Linguistic Gap Analysis — 1 Corinthians (English → Japanese)

0. Method and Scope

This analysis covers all sixteen chapters of 1 Corinthians, organized around the ten curriculum doctrines and anchored to the core passage 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. For each doctrine it identifies:

• Available destination terms — existing Japanese vocabulary (Bible-translation-established or general-use) that could render the concept.
• Weaknesses — where that vocabulary is absent (a gap), or where it is present but already loaded with competing meaning from Shinto, Buddhist, folk-religious, or purely secular usage (a crowded semantic neighborhood requiring “fencing” — deliberate qualification to keep the biblical sense from bleeding into the neighboring one).
• Recommended strategy — reuse baseline term / adopt core-glossary new term / transliterate / paraphrase, with the fencing device to apply in Phase 2.

Chapters not producing new load-bearing vocabulary are explicitly noted as reviewed at the end of each relevant section (per FULL-BOOK COVERAGE mandate) rather than silently skipped.

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A. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

A1. The Resurrection of Christ and Believers (ch. 15, anchor 15:1-11; also 6:14, 15:12-58)

Element	Available Japanese term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Resurrection itself	復活 (fukkatsu)	Crowded: dominant modern usage is secular “comeback” (band, product, sports team). Not a false-doctrine collision but a dilution risk — the word is correct but rhetorically deflated.	REUSE baseline term exactly. Fence with explicit teaching restoring bodily/historical/unrepeatable force at every occurrence in ch.15, especially 15:12-20’s counterfactual argument.
Resurrection body	御霊のからだ (mitama no karada)	Crowded from the opposite direction: Japanese folk/Buddhist afterlife imagery (hotoke 仏, wandering rei/kon at Obon, ghost-story 幽霊) is disembodied-spirit-shaped. Gap: no existing Japanese phrase natively conveys “transformed but still bodily.”	NEW term per core glossary. Fence hard: pair every occurrence with explicit “genuinely physical, not a disembodied spirit” clarification. Critical risk, human theologian review every occurrence.
Firstfruits typology	初穂 (hatsuho)	Gap: OT festal background (Feast of Firstfruits) has zero cultural resonance for secular readers; this is biblical illiteracy, not doctrinal collision.	NEW term. Paraphrase-supplement with a one-sentence OT explanatory gloss at first occurrence rather than the word alone.
Last Adam typology	最後のアダム (Saigo no Adamu)	Gap: requires Genesis narrative background entirely absent for most readers.	NEW term (transliterated proper name + descriptor). Require explanatory footnote/teaching insert, not translation alone.
Resurrection appearances	現れました (arawaremashita)	Crowded: 現れる is the standard verb for ghost/apparition sightings (幽霊が現れる) in horror/pop culture.	NEW term. Fence with “bodily, physical, multiply-witnessed” qualifier — parallel device to baseline’s 聖霊/霊 fencing.
Transmission of tradition (παραδίδωμι/παραλαμβάνω)	伝える / 受ける (tsutaeru/ukeru)	Available and genuinely helpful: parallels Japan’s iemoto master-disciple transmission culture (tea ceremony, budō menkyo). Risk is over-mapping onto esoteric-technique transmission rather than verifiable historical eyewitness testimony.	NEW term; USE the iemoto parallel as a bridge, but fence explicitly against the “secret technique reserved for initiates” reading.
”According to the Scriptures”	聖書に書いてあるとおり	Crowded/gap combination: no false-concept collision, but risk of being processed as coincidental fortune-telling (占い) fulfillment plus general OT-illiteracy.	NEW term. Pair with brief OT-fulfillment teaching, not word choice alone.
Burial	埋葬されました	Gap: Japan’s near-universal cremation practice (火葬) differs from first-century rock-tomb burial; readers may not immediately grasp the empty-tomb plausibility structure.	NEW term. Add one-line cultural-practice clarification, not a doctrinal fence — this is a factual/cultural gap, not a competing theology.
”Untimely born” (self-description)	月足らずで生まれた者	Gap: no natural idiomatic Japanese equivalent carries Paul’s shock value; risk of translators smoothing it into a bland “unexpectedly.”	NEW term. Preserve literal force; explicitly instruct against euphemistic softening.

