Linguistic Gap Analysis — Ephesians
Purpose and Method
This analysis extends 07_semantic_analysis.md and 08_core_glossary.md into the specific diagnostic task PRD Phase 1 Step 8 requires: identifying where the destination language (English) lacks adequate vocabulary for a doctrine (“missing vocabulary”), where the destination language has too much competing vocabulary crowding a single term into ambiguity (“crowded semantic neighborhoods”), where a transliteration-style retention of the traditional theological English word is preferable to a plain-language paraphrase (and vice versa), and which resulting ambiguities carry the highest translation-requirements risk for this curriculum specifically.
As with the Romans baseline, this is not a cross-language translation problem — English is simultaneously source and destination — so “gap” here means a gap between Paul’s Greek concept and the semantic field the corresponding English word or phrase now occupies in contemporary usage, whether through secularization, denominational contest, or obsolescence. All findings extend the Romans baseline’s conventions and risk tiers without contradiction; Ephesians deepens several baseline-Critical risks (grace, election, salvation, church, Lord) and introduces a distinct new tier of risk around household-code and cosmic-powers vocabulary that the Romans baseline did not need to address at this intensity.
Full-book coverage confirmation: every chapter of Ephesians (1–6) has been reviewed for this analysis. Chapters 1–3 (doctrinal exposition: election, redemption, mystery, church) and chapters 4–6 (ethical outworking: unity, gifts, walk, armor, household codes) are both covered below; sections contributing no new vocabulary beyond what is already tabulated are explicitly marked “reviewed, no new terms” in the chapter coverage note (Section 6) rather than silently omitted.
Section 1: Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the nine curriculum doctrines: the available destination-language (English) terms currently in use, their principal weaknesses, and the recommended handling strategy for Phase 2 content generation.
1. Salvation by Grace through Faith
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| grace, faith, salvation/saved, gift, works/good works, mercy, redemption, dead (in sin), workmanship, blood of Christ | ”Grace” is captured by poise/elegance and “grace period” senses; “faith” is detached from a specific object; “redemption” is captured by loyalty-points/comeback-narrative senses; “works” triggers either legalism-anxiety or NGO-charity flattening depending on the reader’s tradition; “dead” risks being softened by therapeutic “struggling” language; “workmanship” defaults to manufactured-goods quality, not personal identity. | Retain all baseline terms as governed by translation_memory.json. Fence “grace” and “redemption” with mandatory first-use clarification (per AI Requirements). Pair “works” (2:9, excluded) and “good works” (2:10, the fruit) explicitly as a single teaching unit so the sequence, not either half alone, is taught. Use “workmanship” but immediately paraphrase (“God’s own handiwork, personally made”) since the manufactured-goods sense will not self-transfer. |
2. Election and Predestination in Christ
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| election, chose, predestined/foreordained, will, purpose, prepared beforehand, adoption, calling | ”Election” is almost totally captured by the political-voting sense; “predestined” carries a competing fatalistic/astrological “written in the stars” sense and is also the single sharpest live denominational-contest term in this curriculum (Reformed unconditional-individual, corporate-election, Arminian conditional-foreknowledge readings all held by English-speaking Christians); “purpose” risks reversed agency via self-actualization “finding your purpose” language; “will” risks import of “willpower” self-effort connotations. | Mandatory explicit clarification for “election” and “predestined” on every substantive occurrence (1:4-5, 1:11), following the same protocol the baseline requires for “grace.” State this curriculum’s own reading of predestination plainly, then name the other major readings respectfully, per the transparency rule — do not silently adopt one school’s vocabulary as if it were doctrinally neutral. |
3. The Church as the Body of Christ
