1 Corinthians — Hmong Language Package: Executive Summary

One sentence: This Language Package extends the Hmong Romans baseline to cover the full text of 1 Corinthians, and it identifies the single highest-stakes linguistic decision in the pipeline to date — never rendering the resurrection body’s “natural/spiritual” contrast with the word for “human soul” — sitting directly inside this curriculum’s own core passage.

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Why it matters

1 Corinthians speaks more directly into live, currently-practiced Hmong traditional religion than Romans did. Where Romans’ collisions were often conceptual (fate vs. election, ritual law vs. custom), this book names concrete, ongoing practices by their exact vocabulary: household spirit-offering meals eaten by families today (ch. 8, 10), shamanic trance-speech performed today (ch. 12, 14), and ancestor-memorial feeding rites observed today (ch. 11). Getting these renderings wrong does not just create comprehension gaps — it risks actively validating or actively slandering practices happening in believers’ own extended families this week.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage complete. All 16 chapters reviewed; chapter 13 (Love as the Greater Way) is the only chapter contributing no new load-bearing vocabulary — logged as reviewed, not omitted, per the full-book-coverage mandate.
• 51+ new terms surfaced beyond the Romans-baseline inheritance (see analysis/08_core_glossary.md Table 2 and assets/translation_memory.json), spanning resurrection vocabulary, idol-meat/idolatry terms, spiritual-gifts vocabulary, Lord’s Supper terms, and marriage/singleness vocabulary.
• The anthropological fence is the top structural risk in the package. The Greek psychikos (“natural”/“soul-ish,” 2:14 and 15:44) must never be rendered with the baseline term for human soul (ntsuj plig), or the core passage’s own resurrection argument collapses into the Hmong folk belief it is written to refute (the dead becoming ancestor-spirits, not receiving a real transformed body).
• Ten doctrines assigned; nine are Critical or High risk. Only “Love as the Greater Way” (Doctrine 9) is Low risk. This is a denser risk profile than the Romans baseline, where several doctrines carried Medium-adjacent High ratings.
• Two hermeneutical (non-collision) flags remain open by design: 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (women’s silence) and the prescriptive scope of 11:2-16 (head covering) are flagged [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED: interpretive scope] rather than resolved — this reflects genuine, faithful denominational diversity, not a translation gap.

Risks

• Term-level: Of the 107 entries in assets/bible_term_registry.json (1 Corinthians), 18 are rated Critical and 17 are rated High (including the escalating koinōnia entry) — 35 terms total requiring mandatory human theologian review before publication, with several (food offered to idols, temple of God, tongues/prophecy, resurrection body) additionally requiring native-speaker co-review.
• Doctrine-level: 6 of 10 doctrines are Critical (Resurrection, Cross as Wisdom and Power, Church Discipline and Holiness, Christian Liberty and Idol Meat, The Lord’s Supper, Spiritual Gifts and the Body of Christ) and 3 are High (Christian Unity, Marriage and Singleness, Order in Worship) — 9 of 10 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review before publication, with no automated-review bypass permitted for any of them.
• Highest-priority single risk: the resurrection/psychikos fence (see Key Findings) — a single lexical slip here would compromise the theological anchor passage of the entire curriculum.
• Most concrete/live risk: food offered to idols and the Lord’s table/table of demons contrast (ch. 8, 10) — the only collision in the book corresponding to a currently, actively practiced household ritual rather than a historical analogue.

Opportunities

• The discerning of spirits gift (12:10) is the text’s own built-in answer to the tongues/prophecy collision risk and should be foregrounded pedagogically across the whole Spiritual Gifts unit, not treated as one gift among twelve.
• The Lord’s table / table of demons contrast (10:21) is Paul’s own explicit safeguard against exactly the collision this package is built to manage, and can be taught as the passage’s strongest resource for worship-exclusivity teaching.
• Firstfruits, heir, and redemption imagery (already fixed Low/Medium risk from the Romans baseline) continue to provide strong, positive cultural bridge-points via Hmong agrarian and clan-inheritance custom.
• Cross-tradition comparison (analysis/04_comparative_theology.md) shows Jewish and Islamic dietary law’s stricter prohibitions on idol-offered food actually reinforce, rather than undercut, Paul’s bottom-line refusal of idol-worship participation — useful corroborating material for teaching 10:14.

Recommended actions

1. Route all content touching the 9 Critical/High doctrines and the 35 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 publication; treat the 10 ranked highest-risk ambiguities in analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md §5 as the review-priority queue.
2. Enforce the psychikos ≠ ntsuj plig rule as a hard, automated pre-publication gate (see analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md §8-9), not merely a style guideline.
3. Keep 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and 11:2-16’s interpretive-scope flags open pending explicit theologian guidance; do not let Phase 2 generation default to a single denominational resolution.
4. Log Apolau (Apollos) and the 15:51 mystery occurrence into the next formal TM-revision cycle (already incorporated into assets/translation_memory.json in this release, per analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md §2/§4/§7).
5. When curriculum content reaches the idol-meat, Lord’s Supper, and spiritual-gifts units, require native-speaker co-review in addition to theologian review, given the currently-practiced (not merely historical) nature of the underlying traditional-religion collisions.