Chapters reviewed with no new load-bearing terms beyond the above: none — ch. 15 is entirely covered above; other chapters’ resurrection references (6:14) reuse 復活 with no additional vocabulary need.

A2. Christian Unity versus Factionalism (chs. 1, 3, 11, 12)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Division/schism	分裂 (bunretsu)	Crowded: Japan’s habatsu (派閥) faction culture in politics, corporations, and religious sects makes 分裂 instantly recognizable as normal organizational politics, risking under-reading as tolerable rather than sinful rupture of Christ’s body.	NEW term. Fence with explicit “this is sin against the gospel, not ordinary organizational friction” framing at 1:10-13 and 11:18.
Fleshly/carnal	肉的な (nikuteki na)	Gap-adjacent: term exists but risk of being read as personality friction rather than moral failure before God.	NEW term. Cross-link explicitly to baseline 罪 (sin) doctrine note.
Boasting (redirected)	誇る (hokoru)	Crowded, bidirectionally: Japan’s humility norm (謙遜, kenson) makes any positive treatment of boasting culturally jarring, while conversely “boast in the Lord” risks being flattened into a merely modest sentiment, missing that Paul confronts subtle humility-as-virtue-signaling too.	NEW term. Fence both directions: clarify Paul condemns ALL self-glorying while redirecting legitimate boasting exclusively to God’s work, not human achievement (including achieved humility).
Stumbling block	つまずき (tsumazuki)	No significant collision; standard.	Reuse core-glossary term consistently across chs. 1 and 8 so the cross’s own offense (1:23) and the liberty-ethics warning (8:9,13) are recognizably the same Japanese word.

Chapters reviewed, no new vocabulary beyond above: ch. 4 (apostolic authority material reuses 使徒/召された from baseline; no new terms).

A3. The Cross as Wisdom and Power (chs. 1-2, also 3:19)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Wisdom (contrasted, worldly vs. divine)	知恵 (chie)	Crowded — highest-priority fence in this doctrine cluster. The near-homophone/near-synonym 智慧 (also read chie) is the standard Japanese Buddhist term for prajñā, transcendent liberating insight attained through enlightenment/practice. The two words are pronounced identically and differ only in kanji, creating a silent-substitution risk parallel to the 預言/予言 homophone risk already flagged in the baseline.	NEW term. MANDATE the 知恵 kanji exclusively; NEVER 智慧. This is a kanji-selection fence, not a word-choice one — flag for the same IME/auto-conversion vigilance as the baseline’s prophet/prophecy caution.
Foolishness of the cross	愚かさ (orokasa)	Gap in rhetorical register: Japanese readers attentive to intellectual respectability may read Paul’s “foolishness” as an actual concession of inferiority rather than his deliberate rhetorical inversion.	NEW term. Fence with explicit paradox-framing: God’s “foolishness” is revealed as true wisdom, not an admission of the gospel’s intellectual weakness.
Power of God (paradoxically displayed in weakness/crucifixion)	神の力 (Kami no Chikara)	REUSE baseline term. Additional 1 Corinthians-specific weakness: the paradox of power displayed through a crucified Messiah (1:18-24) is a new theological layer not present in Romans’ usage, requiring its own explanatory framing beyond avoiding 気/パワー.	Reuse exactly; add paradox-specific teaching note for 1:18-24.

Chapters reviewed: ch. 3’s wisdom material (3:19, “the wisdom of this world is folly with God”) reuses the above 知恵/愚かさ pairing; no additional terms needed.