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| church, body (of Christ), head, fullness, foundation/cornerstone, temple/dwelling place, household of God | ”Church” carries post-Christian institutional-decline/scandal associations; “body” defaults to generic organizational usage (“corporate body,” “student body”); “head” pre-loads a modern CEO/org-chart authority default even in its purely Christological uses (1:22, 4:15), before the marital application (5:23) turns it into this curriculum’s single most denominationally fraught term; “cornerstone” is flattened by business-strategy idiom; “temple” is generic-religious or a bodybuilding cliché. | Actively restore “church” as living/Spirit-indwelt per baseline. Track “head” consistently across all three occurrences (1:22, 4:15, 5:23) as one continuous term whose authority-vs-source ambiguity must be resolved the same way each time, not reinterpreted per passage. Use “body of Christ,” never bare “body” alone, to pre-empt the corporate-institution default. |
4. Unity of Jews and Gentiles in One New Humanity
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| Gentiles, dividing wall, reconcile/reconciliation, fellow citizens, one new humanity/one new man, peace, covenant | ”Gentiles” is low-frequency and easily misglossed as “non-believers”; “dividing wall” needs its temple-architecture referent supplied since the vivid image is otherwise flattened into a generic “any social division” metaphor; “reconciliation” is a partial asset from secular truth-and-reconciliation/restorative-justice usage but risks recasting a unilateral divine act as mutual human negotiation; “fellow citizens” intersects a live, politically charged immigration-discourse topic; “one new man” risks a male-specific misreading of a corporate referent. | Never gloss “Gentiles” as “non-believers.” Supply the Court-of-the-Gentiles temple background for “dividing wall” explicitly rather than assuming the image is self-interpreting. Use “one new humanity” as the primary rendering with “one new man” retained parenthetically as the traditional phrase, per the same archaism-with-gloss convention the baseline uses for “seed of David.” |
5. The Mystery of Christ Revealed
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| mystery, revelation, stewardship, unsearchable riches, manifold wisdom | ”Mystery” is the sharpest false-friend in this doctrine: contemporary English default is an unsolved puzzle awaiting human detection, the near-opposite of Paul’s God-disclosed, previously-hidden-now-revealed sense; “revelation” is diluted by “it was a revelation to me” (a surprising personal insight); “stewardship” survives mainly in church-finance/environmental usage, narrower than Paul’s apostolic-commission sense. | Mandatory explicit correction of “mystery” on every substantive occurrence (1:9, 3:3-9, 5:32, 6:19), including its most counter-intuitive application to marriage (5:32) — flag this application specifically since readers who have accepted the correction elsewhere may still be surprised by it there. |
6. Spiritual Warfare and the Armor of God
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| rulers/authorities/cosmic powers/spiritual forces, armor of God, devil, the six armor pieces, praying in the Spirit, flesh and blood, heavenly places | This is a genuine missing-vocabulary zone (see Section 2): English has no neutral, non-fictionalized register for real personal spiritual beings — available vocabulary defaults either to clinical dismissal (secular materialism) or genre fiction (fantasy/gaming); “armor” itself is a live risk of trivialization via gaming/cosplay association; “the devil” defaults to cartoon superstition or inner-struggle metaphor, both erasing personal agency. | State this curriculum’s position on the powers (literal personal beings vs. structural-forces reading) plainly and name the other view, per the transparency rule extended from the baseline’s denominational-contest precedent. Deliberately register the armor and warfare vocabulary in plain, serious, non-genre prose (avoid words like “quest,” “boss,” “level up” even informally) to actively counteract the gaming-trivialization risk. |
7. Household Codes and Christ-Centered Relationships
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| submit/be subject, head (of wife), love your wives, one flesh, bondservants/slaves/masters, obey your parents, do not provoke | This doctrine contains this curriculum’s two Critical-risk terms with no available neutral synonym: “submit” and “head” (marital sense) are both acutely fraught in contemporary egalitarian/autonomy-valuing English regardless of interpretive school; “bondservants/masters” sits inside a post-modern moral rupture where the source culture’s institution (Greco-Roman household slavery) is universally condemned by contemporary readers, and no available English vocabulary avoids anachronistic reading onto either transatlantic chattel slavery or a dismissible historical footnote. | Apply maximum denominational transparency to “submit” and “head”: state this curriculum’s reading, name the other major reading, and never present 5:22-24 without 5:21’s “submit to one another” and 5:25-33’s sacrificial-love instruction in the same breath. For 6:5-9, require explicit historical contextualization (Greco-Roman household slavery, distinct from and not directly analogous to transatlantic chattel slavery) before any application; never allow the passage to stand as an implied endorsement. |
