Executive Summary: Ephesians (English → Korean) Language Package

Why it matters

Ephesians extends the Romans curriculum into a Korean Christian context that is, per the translation landscape, “the best-positioned language in this batch” — over a century of settled Korean Revised Version vocabulary means most terms already exist and are correctly understood by churchgoing readers. But Ephesians is unusually dense in doctrine per chapter, and it introduces the curriculum’s single highest concentration of collision points with Korean shamanism (무속신앙) and Confucian family ethics (효, 제사, 삼종지도) — specifically the armor-of-God/spiritual-powers cluster (ch. 2, 6) and the household codes (ch. 5–6). Getting these right is not optional polish; it determines whether Korean learners receive Ephesians’ gospel of grace or an unintentionally syncretistic substitute.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed. All six chapters of Ephesians were reviewed; every chapter contributes at least one Medium-or-above risk term. The core passage (2:1–10) carries the highest doctrinal density by design, as the curriculum’s theological anchor.
• 27 distinct doctrines catalogued in assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json: 9 Critical, 16 High, 2 Medium, 0 Low. 25 of 27 (93%) require mandatory human theologian review; the remaining 2 require native speaker review. Zero doctrines are automated-review-only — a materially higher theologian-review burden than the Romans baseline (25 of 42 Romans doctrines required theologian review).
• ~103 individual terms catalogued in the Ephesians term registry and translation memory, of which 22 carry Critical risk and 44 carry High risk (66 of ~103, roughly two-thirds) — reflecting Ephesians’ compressed, doctrine-per-verse density relative to Romans’ more expository pace.
• Two risk tiers were deliberately elevated beyond their Romans baseline values for this curriculum: righteousness (High → Critical, due to the “breastplate of righteousness” in 6:14) and resurrection (Medium → Critical, due to the concentrated union-with-Christ resurrection language in 2:5–6). Both elevations extend, and do not contradict, the baseline.
• Two genuine vocabulary gaps — not mere crowded-neighborhood risks, but places where ordinary Korean itself supplies no adequate neutral term — were identified: 예정 (predestination, unavoidably adjacent to 팔자/사주팔자 birth-chart fate) and 비밀 (mystery, whose ordinary Korean sense of “still-secret” runs backward against Paul’s now-revealed point). Both require mandatory qualifying phrases at every occurrence, not lexical substitution.

Risks

• Critical: Spiritual Warfare and the Armor of God (Eph 6:10–20, anticipated at 2:2). The single highest collision risk in the curriculum. Korean shamanism’s active, still-practiced hostile-spirit vocabulary (귀신, 악귀, 굿, 부적) sits directly adjacent to Ephesians’ own “rulers, authorities, cosmic powers, spiritual forces of evil” language. Mandatory theologian review at every occurrence; must always be paired with Christ’s already-accomplished victory (1:20–22) and exclusively Scripture/prayer-based engagement.
• Critical: Household Codes (Eph 5:21–6:9), especially 복종하다 (submit) and 머리 (head) at 5:23. Korea’s historically rigorous Confucian patriarchal household structure and the rejected “three obediences” (삼종지도) doctrine risk absorbing Paul’s mutual-submission, self-sacrificial-headship teaching into an unqualified hierarchical-compliance reading unless 5:21 and 5:25–29 are always taught alongside 5:22–24.
• Critical: Grace/Works/Gift core passage (Eph 2:8–10). Korea’s self-critical 기복신앙 (fortune-seeking faith) tradition is the single most-cited internal risk in Korean Christian discourse; 선물 (gift) and 행위 vs. 선한 일 (works vs. good works) require mandatory sequential, non-transactional framing at every occurrence.
• Critical: Election/Predestination (Eph 1:4–5, 1:11) and 복 (blessing, 1:3). Both sit inside Korean’s fate/fortune-telling (팔자, 사주팔자) and blessing-seeking semantic fields respectively; front-loaded into the letter’s opening verses, meaning every reader encounters the highest-risk vocabulary within the first page.
• High: 기업 (inheritance) homograph with 企業 (“corporation”). A pure lexical-collision risk (not religious syncretism) requiring per-occurrence native-speaker disambiguation.

Opportunities

• Korean’s existing lexicon needs almost no new coinages. Unlike lower-resourced pipeline languages, nearly every Ephesians term already has an established, community-recognized KRV rendering; the translation task is disciplined reuse plus deliberate fencing, not invention.
• 아빠 (appa) for Abba and the Korean commercial/legal vocabulary for 보증 (guarantee) and 속량 (redemption, price-paid) are unusually well-fitting natural equivalents that can be leveraged pedagogically rather than merely defended against.
• Ephesians 4:30 and 5:18–20 are strong positive teaching resources, not just risk points: the Spirit’s grievability (a relational Person, not a channelable force) and Spirit-filling’s named fruit (song, thanksgiving, mutual submission) directly rebut the shamanistic impersonal-force/possession framings the baseline is most concerned about.
• Korea’s genuinely settled 언약/계약 distinction (covenant vs. commercial contract) — already a documented strength in the Romans baseline — continues to serve Ephesians’ covenant and inheritance vocabulary well.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (this package) together with the Romans baseline equivalents before any Phase 2 segment processing; treat the Ephesians files as elevating, never lowering, baseline risk tiers.
2. Route all 9 Critical and 16 High doctrines (25 of 27) to mandatory human theologian review with zero exceptions, per analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md’s extended escalation rules.
3. Enforce the four cross-book consistency locks without exception: 그리스도 안에서 (in Christ), 행하다 (walk), 머리 (head), and 비밀 (mystery) — each must render identically at every occurrence across all six chapters.
4. Apply mandatory paired-teaching units for the two highest-density collision clusters: (a) armor-of-God/spiritual-powers language always paired with Christ’s finished victory and Scripture/prayer-only engagement; (b) household-code submission language always paired across 5:21, 5:22–24, and 5:25–29 as a single unit.
5. Flag 기업 (inheritance) for native-speaker disambiguation against its modern homograph 企業 at every occurrence, per the linguistic gap analysis.
6. Carry forward all Romans baseline forbidden-substitution and honorific-grammar rules unchanged; add no exceptions for Ephesians.