Executive Summary — 2 Peter (English → Japanese)

Why it matters

2 Peter arrives in the Japanese Language Package pipeline as a short, doctrinally dense letter whose core passage (1:16–21) sits directly on top of Japan’s single most volatile theological fault line: how a personal deity communicates through, and is distinguished from, a human being. The letter’s inspiration doctrine (“carried along by the Holy Spirit”) and its Sonship/deity doctrine (the Father’s voice from “the Majestic Glory”) both collide with live, named Japanese religious frameworks — Shinto spirit-mediumship (神懸り) and the renounced imperial living-god doctrine (現人神) — in ways the Romans baseline never had to address. Getting this right is not incremental; it determines whether the curriculum’s foundational claim (Scripture is reliable because God-superintended human eyewitnesses wrote it) is heard as intended or absorbed into a familiar but doctrinally opposite cultural script.

Key findings

• 22 doctrines analyzed across all 3 chapters; 7 rated Critical, 8 High — a Critical/High concentration (15 of 22, 68%) higher than typical for a 3-chapter book, driven by the letter’s dense cluster of inspiration, Christology, judgment, and eschatology claims.
• 90 terms are now locked in the 2 Peter translation memory — 21 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline (e.g., 神, イエス, 主, 神の子, 聖霊, 救い, 恵み, 義) and 69 newly coined for this letter.
• 34 of those 90 terms (11 Critical + 23 High) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — more than a third of the entire glossary.
• The core passage (1:16–21) alone accounts for 9 of the 15 highest-ranked ambiguities identified in the linguistic gap analysis, confirming it as both the theological and linguistic-risk center of the curriculum.
• Three genuinely new Japanese-specific collision classes appear in this book with no precedent in the Romans baseline: (1) 導かれて vs. Shinto kamigakari trance-possession; (2) 徳 vs. Confucian/Bushido self-cultivated virtue; (3) 神の性質 vs. Buddhist buddha-nature (仏性) and Shinto human-to-kami deification.
• Two lexical-flattening pairs are unique to this letter: ἐπίγνωσις/γνῶσις and ὑπομονή/μακροθυμία both collapse to single Japanese words (知識, 忍耐) where Greek distinguishes two concepts — requiring mandatory disambiguating modifiers at every occurrence.
• A new foundational term, 悔い改め (repentance), enters translation memory for the first time in this Language Package and is recommended for promotion into all future curricula.

Risks

• Highest risk: 1:21’s φερόμενοι (“carried along”) rendered too passively could be heard as itako/miko-style spirit-possession, corrupting the doctrine of Scripture’s inspiration at its most explicit statement in the entire letter.
• Second highest: 1:3–5’s ἀρετή (“virtue,” 徳) could be heard as a self-earned Bushido/Confucian character achievement rather than Spirit-empowered fruit — directly undermining the passage’s own stated logic (“his divine power has granted us all things”).
• Third highest: 1:4’s θεία φύσις (“divine nature”) could be heard as either Buddhist buddha-nature (innate enlightenment-potential) or Shinto human-to-kami deification, recasting salvation as attaining latent inner divinity rather than granted relational participation.
• Pervasive risk across chs. 2–3: 裁き (“judgment”) could silently flatten into the household-idiom 因果応報 (“karmic retribution”), depersonalizing the entire false-teachers/Day-of-the-Lord polemic.
• Dilution risk: 主の日 (“Day of the Lord”) and 来臨/再臨 (“parousia”) both risk being absorbed into Japan’s saturated apocalypse/pop-culture vocabulary or, conversely, near-zero secular reader recognition — opposite failure modes requiring the same fix: mandatory first-occurrence doctrinal anchoring.

Opportunities

• Japan’s adult-heir adoption practice, on-giri grace framework, and Bushido honor vocabulary (all already fenced in the Romans baseline) extend cleanly into this letter with no new bridging work required for grace, righteousness, or calling/election.
• Judaism and Islam’s shared “false prophet subject to divine judgment” category offers a genuine cross-traditional teaching bridge for the false-teachers doctrine, usable in explanatory material without doctrinal compromise.
• The baseline’s existing Pure Land Buddhism (極楽往生) teaching bridge for salvation extends naturally to this letter’s “new heavens and new earth” (3:13), giving translators a proven pattern for the non-equivalence framing already validated in Romans.
• Aum Shinrikyo’s cultural memory of “dangerous religious teacher” can be responsibly invoked as a negative teaching bridge for the false-teacher doctrine, provided it is not allowed to reduce Peter’s theological categories to pure sociology.

Recommended actions

1. Route all nine core-passage (1:16–21) high-risk terms — carried_along, virtue, divine_nature, private_interpretation, holy_mountain, morning_star, parousia, myths, majestic_glory/well_pleased — through mandatory theologian review with zero sampling exceptions in Phase 2 Step 17.
2. Enforce the disambiguating-modifier protocol for 知識 (ἐπίγνωσις/γνῶσις) and 忍耐 (ὑπομονή/μακροθυμία) at every single occurrence; treat any segment lacking the modifier as a validation failure, not a stylistic choice.
3. Promote 悔い改め to a standing Critical/High-risk term in the shared cross-curriculum glossary going forward, given its first appearance here and its likely recurrence in future NT epistle curricula.
4. Confirm the 12_ai_translation_requirements.md extension (this phase’s Step 10 deliverable) is loaded alongside — never instead of — the Romans baseline requirements document for every Phase 2 session.
5. Prioritize native speaker review capacity for the 6 Medium-risk doctrines (assurance, ancient-world judgment, moral corruption, new creation hope, holy living, unity of faith) so Phase 2 throughput on the 15 theologian-track doctrines is not bottlenecked by shared reviewer capacity.