8. Gifts for Building Up the Church
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| spiritual gifts, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors/shepherds, teachers, equipping/ministry, mature manhood/fullness of Christ, speaking truth in love | ”Gifted” defaults to innate-talent/academic-aptitude sense; “evangelist” carries negative door-to-door/televangelist-scandal coding; “pastor” has narrowed to a salaried clergy job title, losing the shepherding metaphor; “ministry” is a British/Commonwealth government-department false-friend and an American clergy-only narrowing, both narrower than Paul’s every-believer sense; “mature manhood” risks a male-specific misreading of a corporate referent. | Actively unpack “ministry” (4:12) as “every-believer service,” explicitly correcting both the British government-department false-friend and the American clergy-only narrowing in the same clarifying note. Retain “mature manhood” with an explicit generic-usage gloss rather than silently substituting a gender-neutral paraphrase, so readers of older English Bible translations are not confused by divergence. |
9. Walking in Newness of Life
| Available English terms | Weaknesses | Recommended strategy |
|---|
| walk, old self/new self (put off/put on), likeness of God, grieve the Holy Spirit, flesh, children of light/darkness, redeeming the time, filled with the Spirit, sexual immorality vice list, sealed, guarantee/down payment, inheritance | ”Walk” for “conduct one’s life” is essentially unused in ordinary modern speech outside biblical idiom; “flesh” is almost entirely literal/physical in modern idiom, missing Paul’s moral-theological sense; “redeeming the time” is inverted by the modern idiom “buying time”; “old self/new self” competes with secular self-reinvention/authenticity culture as a rival explanatory frame. | Gloss “walk” consistently at every occurrence (2:2, 2:10, 4:1, 4:17, 5:2, 5:8, 5:15) as the book’s deliberate structural metaphor, and explicitly point out Paul’s own literary reversal (walked in death, 2:2 → walk in good works, 2:10) rather than treating each occurrence as an isolated word choice. Flag “redeeming the time” as an active false-friend requiring correction, not just a gloss. |
Section 2: Missing Vocabulary — Concepts English Has No Adequate Single Word For
These are true lexical gaps: no existing English word or short phrase captures the Greek concept without either narrowing it or requiring supplementary explanation.
| Concept | Greek | Gap description | Recommended handling |
|---|
| συζωοποιέω (made-alive-together, 2:5) | synzōopoieō | English has no single compound verb for “co-resurrected-with”; “made alive together” is a serviceable phrase but reads as generic revival/recovery language (“turned my life around”) unless explicitly tied to union with Christ’s own resurrection. | Retain the phrase “made alive together with Christ” as a fixed unit (never abbreviate to “made alive”) so the union-with-Christ referent cannot be dropped. |
| πλήρωμα applied to the church (1:23) | plērōma | ”Fullness” is abstract and rare outside set phrases in ordinary English; there is no vivid, concrete English equivalent for “the church as that-which-completes-Christ.” | Paraphrase alongside retention: “fullness — that which completes him” — rather than leaving the bare noun unglossed. |
| κεφαλή’s authority/source ambivalence (1:22, 4:15, 5:23) | kephalē | English “head” does carry both an authority sense (“head of the company”) and, more faintly, a source sense (“headwaters”), but not with the balance the Greek term carries; no single English word reproduces the semantic range without favoring one reading. | Do not attempt a single perfect equivalent; instead state the ambiguity explicitly as an interpretive fork requiring a stated curriculum position (see Section 4 and Doctrine 7 above). |
| δοῦλος inside a household-slavery institution with no living contemporary analog (6:5-9) | doulos | Contemporary English “slave” carries the specific historical weight of transatlantic chattel slavery; “servant” or “employee” both understate the legal bondedness of the Greco-Roman institution. No English word maps cleanly onto the ancient institution without importing either too much or too little moral and historical freight. | Use “bondservants” as the primary technical term (following established English Bible-translation convention) with an explicit historical footnote distinguishing the referent from, not equating it with, chattel slavery; never use bare “slaves” without this framing. |
