Executive Summary: 3 John → Maithili Language Package

Why it matters

3 John is the New Testament’s shortest book, and its 14 verses are being translated into Maithili — a language with the thinnest settled Christian translation precedent in this entire pipeline (one full published New Testament, from 2010). Unlike Romans, this letter’s theological load sits almost entirely in ordinary vocabulary — truth, love, brother, deed, seeing God — which makes it easy to under-translate: reviewers can miss doctrinal risk precisely because the words look simple. Getting hospitality, church-leadership pride, and truth-grounded fellowship right here sets first-instance precedent for how these very common words will read across the rest of this Maithili curriculum library.

Key findings

• 13 distinct doctrines were identified across the letter’s single chapter, all directly textually grounded (no doctrine imported from outside 3 John itself).
• 2 Critical-risk and 9 High-risk doctrines (11 of 13) require mandatory human theologian review — a notably high proportion for such a short book, driven by how densely this letter’s ordinary vocabulary collides with Mithila’s dominant devotional and social vocabulary.
• The translation memory extension for this curriculum adds 42 new terms (plus 3 transliterated proper names) to the 5 baseline Romans terms reused unchanged (परमेश्वर, मण्डली, शान्ति, अन्यजाति, विश्वास) — of the new terms, 2 are Critical-risk and 14 are High-risk, joining the baseline’s 1 inherited Critical term (God) and 1 inherited High term (Faith) relevant to this book.
• Six terms (सत्य, प्रेम, भाइ, नाम, प्रधानता चाहब, काज) require a non-optional translator note at every occurrence, not just first occurrence — a stricter standard than the baseline Romans package applied, justified by this short letter’s unusually dense concentration of high-collision vocabulary in so few verses.

Risks

• Diotrephes’ “love of preeminence” (φιλοπρωτεύω, 1:9) may simply not register as sin. Maithili has no single native word naming self-exalting ambition as a culpable vice, and ordinary Mithila social life legitimately marks caste rank, Panjikaran-verified lineage standing, and household hierarchy — a flat rendering risks reading as unremarkable status-consciousness rather than the letter’s unmistakable apostolic condemnation.
• “The Name” (τὸ ὄνομα, 1:7) risks collapsing into nām-japa, the regionally central devotional practice of ritual name-chanting (especially Ram-nām), rather than being read as shorthand for gospel mission under Christ’s authority.
• “Has not seen God” (1:11) risks collapsing into darśan, the central Mithila temple-worship practice of ritually viewing (and being seen by) a deity’s image — the opposite of the verse’s actual claim that habitual evil conduct proves the absence of relational knowledge of God.
• सत्य (truth) and प्रेम (love) carry the heaviest pre-existing regional weight of any new terms in this curriculum — सत्य via Satya Yuga and Vedantic Sat-Chit-Ananda cosmology, प्रेम via Vidyapati’s devotional poetry and Radha-Krishna bhakti romantic-mystical tradition — and both recur across nearly the whole letter, multiplying the risk surface.
• “Cast out” (1:10) and “brothers” (1:3, 5, 10) both risk resonance with real, consequential Panjikaran-linked social practices (community expulsion; caste-brotherhood) that run precisely counter to the letter’s intended meaning.
• काज vs. कर्म (1:10, “deeds”) is a single easily-missed lexical substitution that would silently reframe Diotrephes’ sin into a karma-doctrine cause-and-effect frame rather than the letter’s actual church-discipline confrontation.

Opportunities

• 3 John’s hospitality command (1:5-8) can draw constructively on the regionally resonant proverb अतिथि देवो भव (“the guest is as a god”) as a bridge illustration in teaching material — provided it is explicitly reframed away from ritual guest-veneration toward covenantal reception of unverified fellow believers as family, for Christ’s sake.
• The letter’s Diotrephes/Demetrius contrast (1:9-10 vs. 1:12) offers a built-in, structurally clear teaching device for distinguishing culpable status-seeking pride from Scripture-commended imitation of gospel character — useful precisely because the text itself, not just the translator’s note, does most of the doctrinal work here.
• Because this is the shortest book in the pipeline, it is a low-cost, high-leverage opportunity to pilot the stricter “every-occurrence footnote” standard (rather than first-occurrence-only) before applying it to longer, higher-volume books in the wider Maithili curriculum library.

Recommended actions

1. Adopt assets/translation_memory.json (this curriculum’s extension) and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (extension) as mandatory Phase 2 pre-flight loads alongside the unmodified baseline Romans package.
2. Route all segments touching the 2 Critical terms (नाम, प्रधानता चाहब) and the letter’s 9 High-risk doctrines to mandatory human theologian review before approval; do not permit native-speaker-only sign-off for these.
3. Add काज (never कर्म) and प्राण (never आत्मा) to the curriculum’s Critical Forbidden Substitutions list effective immediately, extending the baseline Romans forbidden-term list.
4. Require the six mandatory-every-occurrence footnote terms (सत्य, प्रेम, भाइ, नाम, प्रधानता चाहब, काज) to pass a dedicated post-translation term scan before any document in this curriculum is marked complete.
5. Carry the अतिथि देवो भव bridge-illustration guidance and the Diotrephes/Demetrius structural-pairing requirement into Phase 2 teaching-note templates, not just the raw translated text.