A4. Church Discipline and Holiness (chs. 3, 5, 6)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Temple (corporate church / individual body)	神殿 (shinden)	Crowded — structural, not merely lexical. 神殿 is the standard architectural term for a Shinto shrine’s inner sanctuary where a kami is believed to dwell. The conceptual shape (deity’s spirit indwelling a consecrated space) is genuinely structurally parallel to Shinto shrine theology, unlike most other collision risks in this package which are purely false-analogy.	NEW term. This is a bridge-with-fence case: usable as a teaching bridge for “God’s Spirit truly dwells in a set-apart place/people,” but must be anchored immediately and every time to the ONE Holy Spirit indwelling the ONE covenant community/individual believer — never a building, never one kami-dwelling among many kami-dwellings. Human theologian review required at every occurrence (3:16-17, 6:19).
Mystery (μυστήριον)	奥義 (ougi)	Crowded: 奥義 is the standard word for a martial art’s or traditional craft’s secret technique (aikido, kendo, tea-ceremony), attained only after long discipleship under a master — an elite-initiation, effort-attained frame that runs directly opposite to Paul’s point.	NEW term. Fence explicitly: this mystery is graciously disclosed to all believers via the Spirit, not mastered through years of disciplined practice.
Sexual immorality	淫らな行い (midara na okonai)	Gap, not collision: contemporary secular Japanese sexual ethics (normalized cohabitation, large “love hotel” commercial industry, low social stigma outside traditionalist subcultures) sit at real cultural distance from Paul’s assumed shared moral ground.	NEW term. Requires the theological basis (body as temple, one-flesh union) to be actively taught, not assumed as shared intuition.
Judging disputes	裁く (sabaku)	Crowded in an unusual direction: Japan’s low-litigation, mediation-preferring culture (示談) makes Paul’s rebuke against lawsuits seem trivially agreeable, risking a shallow “of course, harmony” reading that misses the deeper gospel-witness point (6:1-6).	NEW term. Fence by surfacing the actual argument (witness before unbelievers, competence of the saints) rather than letting cultural pre-agreement substitute for engagement with the text.
Leaven	パン種 (pan-dane)	Gap: Passover/leaven OT symbolism unfamiliar without background teaching.	NEW term. Explanatory gloss required at 5:6-8.
Bought with a price	買い取られました	Gap: no cultural memory of chattel-slave manumission-by-purchase in modern Japan; default sense is an ordinary commercial transaction (real estate, contract buyout), flattening the costliness of redemption.	NEW term. Requires active teaching to restore weight, paralleling baseline’s covenant/adoption dilution caution.

A5. Marriage and Singleness (ch. 7)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Singleness as calling	独身 (dokushin)	Crowded: contemporary Japan’s demographic marriage-avoidance trend (非婚化, hikonka) and rising lifetime unmarried rate gives 独身 a strong secular “chosen/default lifestyle” resonance quite distinct from Paul’s specific Spirit-given vocational gift for undivided devotion.	NEW term. Fence by explicitly distinguishing Spirit-given calling from generic relationship-avoidance or career-priority discourse.
Marriage / virgin / separate-divorce	結婚 / 処女 / 離れる・離婚	No major collision; standard vocabulary.	NEW terms per core glossary; reuse consistently; apply pastoral sensitivity note for mixed-faith-marriage material (7:10-15) rather than a lexical fence.

Chapters reviewed, no additional vocabulary: none beyond ch. 7 for this doctrine.