| ἀρχαί, ἐξουσίαι, κοσμοκράτορες, πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας as a coordinated set (6:12) | archai, exousiai, kosmokratores, pneumatika tēs ponērias | English has individual words for each (rulers, authorities, cosmic powers, spiritual forces of evil) but no natural collective register for describing organized, hierarchical, personal evil spiritual powers outside either theological technical language or fantasy-genre vocabulary — a genuine missing middle register. | Retain the full fourfold list rather than compressing to a single generic term (“evil spirits”), preserving Paul’s rhetorical stacking, and register it in plain, non-genre prose per Doctrine 6 above. |
| δύναμις, ἐνέργεια, κράτος, ἰσχύς stacked (1:19) | dynamis, energeia, kratos, ischys | English “power” alone cannot bear four simultaneous near-synonyms without becoming repetitive or losing the rhetorical intensification; there is no natural fourfold English power-vocabulary set of matching register. | Retain the four distinct English glosses (power, working, might, strength) as a fixed rendering rather than collapsing to one word, explicitly noting the rhetorical stacking is deliberate, not redundant. |
| ἀνεξιχνίαστος (unsearchable, 3:8) | anexichniastos | ”Unsearchable” itself is rare/formal in ordinary English but is the closest available match; there is no common-register alternative that preserves the “cannot be tracked to its end” sense (the root image is of untraceable footprints). | Retain “unsearchable” with a brief image-restoring gloss (“riches that cannot be tracked to their limit — like a trail that never runs out”). |
Section 3: Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Needing Fencing
These are the inverse problem: not an absence of vocabulary but an oversupply of competing, well-established senses crowding the theological sense out. “Fencing” means establishing an explicit, repeatable boundary statement (what this term does NOT mean here) before or alongside every substantive theological use.
| Term | Competing occupants of the semantic neighborhood | Fencing statement required |
|---|
| grace | physical elegance/poise; a legal/financial “grace period" | "Not elegance, not a delay before a penalty — God’s unearned favor given apart from any merit.” |
| election | political voting/campaigning | ”Not a ballot or a vote — God’s own sovereign, prior, personal choice.” |
| predestined | astrological/fatalistic “destiny,” “it was written in the stars" | "Not an impersonal fate — the personal purpose of a God who acts with intention, not blind cosmic mechanism.” |
| redemption | loyalty-point/coupon redemption; sports/entertainment “comeback” narratives | ”Not cashing in points or a reputational comeback earned by effort — a costly ransom paid by another, at the price of Christ’s own blood.” |
| covenant | real-estate/contract-law “restrictive covenant" | "Not a clause in a property deed — a personal, relational, promissory bond.” |
| mystery | detective-fiction puzzle; “it’s a mystery to me" | "Not a puzzle for humans to solve — a truth God has graciously disclosed that could not have been discovered by human effort.” |
| head (marital, 5:23) | modern org-chart “head of the company”/CEO default | ”State plainly whether this curriculum reads ‘head’ as governing authority or as source/origin, and name the alternative reading — do not let the modern default silently decide the question.” |
| body (of Christ) | corporate/institutional “student body,” “corporate body" | "Not a membership roster — a living, Spirit-animated organism with Christ as its head.” |
| submit | contemporary autonomy-and-egalitarian default association with servility or coercion | ”State plainly which reading (complementarian or egalitarian/mutualist) this curriculum presents, always paired with 5:21’s mutual submission and 5:25’s sacrificial-love instruction.” |
| ministry | British/Commonwealth government-department term; American clergy-only narrowing | ”Not a government office and not exclusively clergy work — every believer’s Spirit-equipped service.” |
| flesh | literal/physical “flesh and blood,” “in the flesh,” “flesh wound" | "Not the physical body itself — the corrupted human nature in rebellion against God.” |
| walk | archaic/absent from ordinary “conduct one’s life” usage | ”Not literal ambulation — one’s whole habitual manner and direction of life.” |
| calling | career-vocation self-actualization (“finding your calling”) | “Not a career discovered through introspection — a summons initiated by God, not self-selected.” |
