Executive Summary: Mark 1–16 Translation Requirements (English → Korean)

Why it matters

Korean is the best-positioned language in this pipeline for a Mark curriculum: over a century of indigenous, settled Bible-translation vocabulary (개역개정) means most doctrinal terms already exist and are community-recognized. But Mark’s narrative texture — dense with exorcism, healing, and a single sharply substitutionary atonement saying (10:45) — pushes on Korean-specific pressure points that Romans’ more expository register never tested: an actively practiced, not merely historical, shamanistic spirit-world (무속신앙), Korea’s hierarchy-saturated social ethics, and the still-current 기복신앙 (“fortune-seeking faith”) critique Korean church leaders themselves apply to grace language. The core passage (Mark 10:35-45) sits at the exact intersection of the highest-stakes risks: the ransom saying is this curriculum’s single most theologically load-bearing sentence.

Key findings

• 60 terms are now enforced in translation_memory.json (Mark version): 26 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 34 newly introduced by this curriculum.
• 44 of those 60 terms (73%) carry Critical or High doctrine risk requiring mandatory human theologian review on every occurrence — 17 Critical, 27 High.
• 28 distinct doctrines are tracked in doctrine_risk_registry.json (Mark): 9 Critical, 11 High, 7 Medium, 1 Low — 20 of 28 doctrines (71%) require human theologian review; 7 require native speaker review; only 1 is automated-only.
• Two genuinely new categories of translation ambiguity not present in Romans: (1) σῴζω’s dual healing/salvation sense (34 occurrences across healing and salvific contexts), and (2) the 권세 (authority)/능력 (power) distinction, both requiring case-by-case judgment rather than a fixed substitution rule.
• The core passage alone touches four Critical-risk doctrines simultaneously: The Ransom for Many, The Necessity of the Cross, Servanthood versus Worldly Greatness, and Jesus as the Suffering Servant and Son of God.

Risks

• Ransom/substitution language (10:45; 14:24) sliding into a transactional exchange. 대속물 (ransom) and 대신하여 (in place of) are one preposition-choice away from collapsing penal substitution into either a commercial payment (몸값) or a repeatable cultic offering (제물) resembling a shamanistic gut-ritual or Confucian jesa ancestor-offering — the same 기복신앙 risk the baseline already flags as central for “grace,” now applied directly to the atonement itself.
• Exorcism narratives (7+ major pericopes) colliding with a live folk-religious system. Unlike Confucian and Buddhist collision points, which are comparatively settled cultural memory, Korean shamanism remains an actively practiced tradition; 귀신 (unclean spirit) must never be framed as negotiable or placatable, and must never be conflated with venerated ancestor-spirits (조상신).
• Servanthood language domesticated by Korean church culture itself. The increasingly common phrase 섬김의 리더십 (“servant leadership”) risks softening Mark 10:42-45’s radical status-reversal into a management technique rather than Christ’s own total self-giving pattern.
• Divine necessity (반드시, δεῖ) drifting toward fatalism. Applied to Christ’s own death (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34), this is a higher-stakes application of the baseline’s existing 팔자/운명 caution than anything tested in Romans.
• The Son of Man title (인자) losing its Daniel 7 force if paraphrased as generic “a human being,” collapsing the Messianic Secret’s central paradox of veiled humility and hidden divine authority.

Opportunities

• Korean’s existing clean 언약/계약 (covenant/contract) distinction — already an asset in the Romans baseline — extends cleanly to the new “blood of the covenant” compound (언약의 피, 14:24) with no additional lexical repair needed.
• 아빠 (Abba) remains an unusually close semantic and phonetic near-cognate, now doing double duty at Gethsemane (14:36) alongside the “cup” metaphor, reinforcing intimacy precisely at the point of the passage’s highest cost.
• Korea’s high existing Christian literacy means less foundational biblical-literacy scaffolding is needed than elsewhere in this pipeline; effort can concentrate on the surgical defense of specific terms (ransom, authority, Son of Man, necessity) rather than building vocabulary from scratch.
• The σῴζω dual-sense challenge, while new, is containable: Korean already has two adequate, distinct, established words (구원, 낫다) — the task is disciplined judgment, not vocabulary invention.

Recommended actions

1. Route Mark 10:35-45 as a single non-splittable review unit in Phase 2 batch processing, given its four-doctrine Critical-risk density (per 12_ai_translation_requirements.md Doctrinal Preservation Rule 10).
2. Enforce the Mark-specific forbidden-substitution list (제물/몸값, 위하여, 사람의 아들, 신비, 조상신-conflation, 섬김의 리더십-domestication, 전통, mechanical σῴζω rendering) with the same absolute priority already given to Grace/Salvation/Power-of-God in the Romans baseline.
3. Require per-occurrence documented judgment (not a fixed rule) for every σῴζω occurrence and every 권세/능력 pairing, logged in the segment cache for Step 17 review.
4. Track the three cross-book structural motifs — the 1:1/1:11/15:39 Sonship inclusio, the threefold Passion-prediction cycle, and the fear/faith pairing — as single consistency units across all lessons, not resolved independently per chapter.
5. Brief all assigned theologian reviewers specifically on Korea’s active shamanistic practice (not merely historical Confucian/Buddhist background) before reviewing any exorcism or unclean-spirit segment, since this is the single most operationally significant syncretism risk in the entire curriculum.