A6. Christian Liberty and Idol Meat (chs. 8, 10; also 6, 9, 12 tangentially)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Idol	偶像 (guuzou)	Crowded — bidirectional pastoral risk, highest-priority fence in this cluster. Collides with normalized Japanese household ancestor-veneration and kami-shelf practice (butsudan 仏壇, kamidana 神棚), common even in secular homes, including regular food/drink offerings (お供え). Risk cuts two ways: (a) readers may treat “idols” as irrelevant ancient exotica with no present referent; (b) if the household-altar parallel is drawn too bluntly, readers may feel their ordinary family piety toward deceased parents is being accused of paganism.	NEW term. Requires deliberately careful, pastorally sensitive theological framing distinguishing the ancient temple-cult referent from modern family ritual, without either erasing the analogy’s real relevance or giving unnecessary offense. Human theologian review required at every occurrence.
Food offered to idols	偶像に献げられた肉	Same collision profile as above, intensified by direct structural parallel to お供え物 (offered food later consumed by the family).	NEW term. Same review routing as “idol.”
Demon	悪霊 (akuryou)	Crowded — Critical tier. Already a fully established Japanese folk-religious/horror-culture term (お祓い exorcism practice, yūrei/yōkai horror genre). This makes the word instantly intelligible but risks filing biblical demons as one more category within a generic animistic spirit-world taxonomy rather than personal, morally culpable beings opposing the one true God specifically.	NEW term. Fence with the same rigor as baseline’s 聖霊/霊 distinction. Human theologian review required at every occurrence (10:20-21).
Table of the Lord / table of demons	主の食卓 / 悪霊の食卓	Structurally intelligible via Japan’s own kami/ancestor food-offering custom (table-sharing = communion with the spiritual power), which makes the underlying logic easy to grasp but risks conflating the two tables with each other and with ordinary Japanese offering customs.	NEW term. Keep the two phrases sharply, unambiguously distinct from each other in every occurrence; do not let either bleed into ch.11’s Lord’s Supper material without clear signposting.
Conscience	良心 (ryoushin)	Crowded: Japan’s shame-orientation (per Ruth Benedict’s framework, already noted in baseline for 罪) risks 良心 defaulting to social-propriety-sensing (avoiding 迷惑/disharmony) rather than an internal moral compass answerable to God regardless of social consequence.	NEW term. Fence with explicit God-oriented (not merely social) framing at 8:7-12, 10:25-29.
Rights/authority	権利 (kenri)	Crowded in the opposite direction from most entries: Japan’s group-harmony culture (和) mutes individual rights-assertion language, risking under-reading of Paul’s forceful defense of a genuine right he then voluntarily renounces.	NEW term. Fence by clarifying this is free renunciation of a real right, not absence of standing to claim it — Paul argues his rights forcefully in 9:4-18 before surrendering them.
Athletic race/prize/crown	競技 / 冠	Crowded: sits directly on Japan’s competitive exam/hiring “selection” culture (受験, 選抜) and ganbaru achievement-merit ethic, risking a “hard work earns salvation/reward” misreading.	NEW term. Fence as disciplined stewardship of a gift already graciously given (echo 15:10’s grace-then-labor pattern), not merit accumulation toward earning reward.
Knowledge / freedom	知識 / 自由	Moderate risk only; standard terms, but “knowledge puffs up” and “freedom” both need pairing with love/qualification respectively to avoid flattened readings.	NEW terms; pair systematically per core glossary notes.

A7. The Lord’s Supper (ch. 11)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
The Lord’s Supper	主の晩餐 (Shu no Bansan)	Crowded: must be distinguished from Japan’s well-established Buddhist memorial-meal tradition (法事, hōji, on death anniversaries) and Obon ancestor food-offerings.	NEW term. Fence explicitly as participatory communion in Christ’s ongoing life and proclamation of his return (11:26) — NOT a memorial rite for one who remains among the departed.
Remembrance	記念 (kinen)	Same collision profile as above.	NEW term. Anchor explicitly to a death reversed by resurrection, cross-linking to 15:3-4.
Covenant (institution words)	契約 (keiyaku) — REUSE baseline	Gap/dilution: 契約’s fully secularized commercial-contract default sense (employment, rental, insurance) is at its highest-stakes exposure here — the single most liturgically weighted occurrence in the curriculum.	Reuse exactly per baseline; require active restoration of relational, blood-sealed, gracious sense at 11:25, not passive reliance on the word alone.
Body (sacramental sense) / discerning the body	体・からだ / からだを見分ける	Genuine exegetical ambiguity, not merely cultural collision. Scholarly disagreement over whether “the body” (11:29) refers to Christ’s sacrificial body, the gathered church body, or both.	Flag per baseline ambiguity-handling protocol: record alternative rendering, route to human theologian review; do not silently resolve in translation.
Headship	かしら (kashira)	Crowded: collides with Japan’s traditional patriarchal household-authority structure (家長, kachou); risks either overstated dominance reading or a defensively softened, doctrinally flattened rendering.	NEW term. Fence with functional/relational framing (echoing the Trinitarian Father-Son relation invoked in 11:3) without overstating dominance or erasing genuine ordering language. Human theologian review required.

