Executive Summary: Ephesians Language Package for Maithili

Why it matters

Ephesians is being added to a Maithili Bible-translation pipeline that already has a working, tested foundation from Romans — but Ephesians is not simply “more Romans vocabulary.” It introduces four substantial new doctrinal-risk clusters (predestination, mystery, spiritual warfare, and household codes) that collide with living Mithila religious and social practice in ways Romans never tested: Tantric-esoteric secrecy tradition, Ojha exorcism and bhoot-pret folk belief, fatalistic everyday idiom, and strongly patriarchal household custom. Getting this package right the first time matters because, as with Romans, there is no settled Maithili Christian precedent to fall back on — every choice here becomes precedent for future curricula in this language.

Key findings

• Core passage (Eph 2:1-10) carries the curriculum’s single highest-stakes clause: the grace/faith/not-of-works/no-boasting formula in 2:8-9 must be held to the same verbatim cross-document consistency standard the Romans baseline already applies to Romans 1:16-17 and 10:9-10.
• काज replaces कर्म for “works” in the grace/works contrast — a deliberate, load-bearing departure from the more “natural” Sanskrit-shared word, because कर्म is inseparable from the karma-causality/rebirth worldview this doctrine must exclude.
• Ephesians’ vocabulary gap is deeper than Romans’ in one specific place: μυστήριον (“mystery”) has no clean pre-existing Maithili home at all — the nearest natural word (रहस्य) means the theological opposite of what Paul means, requiring a coined term (भेद) with mandatory disambiguating notes at all 6 occurrences.
• Spiritual warfare (ch. 6) is an entirely new doctrine cluster for this language pair, with no Romans-baseline precedent, directly engaging Mithila’s still-living Ojha exorcism practice and epic divine-weapon imagery (अस्त्र, कवच) — both must be avoided or carefully fenced.
• Household codes introduce a discourse-level risk, not just a word-level one: Ephesians 5:21’s mutual submission can be lexically correct yet still be read through the region’s default one-directional household-duty grammar unless reviewers are specifically trained to check for it across verse boundaries.
• The single most culturally sensitive verse in the entire package is Ephesians 5:3-5 (covetousness equated with “idolatry,” εἰδωλολατρία), because it uses vocabulary that literally names the majority Hindu culture’s own reverent devotional practice (मूर्तिपूजा); this requires the highest level of mandatory translator annotation in the whole curriculum.

Risks

• Doctrine-level: of 36 total doctrine entries spanning Ephesians 1-6, 13 are Critical risk and 16 are High risk — 29 doctrines (81%) require mandatory human theologian review; a further 7 require native speaker review. Zero doctrines are automated-review-only. This is a heavier Critical/High load than the Romans baseline (7 Critical / 23 High out of 40 doctrines there), driven specifically by the four new risk clusters named above.
• Term-level: the Ephesians translation_memory.json now contains 121 enforced entries — 39 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline plus 82 new Ephesians-specific terms. Of these 121, 20 are Critical risk and 48 are High risk — 68 terms (56%) require mandatory theologian review at every occurrence, a substantially higher proportion than Romans carried alone.
• Reviewer fatigue risk: several terms (भेद/mystery, आयु-paraphrase/age, स्वर्गीय स्थान/heavenly places) require a disambiguating note at every occurrence rather than just the first — a workflow pattern with real risk of notes being dropped during batch Phase 2 processing if tooling does not treat “note present” as a hard validation gate.
• The controlled शक्ति exception (permitted only as a plain plural noun inside the rulers/authorities/powers cluster) is a deliberately narrow carve-out from an otherwise absolute baseline prohibition; without clear reviewer briefing, this is likely to generate false-positive rejections or, worse, be misread as license to use शक्ति more broadly.

Opportunities

• Ephesians’ heavy reuse of Romans-baseline vocabulary (grace, faith, salvation, righteousness, Holy Spirit, saints, church, power of God) means roughly a third of the curriculum’s theological load-bearing terms require zero new decision-making — straightforward enforcement of already-vetted, already-defensible choices.
• The Romans baseline’s proven pattern of building full descriptive clauses rather than forcing inadequate single-word compressions (e.g. धर्मी घोषित कएल जाएब for “justification”) transfers directly to Ephesians’ hardest new terms (predestined, dividing wall, one new man, armor of God), giving translators a tested methodology rather than a blank page.
• Ephesians’ sustained “one…one…one” unity language (4:4-6) and its direct challenge to caste/lineage hierarchy (2:11-22) give this curriculum unusually strong potential to speak with clarity and pastoral relevance into Mithila’s live Panjikaran-conscious social structure — a genuine opportunity for the gospel’s social implications to land with force, provided the “dividing wall” and “one new man” language is not softened.
• Because no competing Maithili Christian translation tradition has yet settled this vocabulary, this package’s disciplined, well-annotated choices (especially भेद, पहिनहिं ठहराओल जाएब, and the मालिक/प्रभु split) have a real chance of becoming the enduring standard for future Maithili Christian literature, not just this curriculum.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 29 Critical/High doctrines and all 68 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review before Phase 2 release, with Ephesians 2:8-10, 5:3-5, and 6:10-12 treated as the three highest-priority individual passages for sign-off.
2. Build a hard validation gate in Phase 2 tooling requiring “disambiguating note present” for भेद, आयु/age, and स्वर्गीय स्थान at every occurrence, not just first occurrence, given the proven reviewer-fatigue risk identified in the linguistic gap analysis.
3. Brief every reviewer explicitly on the single controlled शक्ति exception before batch processing begins, to prevent both false-positive rejections and inadvertent overuse.
4. Treat Ephesians 5:21-33 as a discourse-level review unit, not a segment-by-segment one, specifically checking that mutual submission’s reciprocal force survives intact through the wife-specific instructions that follow it.
5. Carry the Romans baseline’s exact grace/works and salvation/righteousness terms forward without re-litigation — these are settled; reviewer time is better spent on the 82 genuinely new Ephesians terms than re-checking inherited ones.
6. Confirm the प्रभु/मालिक split with an automated string-check across Ephesians 6:1-9 in addition to human review, given the high density of “lord/master” vocabulary in a short span.