| passions/desires | overwhelmingly positive contemporary usage (“follow your passion”) | “Not a virtue to be pursued — disordered appetites that formerly dominated and enslaved.” |
| nature (by nature, 2:3) | “nature vs. nurture,” “born this way” identity-affirming rhetoric | ”Not an innate trait to be accepted and celebrated — an inherited condition of moral liability needing redemption.” |
| wrath | softened by non-judgmental therapeutic culture into mere disappointment or impersonal consequence | ”Not divine sulking or an impersonal cause-and-effect — God’s just, personal, judicial response to sin.” |
| world/age (kosmos/aiōn) | geographic-neutral “world news,” occult-adjacent “New Age" | "Not a place on a map or an esoteric movement — the present organized human system in rebellion against God, contrasted with the age to come.” |
| fellowship | academic/professional “a fellowship” (grant, appointment) | “Not a funded appointment — shared participation in Christ and in the life of other believers.” |
| temple | generic cross-religious usage; “the body is a temple” bodybuilding idiom | ”Not any building associated with any religion, and not an individual’s body — the whole church corporately as God’s dwelling place by the Spirit.” |
| armor | gaming/fantasy/cosplay association | ”Not a costume or game mechanic — real equipping for a real, dangerous spiritual conflict.” |
| reconciliation | secular truth-and-reconciliation commissions, restorative-justice processes | ”Not a mutual, ongoing human negotiation — God’s unilateral act at the cross, already accomplished.” |
Section 4: Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
Because English is simultaneously source and destination, “transliteration” here means retaining the traditional English theological-loanword rendering (often itself a Latinate or Greek-derived English word already embedded in the Bible-translation tradition) rather than substituting a plain-contemporary paraphrase. Both choices carry tradeoffs; this table records the recommended decision per term class.
| Term | Retain traditional English word (transliteration-equivalent)? | Paraphrase alternative | Decision and rationale |
|---|
| redemption | Yes | ”being bought back,” “ransomed” | RETAIN with mandatory gloss. The traditional word carries the ransom-price weight; a paraphrase risks losing the “at a cost” dimension the false-friend correction depends on. Use “redemption — ransomed at the price of Christ’s own blood” together. |
| mystery | Yes | ”God’s secret plan,” “hidden truth now revealed” | RETAIN, but always paired with the paraphrase clause (“a truth once hidden, now revealed”) on first use per document, since the bare word alone actively misleads via the puzzle-genre false friend. |
| predestined | Yes, with caution | ”planned in advance,” “determined beforehand” | RETAIN the traditional term because it is this doctrine’s proof-text vocabulary and avoiding it entirely would obscure the very denominational debate readers need to be able to recognize by name in other resources; supply the paraphrase alongside, not instead. |
| workmanship | No — paraphrase preferred | ”God’s own handiwork,” “what God has made us to be” | PARAPHRASE primary, with “workmanship” retained parenthetically as the traditional word, since the bare traditional term’s dominant modern sense (manufactured-goods quality) actively misdirects without the paraphrase doing the interpretive work up front. |
| stewardship | No — paraphrase preferred | ”the responsibility entrusted to me,” “the task God assigned me to manage” | PARAPHRASE primary; “stewardship” alone now evokes church-finance campaigns or environmental care, both narrower than Paul’s apostolic-commission sense; a plain paraphrase avoids that narrowing more reliably than a gloss on the old word can correct it. |
| one new man / one new humanity | Both, paired | — | RETAIN “one new man” parenthetically (traditional-phrase familiarity, hymnody/older-translation continuity) while using “one new humanity” as the primary gender-inclusive rendering — the same dual-track convention the baseline uses for “seed of David.” |
| mature manhood | Both, paired | ”full maturity,” “the fullness of Christ” | RETAIN “mature manhood” parenthetically with an explicit generic-usage note; use “maturity”/“fullness of Christ” as the primary rendering to avoid a male-specific misreading while preserving traceability to older English translations. |
| bondservants | Yes — established convention | ”servants under obligation,” “those bound in service” | RETAIN “bondservants” as the primary technical term (the established English Bible-translation convention for doulos in a household context) rather than bare “slaves,” specifically because it signals a distinct legal-social institution requiring historical explanation rather than collapsing the term into either a euphemism or an anachronistic equation with chattel slavery. |