A8. Spiritual Gifts and the Body of Christ (ch. 12; also 14 for tongues/order)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Spiritual gifts	賜物 (tamamono)	REUSE baseline. New wrinkle: 7:7’s unusual application of the same term to a life-state (singleness) requires an explanatory bridge distinct from ch.12’s ministry-ability sense.	Reuse exactly; add cross-reference note bridging 7:7 usage to ch.12’s primary sense.
Body of Christ (corporate)	キリストの体 (Kirisuto no karada)	Gap: 体/からだ is polysemous across at least four distinct theological senses in the book (sacramental, individual-temple, corporate-ecclesial, resurrection); the Japanese word carries no built-in sense-marker.	NEW term. Teaching materials must make each sense explicit per passage rather than assuming Japanese readers will intuit the shift from context alone.
Tongues	異言 (igen)	Crowded — high-priority fence. Collides with Japanese trance-mediumship folk phenomena — e.g., itako (イタコ) oracular mediums of the Tohoku region who channel the words of the dead — plus broader shamanistic/channeling associations in folk religion and new religious movements.	NEW term. Fence explicitly: Spirit-given tongues are intelligible-to-God, edifying, orderly, speaker-controlled speech under God’s authorship — NOT trance-mediumship where the medium’s own agency is displaced by another entity.
Interpretation of tongues	解き明かし (tokiakashi)	Inherits tongues’ collision risk; adds the specific concern that untranslated public “spiritual speech” could otherwise be indistinguishable to an outside observer from mediumship phenomena.	NEW term. Required companion for public tongues per 14:27-28; frame as the safeguard that prevents the mediumship misreading.
Healings/miracles	癒しの力 / 力あるわざ	Gap in the opposite direction from the baseline’s peace/癒し caution: here 癒し must be elevated to genuine supernatural healing, resisting dilution into Japan’s wellness/relaxation-marketing industry usage.	NEW term. Fence toward supernatural weight, not away from it.

A9. Love as the Greater Way (ch. 13)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Love (agapē)	愛 (ai)	Crowded — highest-priority fence in the whole book alongside 知恵/智慧. Documented historical translation challenge: 愛 was substantially reshaped by 19th-century missionary translation to carry agapē’s weight; pre-Christian/Buddhist connotations leaned toward romantic attachment or even negatively-viewed clinging attachment (愛着, aichaku, one of the twelve links of dependent origination associated with suffering-causing craving). Contemporary secular usage defaults overwhelmingly to romantic love (愛してる, used almost exclusively between romantic partners). 1 Corinthians 13 is frequently read at weddings even by non-Christian Japanese couples, reinforcing a purely romantic-relationship-advice reading.	NEW term. Fence explicitly and repeatedly: 13:4-7’s descriptions are self-giving, non-romantic, ecclesial/corporate ethic, not marital advice; teaching materials should proactively name and correct the wedding-reading association rather than assume it will not arise. Human theologian review required at every occurrence in ch.13.

A10. Order in Worship (ch. 14; also 11:2-16)

Element	Available term(s)	Weakness	Strategy
Order	秩序 (chitsujo)	Genuine bridge, low risk: Japan’s strong cultural value on procedural order and propriety maps unusually well onto Paul’s summary principle (14:40).	NEW term; no special fencing required — flagged in core glossary as a rare easy case.
Tongues / interpretation / prophecy in worship	See A8 above; 預言/預言者 REUSE baseline	Compounding risk: ch.14 has the highest term density of 異言/預言/解き明かし in the book, raising both the tongues-mediumship collision (A8) and the 預言/予言 homophone risk (baseline) simultaneously in adjacent verses.	Apply both fences concurrently; verify 預 kanji at every occurrence in this chapter specifically, given density.
Headship / women’s worship practice	See A7 above	Same かしら collision as ch.11.	Apply A7 strategy consistently across both chapters.

