Executive Summary — 2 Corinthians | English → French Language Package

Why it matters

2 Corinthians is Paul’s most personal, theologically dense, and rhetorically volatile letter — and for a French destination audience split across practicing/lapsed Catholic heritage, a small Protestant minority, and a large secular/biblically-unchurched segment, it collides with French vocabulary at an unusually high rate. The core passage (5:11-21) alone packs three Critical-risk doctrines — Reconciliation, Substitutionary Atonement, Imputed Righteousness — into eleven verses, and the letter as a whole introduces the Trent-vs-Reformation “sufficiency” false-friend trap, a Catholic Eucharistic-liturgy collision on “new covenant,” and a live laïcité/hijab-debate collision on “veil.” Getting this Language Package right is the difference between a French-language 2 Corinthians curriculum that preserves apostolic doctrine and one that silently drifts into sacramentalism, secular self-help language, or political controversy.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed. All 13 chapters were analyzed; no chapter contributes zero new theological vocabulary. Chapter 5 (the core passage) carries the highest concentration of Critical-risk material in the book; chapters 11-12 (false apostleship, thorn in the flesh) carry the second-highest concentration.
• 85 terms are now recorded in this curriculum’s enforced glossary (25 terms inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 60 new terms specific to 2 Corinthians), extending — never contradicting — the Romans Language Package.
• 36 doctrines are mapped across the letter (consistent across doctrine_risk_registry.json and 11_doctrine_analysis.md), 8 of which are this curriculum’s named doctrines and 28 of which are supporting sub-doctrines the translation must still track.
• Zero new transliteration decisions. Unlike Romans’ retained “Abba,” 2 Corinthians requires no new Greek transliterations — every new concept is served by existing or compounded French vocabulary, glossed for precision.
• Ten forbidden-substitution traps are newly documented for this letter, the most dangerous being “suffisance” (a one-letter-adjacent false friend for God-given sufficiency) and the reflexive “réconciliez-vous” (which inverts the doctrine of unilateral divine reconciliation at 5:20).

Risks

• 49 of 85 glossary terms (58%) are Critical or High risk, requiring mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — nearly double the term-level density of the Romans baseline, driven by the letter’s atonement, apostleship-legitimacy, and covenant-contrast content.
• 23 of 36 doctrines (64%) require human theologian review (7 Critical + 16 High), matching the count already fixed in doctrine_risk_registry.json’s risk summary; only 1 doctrine is automated-review-only.
• Highest-stakes single risk: 5:20’s passive imperative “be reconciled” is one grammatically natural French mistranslation (“réconciliez-vous”) away from teaching the opposite of the doctrine it renders.
• Highest-stakes recurring risk: the “suffisance” false-friend trap recurs at three separate load-bearing points (2:16, 3:5, 12:9) and is only one letter removed from a completely innocent-looking French sentence.
• Highest-stakes cultural-collision risk: “nouvelle alliance” (3:6) is the exact phrase spoken at every Catholic Mass, and “voile” (3:13-16) is a live term in France’s ongoing hijab/laïcité political debate — both require deliberate historical/narrative framing that a rushed translation could easily skip.
• Sectarian-appropriation risk: francophone Jehovah’s Witness (impersonal Holy Spirit, subordinationist 13:14), prosperity-gospel (8:9, 12:7-10), and esoteric/New Age (12:2-4) materials actively misuse passages in this letter; the curriculum must pre-empt these readings, not merely avoid them by accident.

Opportunities

• Reuse, don’t reinvent. 25 of the letter’s highest-value terms already have an exact, tested French rendering from the Romans baseline — this curriculum need only extend usage notes, not create new vocabulary.
• “Écharde dans la chair” and “ma grâce te suffit” are both already stable, well-loved idioms in French Christian culture across translation traditions (LSG through TOB) — the curriculum can lean on existing cultural fluency here rather than fighting it.
• France’s own “sectes”/“dérives sectaires” cultural discourse offers a ready-made (if double-edged) bridge for teaching “Genuine versus False Apostleship,” provided the curriculum explicitly distinguishes discernment-of-false-teaching from generalized anti-religious suspicion.
• A locked-in YouVersion citation standard (Segond 21, version ID 951, book code 2CO) removes ambiguity for all Phase 2 hyperlink generation, avoiding the archaic-register risk of defaulting to Segond 1910.

Recommended actions

1. Lock the Step 9-11 artifacts (assets/translation_memory.json, analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md, this summary) as the mandatory Phase 2 pre-flight load, alongside the Romans baseline files — never as a replacement for them.
2. Pre-flag all segments touching 2 Corinthians 5:11-21, 3:6-18, and 11:1-13:10 for mandatory theologian review before Phase 2 begins, given their outsized share of Critical-risk content.
3. Enforce the ten new forbidden substitutions (“suffisance,” “quête,” unglossed “jalousie,” reflexive “réconciliez-vous,” “une autre façon de voir Jésus,” capitalized “Dieu” at 4:4, “se baiser,” “transfiguré” for ongoing change, bare “égalité,” bare “temple”) at automated validation, not merely at human review.
4. Brief all human theologian reviewers on the four sectarian-appropriation patterns documented in 05_translation_landscape.md (Watchtower, LDS, Christian Science, prosperity-gospel/esoteric) so Critical-risk approvals are made with that context in view, not discovered after publication.
5. Carry the doctrine and term risk counts forward unchanged into Phase 2 review-routing tooling: 7 Critical + 16 High doctrines (23 total theologian-routed) and 17 Critical + 32 High terms (49 total theologian-routed), matching the registries delivered in this phase exactly.