| sealed / guarantee (arrabōn) | Yes | ”marked as God’s own,” “a deposit guaranteeing what’s still to come” | RETAIN both traditional words but supply the paraphrase immediately, since the ancient practices behind each (wax/signet seals; earnest-money deposits) are unfamiliar enough that the bare word alone will not transfer without explanation, even though no false-friend risk is present. |
| trespass | Paraphrase preferred, traditional word retained where liturgically familiar | ”wrongdoing,” “moral failure,” “a false step” | Use “sin” as the primary modern-register term (per baseline) and retain “trespass” only in direct quotation or where liturgical familiarity (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer) makes it a recognizable asset, always with the plain gloss attached. |
| fellow citizens | Paraphrase supplement, retain the word | ”full members, not outsiders” | RETAIN “fellow citizens” as the primary rendering (it is Paul’s own vivid image) but attach the plain paraphrase to keep contemporary immigration-politics associations from becoming a distraction from Paul’s covenantal point. |
Section 5: Ranked List of This Curriculum’s Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity (false-friend confidence + denominational contest + doctrinal centrality to the core passage and the nine curriculum doctrines). This ranking governs Phase 2 review-routing priority within the Critical/High tiers already assigned in bible_term_registry.json and doctrine_risk_registry.json.
- “Head” applied to the wife (5:23) — the single highest-risk ambiguity in this curriculum. Combines a Critical-tier false-friend default (modern org-chart authority sense), a live and sharply contested denominational fork (complementarian authority vs. egalitarian source/origin), and acute contemporary cultural sensitivity around gender and autonomy. No available English word resolves the ambiguity; only an explicit, transparent editorial statement can.
- “Submit”/“be subject” (5:21-24) — inseparable from #1 in practice; ranked separately because it carries its own distinct false-friend risk (servility, coercion, “just following orders”) independent of the head/authority debate, and because isolating 5:22-24 from 5:21’s “submit to one another” is itself a common and serious misreading in ordinary English-language teaching.
- “Election” / “predestined” (1:4-5, 1:11) — near-total contemporary capture by political-voting and astrological-fatalism senses respectively, compounded by the sharpest denominational three-way split in the registry (Reformed/corporate/Arminian readings). This curriculum’s core doctrine list names “Election and Predestination in Christ” explicitly, so this ambiguity cannot be avoided or minimized.
- “Bondservants”/“masters” (6:5-9) — the only term set in this curriculum facing a full post-modern moral rupture rather than a semantic drift; the risk is not misunderstanding the word but catastrophic misapplication (either perceived endorsement of slavery or wholesale text-dismissal) if historical contextualization is omitted.
- “Grace” (throughout, esp. 2:5-9) — retains the baseline’s Critical tier at full force; Ephesians 2:9’s explicit “not a result of works” makes the grace-works denominational contest unavoidable in the core passage itself.
- “Mystery” (1:9, 3:3-9, 5:32, 6:19) — a structural, recurring false-friend (puzzle-genre default) whose failure to correct at any one occurrence undermines the doctrine at every other occurrence, given how load-bearing the term is across four chapters.
- “Cosmic powers” cluster (1:21, 2:2, 3:10, 6:12) — combines outright secular denial of the referent’s reality with a genuine missing-register problem (no neutral non-fictionalized English vocabulary for organized personal evil) and a live literal-vs-structural denominational fork.
- “Salvation”/“saved” (2:5, 2:8) — retains baseline Critical tier; Ephesians 2:8’s perfect tense adds a genuine teaching opportunity but also a genuine risk if the event-vs-process denominational contest is resolved silently in either direction.
- “Church” (1:22, 3:10,21, 5:23-32) — retains baseline Critical tier, intensified here by the marital-union imagery, which risks compounding institutional-decline associations with an additional, unfamiliar nuptial metaphor in the same breath.
- “Redemption” (1:7, 1:14, 4:30) — Critical false-friend (loyalty points/comeback narrative) newly introduced in this curriculum, without any baseline precedent to draw on, requiring fresh registry treatment rather than simple baseline reuse.