Full-book coverage note: Chapter 2 (contrast of Spirit’s wisdom with “the spirit of the world,” 2:12) and chapter 9 (Paul’s apostolic self-support argument, reusing 使徒/権利/自由 vocabulary already addressed above) and chapter 16 (collection/献金, Maranatha/マラナ・タ, holy kiss/聖なる口づけ) have been reviewed; no additional load-bearing vocabulary beyond what is captured under A3, A6, and the core glossary’s Section B entries for these minor terms. Chapter 4 (stewardship/judgment of apostles) is reviewed under A2/A4 above with no further gap items.

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B. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods — Fencing Priorities

B1. Genuine Gaps (no native Japanese concept exists; risk is blankness/illiteracy, not competing meaning)

These require explanatory teaching insertion, not lexical substitution:

1. Firstfruits (初穂) — OT festal background
2. Last Adam (最後のアダム) — Genesis narrative background
3. Leaven (パン種) — Passover symbolism
4. Bought with a price (買い取られました) — no cultural manumission-by-purchase memory
5. According to the Scriptures (聖書に書いてあるとおり) — OT messianic-fulfillment literacy
6. Burial practice (埋葬されました) — cremation-dominant funerary custom differs from rock-tomb burial

Strategy for this class: supply a one-to-two-sentence explanatory gloss on first occurrence in every teaching document; do not rely on the Japanese word alone to carry the concept.

B2. Crowded Neighborhoods Requiring Active Fencing (a Japanese word exists and is used, but a strong competing native/pop-culture/religious sense is already attached)

Ranked by density of competing associations:

1. 愛 (love/agapē) — romantic-love default + Buddhist aichaku attachment connotation + wedding-reading cultural reflex. Triple-crowded.
2. 知恵/智慧 kanji pair (wisdom) — homophone with Buddhist prajñā term; silent kanji-substitution risk.
3. 偶像 (idol) / 偶像に献げられた肉 (food offered to idols) — household butsudan/kamidana ancestor-veneration practice; bidirectional pastoral risk.
4. 悪霊 (demon) — established folk-horror/exorcism-culture spirit taxonomy.
5. 神殿 (temple) — Shinto shrine architecture and indwelling-kami theology; structurally similar, not merely superficially similar.
6. 異言 (tongues) — itako/shamanistic trance-mediumship folk phenomena.
7. かしら (headship) — patriarchal household-authority (家長) structure.
8. 復活 (resurrection) — secular pop-culture “comeback” usage (dilution rather than false-concept collision).
9. 契約 (covenant, at Lord’s Supper institution) — commercial-contract default sense, at its highest liturgical stakes in this book.
10. 分裂 (division/schism) — normalized habatsu faction-politics culture.
11. 良心 (conscience) — shame/social-propriety orientation vs. God-oriented moral faculty.
12. 誇る (boasting) — kenson humility norm, bidirectional risk.
13. 競技/冠 (athletic race/crown) — juken/senbatsu competitive-selection and ganbaru merit culture.
14. 奥義 (mystery) — martial-arts/traditional-craft secret-technique attainment framing.
15. 裁く (judge/dispute) — low-litigation, jidan-mediation cultural preference producing shallow agreement rather than engagement.

Strategy for this class: each occurrence requires an explicit disambiguating clause or teaching note in context (not merely a glossary entry) distinguishing the biblical sense from the competing native sense. Items 1-7 are assessed as requiring human theologian review at every occurrence given doctrinal weight; items 8-15 require native-speaker review with mandatory fencing language.

