Executive Summary: 2 Peter Language Package (French)

Why it matters

2 Peter defends the apostolic eyewitness basis of the gospel and the certainty of Christ’s return against scoffers and false teachers — and every one of its central doctrinal claims lands on top of a French-specific vocabulary collision. The French phrase for “the Day of the Lord” is also the everyday French phrase for Sunday. The French phrase for “partakers of the divine nature” sustains two genuinely incompatible theologies (Orthodox théosis vs. Reformed moral renewal) in identical wording. The historic French rendering of “private interpretation” (1:20) has centuries of Catholic-Protestant apologetic baggage attached to it. This curriculum carries more Critical-tier doctrinal risk per chapter than the Romans baseline it extends, concentrated in a shorter, three-chapter book — meaning theologian-review capacity must be planned proportionally higher, not lower, than a simple page-count comparison would suggest.

Key findings

• 24 doctrines mapped, full-book coverage confirmed (chs. 1–3, no chapter silently skipped): 5 Critical, 9 High, 8 Medium, 2 Low. 14 of 24 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review before Phase 2 sign-off; 8 require native speaker review; only 2 clear automated review alone.
• 101 terms now in translation memory (v2: 19 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline + 82 new to this curriculum). Of these, 9 are Critical risk and 13 are High risk — 22 terms requiring mandatory human theologian review, roughly one in five of the letter’s entire load-bearing vocabulary.
• Three unique “hard collision” terms found nowhere in the Romans baseline: “le jour du Seigneur” (Sunday collision, Critical), “participer à la nature divine” (théosis collision, Critical), and ταρταρώσας/“Tartare” (culinary-dish collision if mistransliterated, Critical). None of these has a safe one-word French substitute — each requires mandatory glossing or descriptive paraphrase, not a lexical swap.
• Chapter 1 and chapter 3 concentrate Critical-tier risk; chapter 2, despite having only 3 registry-level doctrine entries, is the single densest chapter for term-level collision risk (hérésies’ Wars-of-Religion baggage, despotēs’ unusable cognate “despote,” and the Tartarus culinary trap) and must not be treated as lower-priority in QA scheduling.
• Known sectarian mistranslation pattern identified and blocked: the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Traduction du Monde Nouveau historically splits Granville Sharp constructions (like 2 Peter 1:1’s “God and Savior”) into two persons to deny Christ’s deity. This exact syntactic error is now a named forbidden substitution in the Phase 2 instruction set.

Risks

• Critical — “Le jour du Seigneur” (3:10) defaults to “Sunday” for French readers, Catholic and secular alike, without an explicit non-liturgical clarifying gloss on every occurrence in teaching material.
• Critical — “Participer à la nature divine” (1:4) can be taught, even unintentionally, in a way compatible with ontological divinization (Orthodox/Catholic-mystical or New Age/Hindu-monist assimilation) rather than Spirit-wrought moral transformation; the Creator/creature distinction must be actively guarded, not assumed.
• Critical — “Own interpretation” (1:20) risks importing a centuries-old Catholic-apologetic argument against individual Bible reading into a verse that is actually about the prophet’s, not the reader’s, relationship to the text’s origin.
• Critical — Granville Sharp constructions (1:1, 1:11) are one inserted French article away from silently denying Christ’s deity, echoing a documented sectarian translation pattern.
• High — “Avènement” (1:16, 3:4) competes with secular “dawning of an era” usage and the liturgical “l’Avent,” both of which understate a personal, bodily, future return.
• High — “Hérésies” (2:1) risks reframing false teaching as an institutional-authority dispute rooted in French religious-war history rather than Peter’s actual charge: denial of Christ.
• High — Cross-term lexical fences (μακροθυμία “patience” vs. ὑπομονή “persévérance”; δεσπότης “Maître souverain” vs. κύριος “Seigneur”) are new failure modes not present in the Romans baseline: the risk is not mistranslating either term, but silently merging two correctly-available French words.

Opportunities

• Reuse, don’t rebuild: 19 baseline Romans terms (Seigneur, Dieu, Esprit Saint, Fils de Dieu, appel, élection, foi, justice, grâce, paix, and others) carry directly into 2 Peter with zero renegotiation, giving Phase 2 a substantial head start and guaranteeing vocabulary consistency for learners moving between the two curricula.
• Establish the YouVersion precedent now: the Romans baseline never recorded a YouVersion version selection; this package formally recommends Segond 21 (S21) with a documented URL-construction pattern (2PE.{chapter}.{verse}), closing a gap in the baseline package for all future curricula, not just this one.
• Codify the sectarian-mistranslation blocklist: naming the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Granville Sharp splitting pattern and the Watch Tower “anointed class” reading of 1:4 explicitly in the Phase 2 instruction set turns a diffuse risk into a checkable validation rule.
• Turn chapter 2’s density into a QA strength: front-loading theologian review capacity on hérésies/despotēs/ταρταρώσας in chapter 2, rather than assuming chapter 1 and 3 need it more, closes the single biggest scheduling blind spot this analysis surfaced.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 22 Critical/High terms and 14 Critical/High doctrines to mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 segment touching them is marked approved — no exceptions, per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
2. Enforce the mandatory “not Sunday” gloss on every teaching-material occurrence of “le jour du Seigneur,” even though the base Scripture text itself should remain unglossed per standard French Bible convention.
3. Load assets/translation_memory.json v2 (2 Peter), not the Romans-only baseline file, at the start of every Phase 2 2 Peter session; treat any drift back to the Romans-only file as a tooling defect.
4. Confirm the live YouVersion numeric ID for Segond 21 via API/catalog lookup before production deployment of any hyperlink — do not hard-code a remembered ID.
5. Brief theologian reviewers explicitly on the two new cross-term lexical fences (patience/persévérance; despotēs/kyrios) as a distinct review category from single-term mistranslation, since standard back-translation QA will not catch a fence violation where both individual terms are, in isolation, correctly rendered.