- “Ministry”/“equipping” (4:12) — a quieter but pervasive risk: the British/Commonwealth and American false-friends both narrow Paul’s every-believer sense in opposite directions, and this term governs how the entire Doctrine 8 (Gifts for Building Up the Church) is applied practically by readers.
- “Flesh” (2:3, 2:11, 2:14-15, 5:29-31, 6:5, 6:12) — a recurring, book-wide false-friend (literal/physical default) whose correction must be repeated at each distinct occurrence rather than assumed to transfer from an earlier correction, since the contexts vary (moral corruption vs. ethnic identity marker vs. literal marital-union image vs. household-slavery social status).
- “Reconciliation” (2:16) — a partial asset (secular restorative-justice usage) that nonetheless risks recasting a unilateral divine accomplishment as an ongoing mutual human process; ranked lower than the above because the secular usage, while imprecise, is not actively hostile to the concept the way “grace” or “election” secular usage is.
- “Redeeming the time” (5:16) — a sharp but narrowly localized false-friend (inverted by “buying time” = stalling); high confidence of misreading but limited doctrinal centrality outside its single occurrence.
- “Walk” (2:2, 2:10, 4:1, 4:17, 5:2, 5:8, 5:15) — not a false-friend but a severe obsolescence risk; ranked lower than the false-friend terms above per the baseline’s own stated principle that obsolescence prompts readers to ask rather than confidently misread, but ranked this high because of its unusually heavy structural load across the entire book.
Section 6: Chapter-by-Chapter Coverage Confirmation
| Chapter | Content reviewed | New vocabulary contribution |
|---|
| Ephesians 1 | Election, predestination, redemption, sealing, inheritance, the power/might/strength cluster, “heavenly places,” church as body/fullness | Extensive — see Doctrines 1, 2, 3, 6 above |
| Ephesians 2 | Core passage (2:1-10): dead in sin, grace, faith, works/good works, workmanship; also Jew-Gentile unity, dividing wall, reconciliation, one new humanity, temple/household of God | Extensive — see Doctrines 1, 4 above; anchors this curriculum’s core passage |
| Ephesians 3 | Mystery, stewardship, unsearchable riches, manifold wisdom, cosmic powers (3:10), Paul’s intercessory prayer (power cluster echoed) | Extensive — see Doctrine 5 above |
| Ephesians 4 | Calling, unity of the Spirit, baptism, spiritual gifts/church offices, equipping/ministry, mature manhood, old self/new self, grieve the Holy Spirit | Extensive — see Doctrines 2, 8, 9 above |
| Ephesians 5 | Walk, children of light/darkness, redeeming the time, filled with the Spirit, sexual immorality vice list, imitators of God, sacrifice/offering, submission, head, love your wives, one flesh, mystery (5:32) | Extensive — see Doctrines 6, 7, 9 above |
| Ephesians 6 | Bondservants/masters, obey your parents, do not provoke, armor of God (full set), devil, cosmic powers (6:12), praying in the Spirit, ambassador | Extensive — see Doctrines 6, 7 above |
No chapter of Ephesians is silently omitted; every chapter contributes load-bearing vocabulary to at least one of the nine curriculum doctrines, and the coverage above traces each chapter to its corresponding doctrine-matrix and ranked-risk entries.
Cross-References
- Full term-level detail:
assets/bible_term_registry.json (this curriculum’s extended registry, built on the Romans baseline)
- Doctrine-level risk tiers and review routing:
assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (Romans baseline) and its Ephesians extension (Phase 1 Step 9 forthcoming)
- Term consolidation by doctrine:
analysis/08_core_glossary.md
- AI enforcement instructions for all findings in this document:
12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Romans baseline), to be extended with Ephesians-specific escalation rules in Phase 1 Step 10
This document governs Phase 2 content-generation decisions wherever a term listed above appears. Any newly discovered ambiguity not covered here must be scored against the same three-category framework (false-friend drift, denominational contest, obsolescence) and added to the registry before finalizing the containing segment, per the Translation Memory Load and Enforcement Instructions.