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C. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Term	Decision	Rationale
Christ / Messiah	Transliterate (キリスト)	Already fully established per baseline; paraphrase would break with universal Japanese Christian usage. Explanatory teaching (not re-translation) addresses the “foreign cultural brand” biblical-illiteracy risk.
Maranatha	Transliterate (マラナ・タ)	Baseline precedent (アバ) for preserving Aramaic devotional formulas; gloss on first occurrence rather than translating away the liturgical texture.
Untimely born (ἔκτρωμα)	Paraphrase, not transliterate (月足らずで生まれた者)	No transliteration option exists for a Greek common noun; paraphrase must preserve the shock/self-abasement value rather than default to a euphemistic smoothing.
Holy kiss	Paraphrase with cultural-practice note (聖なる口づけ + explanatory gloss)	No transliteration applicable; literal Japanese practice has no equivalent gesture, so the paraphrase must be accompanied by a cultural-substitution note (bow/handshake/verbal greeting) rather than prescribing literal kissing.
Last Adam	Partial transliteration + descriptor (最後のアダム, Adamu transliterated as an established proper name, 最後の as translated qualifier)	Follows existing convention for biblical proper names (cf. ダビデ, モーセ) combined with a translated ordinal descriptor; full paraphrase would obscure the Genesis-Christ typological link Paul is making.
Tongues (γλῶσσαι)	Paraphrase/existing compound (異言), NOT transliteration of a Greek loan	A transliterated loanword would carry no inherent meaning and risk being read as a technical foreign-import curiosity; 異言 (“different/other tongue/language”) is intelligible but requires the fencing described in B2 above rather than transliteration avoidance of the risk.
Agapē (love)	Existing native term (愛), NOT transliteration	Transliterating (e.g., “アガペー”) is used in some specialist theological contexts but was rejected for general curriculum use: it would create a second, disconnected vocabulary island isolated from the rest of the church’s devotional and liturgical language (hymns, prayers, wedding-verse familiarity), forfeiting the opportunity to correct the existing word’s dominant sense rather than replace it. Curriculum materials may reference アガペー only as a technical aside explaining the Greek term behind 愛, never as the primary rendering.
Wisdom / Sophia	Existing native term (知恵), NOT transliteration	Parallel reasoning to agapē: correcting the kanji-selection risk (知恵 vs. 智慧) is judged more effective curriculum-wide than introducing a transliterated island term for this central, recurring word.
Headship (κεφαλή)	Existing native term (かしら), NOT transliteration	かしら is deliberately not the more heavily loaded 家長; this is a native-term substitution decision rather than a transliteration decision — see core glossary note.
Steward/mystery (οἰκονόμος/μυστήριον)	Existing native terms (管理者/奥義), NOT transliteration	Same reasoning: transliteration would strand the terms outside ordinary Japanese theological vocabulary; the correction/fencing strategy is preferred throughout this package over introducing loanword islands, consistent with the baseline’s general preference for established Shinkaiyaku vocabulary over new loanwords.

General transliteration policy for this curriculum: Transliteration is reserved for (a) proper names already fixed in Shinkaiyaku convention, and (b) a small class of untranslatable Aramaic/Greek liturgical formulas explicitly preserved untranslated in the source text itself (Abba, Maranatha). All other new-vocabulary decisions in 1 Corinthians favor existing native Japanese terms paired with active fencing over transliteration, because transliterated loanwords in this language pair tend to be received as exotic technical curiosities disconnected from lived devotional vocabulary — the opposite of the curriculum’s aim to embed doctrine in ordinary reading and worship language.

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D. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in 1 Corinthians

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal weight × likelihood of misreading given the Japanese cultural/linguistic terrain):

1. 愛 (agapē love, ch. 13) — Critical-tier practical risk. The single most commercially/culturally reinforced misreading vector in the entire curriculum (wedding-reading reflex + romantic-love default + Buddhist aichaku undertone). Requires mandatory theologian review and proactive correction, not passive glossary reliance.

2. 御霊のからだ (spiritual body, 15:35-58) — Critical. Sits at the doctrinal climax of the anchor doctrine (Resurrection) and runs directly against the grain of available Japanese afterlife imagery (disembodied hotoke/rei). Highest-stakes single term in the anchor chapter.

