Executive Summary — Ephesians Translation Requirements (English)

The big picture: Ephesians extends the Romans baseline’s core insight — that English itself, not a foreign target language, is where translation risk lives in this pipeline — into new and sharper territory. This curriculum’s core passage (Ephesians 2:1–10) concentrates three of the baseline’s own Critical-risk terms (grace, faith, salvation) into ten verses, while the wider letter introduces five entirely new Critical-risk clusters the Romans baseline never had to address: predestination, redemption, headship/submission in marriage, cosmic spiritual powers, and the household slave code.

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Why it matters

Ephesians is doctrinally denser and more denominationally contested, per verse, than Romans. Its nine curriculum doctrines (Salvation by Grace through Faith; Election and Predestination in Christ; The Church as the Body of Christ; Unity of Jews and Gentiles in One New Humanity; The Mystery of Christ Revealed; Spiritual Warfare and the Armor of God; Household Codes and Christ-Centered Relationships; Gifts for Building Up the Church; Walking in Newness of Life) each carry live, well-represented disagreements among English-speaking Christians — and several (headship/submission, predestination, cosmic powers) sit atop disagreements sharper than anything the Romans baseline required this project to resolve. Getting this wrong risks either a false appearance of settled consensus where none exists, or — in the case of Ephesians 6:5–9 — a genuinely serious historical and pastoral misstep if the household slave code is mishandled in either direction (endorsement or dismissal).

Key findings

• 106 tracked terms in this curriculum’s extended translation memory (36 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline, 70 newly introduced by Ephesians); 14 are Critical-risk and 28 are High-risk — 42 terms (40%) require mandatory human-theologian-level glossary enforcement, not merely native-speaker review.
• 30 doctrine entries in the extended doctrine risk registry; 10 Critical and 8 High — 18 doctrines (60%) require human theologian review, versus 9 requiring native-speaker review and 3 automated-only.
• The core passage (Eph 2:1–10) alone touches at least 4 Critical-risk terms (dead in sin, grace, faith, salvation) and 2 High-risk terms (works/good works, workmanship), making it the single highest-density Critical-risk passage identified across both the Romans baseline and this curriculum combined.
• Ephesians 5:21–33 (household headship/submission) is this curriculum’s single highest-risk ambiguity overall: no available English word resolves the complementarian-vs-egalitarian fork in “head” (kephalē), and contemporary egalitarian/autonomy cultural values make “submit” acutely fraught regardless of which reading is adopted.
• Ephesians 6:5–9 is the only passage in either the Romans or Ephesians curriculum facing a full post-modern moral rupture rather than a semantic drift: the risk is not misunderstanding a word but catastrophic misapplication if historical context is omitted.

Risks

• False-friend drift (Critical): “predestined” (astrological fatalism), “redemption” (loyalty-point/comeback-story senses), “mystery” (detective-fiction puzzle), and “head” (CEO/org-chart default) each carry a dominant competing modern meaning strong enough to produce confident misreading without deliberate correction.
• Denominational contest (Critical): predestination (Reformed/corporate/Arminian), headship and submission (complementarian/egalitarian), and cosmic powers (literal-beings/structural-forces) are all live, well-represented positions among English-speaking Christians; silently adopting one as neutral is itself a misrepresentation this curriculum must avoid.
• Post-Christian cultural erosion (High): “church,” “flesh,” “walk,” and “old self/new self” all suffer varying degrees of secular flattening or obsolescence that compound across Ephesians’ unusually high concentration of structural metaphors (walk, body, fullness, armor).
• Post-modern moral rupture (Critical, unique to this curriculum): the household slave code (6:5–9) requires the sharpest historical contextualization of any passage across both Language Packages produced to date.
• Missing vocabulary (structural): English has no neutral, non-fictionalized register for organized personal spiritual evil (the cosmic-powers cluster), forcing a choice between clinical secular dismissal and fantasy-genre trivialization unless deliberately corrected.

Opportunities

• Ephesians 2:8’s perfect tense (“you have been saved”) offers a genuine teaching bridge across the baseline’s documented salvation-as-event-vs-process denominational divide.
• The adoption doctrine (a rare positive secular drift, per baseline) is reinforced by Ephesians’ own inheritance, sealing, and guarantee/down-payment imagery (1:11–14), all of which have strong, largely intact contemporary financial/legal analogies once explicitly connected to the Spirit’s guarantee role.
• “Speaking the truth in love” (4:15) and “one flesh” typology (5:31–32) are already well-known, largely intact English phrases requiring minimal correction — genuine assets rather than risks.
• Paul’s own literary structure (the “walk” bracketing 2:2/2:10; the sevenfold “one” formula at 4:4–6; the six-doctrine armor set at 6:14–17) gives this curriculum built-in teaching scaffolding that, if surfaced explicitly, turns several Medium-risk obsolescence items into memorable structural anchors rather than merely glossed vocabulary.

Recommended actions

1. Route Ephesians 2:1–10 and 5:21–33 in their entirety to human theologian review, not just their individual flagged terms, given their exceptional density of Critical-risk material.
2. Apply the denominational-transparency rule with maximum rigor to predestination, headship/submission, and cosmic powers — state this curriculum’s own reading and explicitly name the alternative(s) every time, per 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
3. Never publish Ephesians 6:5–9 without the Greco-Roman household-slavery historical contextualization and the kyrios/“Lord” wordplay at 6:9 surfaced explicitly.
4. Enforce consistent handling of “head” (kephalē) across 1:22, 4:15, and 5:23 as a single tracked term, not three independent word choices.
5. Default all published Scripture citations to NLT (YouVersion version ID 116, book code EPH), per the site-wide copy rule, while ensuring this curriculum’s own explicit doctrinal clarifications always accompany NLT’s dynamic-equivalence renderings (e.g., “masterpiece,” “decided in advance,” “secret plan”) rather than letting the base translation’s paraphrase substitute for them.

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Full detail: assets/translation_memory.json (Step 9), analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Step 10), 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.