testing the Spirits
NEW TERM. A stable, direct moral category applied to anyone whose profession of faith or love is falsified by contradictory speech or conduct (1:10; 2:4, 22; 4:20).
Joy
Approved rendering: joy
Transliteration: joy
Doctrine: Fellowship with God and One Another
Rejected alternatives: shallow, fleeting ‘happiness’
Original: χαρά
Category: Fellowship with God and One Another
NEW TERM. A settled, deep gladness, the intended outcome of fellowship with God and one another (1:4).
Referenced passages