3. 悪霊 (demon, 10:20-21) and 偶像 / 偶像に献げられた肉 (idol / food offered to idols, chs. 8, 10) — Critical/High cluster. Structural (not merely superficial) parallels to Japanese household religious practice create a bidirectional pastoral risk (dismissal as irrelevant vs. unintended accusation of family piety) that is more delicate to navigate than a simple false-concept collision.

4. 神殿 (temple, 3:16-17; 6:19) — High, with a bridge-or-collapse duality: the same structural parallel to Shinto shrine theology that makes this term pedagogically useful also makes it the easiest term in the book to misread toward “one kami-dwelling among many” if the fencing language is dropped even once.

5. 知恵 vs. 智慧 kanji homophone (wisdom, chs. 1-3) — High. A purely orthographic risk with no verbal signal, parallel to the baseline’s 預言/予言 caution but attached to a doctrinally central term (God’s wisdom in the cross) rather than a supporting one; silent kanji drift here would import a Buddhist enlightenment-attainment framework directly into the cross’s wisdom-by-revelation argument.

6. からだを見分ける (discerning the body, 11:29) — High, and uniquely a matter of genuine exegetical ambiguity rather than cultural collision: Christ’s sacrificial body, the church body, or both. Must be flagged per the baseline’s ambiguity-handling protocol rather than silently resolved by the translator.

7. 異言 (tongues, chs. 12, 14) — High. Compounding risk from chapter 14’s unusually high term density alongside 預言/預言者, raising two distinct fencing requirements (mediumship-collision and homophone-verification) in close textual proximity.

8. かしら (headship, 11:3-16) — High. Genuine translation-difficulty risk of overcorrection in either direction (overstated patriarchal dominance vs. doctrinally flattened softening), compounded by contemporary social sensitivity around gender-hierarchy language.

9. 契約 (covenant, at the Lord’s Supper institution words, 11:25) — High. The single highest liturgical-use exposure of this already-flagged baseline dilution risk in the entire curriculum; a lapse here affects the most frequently recited words in the book.

10. 復活 (resurrection, pervasive in ch. 15) — High but well-precedented: the baseline has already identified and addressed this dilution risk; ranked here primarily because ch. 15’s sheer term density and doctrinal centrality make even minor fencing lapses more consequential than elsewhere in the curriculum.

11. 競技 / 冠 (athletic race/crown, 9:24-27) and 誇る (boasting, throughout) — High. Both risk quietly reintroducing a merit-earns-reward logic into a grace-saturated book; ranked together because both require the same corrective anchor (9:24-27 and 15:10’s grace-then-labor pattern respectively) to resist Japan’s achievement-merit (ganbaru) cultural instinct.

12. 裁く (judging disputes, 6:1-6) and 分裂 (division, 1:10-13) — Medium-High. Both risk premature cultural pre-agreement (mediation-preference, faction-tolerance) substituting for actual engagement with Paul’s gospel-witness argument; lower-ranked than items above because the risk is under-engagement rather than doctrinal distortion per se.

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E. Summary Recommendations for Phase 2 Handoff

1. All Section A “NEW” terms should be merged into a versioned translation_memory.json update per the baseline’s enforcement instructions before any Phase 2 segment translation of 1 Corinthians begins.
2. Terms ranked 1-9 in Section D require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence, not merely at first occurrence, given the depth and structural (not superficial) nature of their cultural-collision risk.
3. The 知恵/智慧 and 預言/予言 kanji-pair risks should be added to an automated pre-submission kanji-verification check, analogous to a spell-check, prior to human review — this is a mechanically detectable risk class distinct from the interpretive risks dominating the rest of this analysis.
4. Fencing language (explicit in-context disambiguation, not footnotes alone) is required wherever Section B2 terms occur in doctrinally weighty statements; footnote-only mitigation is judged insufficient for Critical/High tier items given how easily a footnote can be skipped by a biblically illiterate reader already unfamiliar with the underlying concept.