Executive Summary — 1 Peter Language Package (English → French)

Why it matters

1 Peter is being added to the French Bible study pipeline as the second curriculum after Romans. It carries a distinctive risk profile: the letter’s core doctrines — the church as a “holy and royal priesthood,” Christ’s descent-and-proclamation to “spirits in prison,” and “baptism now saves you” — land directly on top of the deepest fault lines in French Christianity (Catholic sacramental theology, the Apostles’ Creed’s “descendu aux enfers,” and the Reformation’s priesthood-of-all-believers doctrine), and two of its passages (3:18-22, 4:6) are actively contested proof-texts for Jehovah’s Witness and Latter-day Saints teaching that this curriculum must not inadvertently reinforce. Getting this package right protects doctrinal fidelity for a mixed Catholic-majority, Protestant-minority, secular-majority francophone audience.

Key findings

• 23 doctrines identified across all 5 chapters (full-book coverage confirmed chapter-by-chapter in analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md): 5 Critical, 8 High, 10 Medium, 0 Low.
• 13 doctrines (5 Critical + 8 High) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — more than half the doctrine set, reflecting how densely 1 Peter concentrates its highest-stakes material (substitutionary atonement, the proclamation to the spirits, baptism, priesthood, submission, election) into just five chapters.
• 111 glossary terms are now enforced in assets/translation_memory.json (32 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline package + 79 new terms specific to 1 Peter). Of these, 33 terms are Critical or High risk (11 Critical, 22 High) — nearly a third of the entire glossary.
• The letter’s own deliberate literary structure (the repeated “living” motif: espérance vivante 1:3, parole vivante 1:23, pierre vivante 2:4-5; and the repeated keyword conduite for ἀναστροφή) creates a consistency requirement layered on top of the doctrinal risk — a correct single-verse rendering can still fail the curriculum if it breaks the cross-chapter pattern.
• Comparative theology work (analysis/04_comparative_theology.md) confirms the single highest French-specific collision in the whole book is “sacerdoce” (2:5, 2:9) — a word that, in ordinary French, denotes the ordained Catholic clergy almost exclusively — and the single highest-stakes interpretive passage is 1 Peter 3:18-22, where French liturgical memory (the Creed’s “descendu aux enfers”) and the historic Catholic “limbes des Patriarches” doctrine pre-load a reading the Greek text does not require.

Risks

• Critical risk, unresolved by vocabulary alone: 3:18-22 and 4:6 are proof-texts for Jehovah’s Witnesses (non-bodily resurrection reading of 3:18) and LDS teaching (posthumous evangelization / proxy baptism from 3:19-20 and 4:6). No French word choice eliminates this risk; only mandatory theologian-authored teaching notes that explicitly foreclose these readings can.
• Critical risk, permanent forbidden substitutions required: “immaculé” (Marian Immaculée Conception collision, 1:4 and 1:19), “Apocalypse” (catastrophist misreading, 1:5/1:7/1:13/4:13), “âmes aux enfers” (Creed/limbes collision, 3:19-20), any “race”-rooted rendering (2:9), and “évêque”/“épiscopat” vocabulary (2:25, 5:2) are now locked as non-negotiable exclusions in both the glossary and the Phase 2 system prompt.
• High risk, culturally live: ὑποτάσσω-submission vocabulary (2:13-3:7, 5:5) intersects with an active, high-visibility contemporary French public controversy around religiously-grounded “soumission” (post-#MeToo discourse); every occurrence requires mandatory co-located Christ-modeled framing, not just correct word choice.
• High risk, structural: 3:21’s “baptism now saves” must never be excerpted without Peter’s own qualifying clause in the same sentence — a segmentation rule that downstream lesson, slide, and caption production must enforce, not just the glossary.

Opportunities

• French already has strong, stable vocabulary for most of the letter’s hardest terms — the linguistic gap analysis found almost no missing vocabulary; the recurring problem is crowded semantic neighborhoods (an existing French word already carries strong competing associations). This means the fix is fencing (forbidden substitutions, mandatory teaching notes, invariant renderings), not invention — a lower-risk remediation path than coining new vocabulary.
• “Ancien” (elder) is a genuine advantage absent in many target languages: it is the established, ready-made French Reformed/Protestant ecclesial term, requiring only a clarifying note for Catholic-background readers rather than a new coinage.
• Segond 21 is confirmed as the right citation anchor for this curriculum (per analysis/05_translation_landscape.md), giving both Romans and 1 Peter a single, consistent, contemporary-register YouVersion reference going forward.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (this package) alongside the Romans baseline files for every Phase 2 translation session — never substitute one package for the other.
2. Route all 13 Critical/High doctrines and all 33 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review before any 1 Peter segment is marked approved, with particular priority on the 3:18-22/4:6 cluster and the 2:4-10 priesthood cluster.
3. Enforce the “living” motif and “conduite” keyword-consistency checks as automated validation gates in Phase 2, not merely as style guidance, since these are structural-literary risks, not simple mistranslation risks.
4. Verify the YouVersion version_id values for Segond 21 and Louis Segond 1910 against the live API before generating hyperlinks at scale, per the landscape document’s outstanding verification flag.
5. Back-propagate the YouVersion citation recommendation (S21 primary, LSG1910 fallback) into the Romans package’s own documentation, since no version was previously recorded there.