Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 Linguistic Gap Analysis — 1 John (English → Mandarin)
0. Purpose and Scope
This document executes Phase 1 Step 8 (Linguistic Gap Analysis) for the 1 John curriculum, extending — never contradicting — the baseline Romans Language Package. It covers the entire letter, chapters 1–5, with the core passage (4:7-21, the love pericope) treated as the theological anchor rather than the scope boundary. Every chapter is reviewed explicitly below (§1) for its contribution to the vocabulary and doctrine-collision picture, in line with the full-book-coverage mandate.
The analysis identifies:
- A doctrine vocabulary matrix — for each of the eight curriculum doctrines, the available Mandarin terms, their weaknesses/collision risks, and the recommended handling strategy.
- Missing vocabulary (concepts with no ready-made Mandarin equivalent, requiring new coinage or compound construction) versus crowded semantic neighborhoods (concepts with an existing, well-worn Mandarin term that already carries strong, doctrinally incompatible associations from Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, or folk religion, requiring “fencing” — mandatory clarifying notes at every occurrence).
- Transliteration vs. paraphrase decisions for each new term surfaced by this letter.
- A ranked list of the letter’s highest-risk ambiguities, prioritized for theologian review routing in the forthcoming doctrine risk registry extension.
All Mandarin renderings proposed here match, and were subsequently promoted into, assets/bible_term_registry.json and analysis/08_core_glossary.md. No rendering below departs from the baseline Romans translation_memory.json where a term already exists there (神, 耶稣, 基督, 神的儿子, 父, 圣灵, 罪, 义, 信心, 团契).
1. Chapter-by-Chapter Coverage Note
| Chapter | Load-bearing contribution | Doctrine tie-in |
|---|---|---|
| 1 John 1 | 生命之道 (Word of life), 光/黑暗 (light/darkness), 团契 (fellowship), 罪/认罪/赦免/洗净/血 (sin/confess/forgive/cleanse/blood) | God is Light and God is Love; Fellowship; Confession and Forgiveness of Sin |
| 1 John 2 | 中保/挽回祭 (advocate/propitiation), 命令 (commandment), 世界/肉体的情欲/今生的骄傲 (world/lust/pride), 敌基督/末时 (antichrist/last hour), 恩膏 (anointing), 承认 (confess-Christ sense) | Confession and Forgiveness of Sin; Overcoming the World; Incarnation and Antichrist; Testing the Spirits |
| 1 John 3 | 从神生的/神的儿女/神的种 (born of God/children of God/seed of God), 义 (ethical-fruit sense), 恨/杀人的 (hate/murderer), 弟兄 (brother), 真理 (truth), 命令 | Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth; Confession and Forgiveness of Sin |
| 1 John 4 | Core passage 4:7-21: 爱 (agapē noun/verb), 显现/差遣 (manifested/sent), 独生的(儿子) (only-begotten), 救主 (Savior), 挽回祭 (propitiation reprise), 住 (abide), 完全/得以完全 (perfected), 坦然无惧 (confidence), 审判的日子/惧怕/刑罚 (day of judgment/fear/punishment); also 4:1-6: 试验/那些灵/真理的灵/谬妄的灵/假先知 (test the spirits) | God is Light and God is Love; Testing the Spirits; Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life |
| 1 John 5 | 信/信心 (faith), 胜/胜过/胜过世界 (overcome/overcome the world), 水和血 (water and blood), 见证 (testimony), 永生 (eternal life), 至于死的罪 (sin unto death), 那恶者 (the evil one), 偶像 (idols) | Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life; Overcoming the World; The Incarnation and Antichrist |
No chapter is without load-bearing content; all five are represented in the matrix and ranking below.
2. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Available Mandarin term(s) | Weaknesses / collision risk | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| God is Light and God is Love | 光 (guāng); 黑暗 (hēi’àn); 爱 (ài); 显现 (xiǎnxiàn) | 光: collides with Buddhist attainable inner illumination (悟/光明) and Daoist yin-yang balanced polarity, where light and dark are complementary cosmic forces, not moral opposites. 爱: flattens into romantic 爱情 or graded Confucian 仁 (rén, relational benevolence proportioned by social role). | Retain 光/黑暗/爱 (no viable substitute exists) but mandate a fixed clarifying gloss at every doctrinally load-bearing occurrence: light = absolute, unmixed moral purity self-disclosed by a personal God (not a balance-partner or an attainable state); love = God’s own prior, self-giving, unmerited character generating human love (not graded 仁 or romantic 爱情). |
| Fellowship with God and One Another | 团契 (tuánqì); 住 (zhù) | 团契 is a purpose-built Chinese Christian coinage with low ambiguity. 住 (menō/“abide”) is the greater risk: ordinary “reside,” but also Buddhist meditative “abiding” (安住) and the metaphysical-permanence term 常住 (chángzhù, also a monastery-property term). | Reuse 团契 without qualification (Low risk, established). Fence 住 at every mutual-indwelling occurrence (24+ times in the letter) with a note: personal, reciprocal, relational communion between God and believer, not a meditative or metaphysically-permanent state attained through practice. |
| Confession and Forgiveness of Sin | 认罪 (rènzuì); 赦免 (shèmiǎn); 洗净/洁净 (xǐjìng/jiéjìng); 血 (xuè); 挽回祭 (wǎnhuí jì); 中保 (zhōngbǎo) | No single existing term for “propitiation” or “advocate” carries full biblical freight; 赦免 risks collapse into psychological 放下 (“letting go”) or imperial 大赦 (state amnesty); 洗净 risks collapse into self-performed ritual purification (斋戒, 净身); 中保 in modern usage = a commercial/legal guarantor. | Missing-vocabulary items (挽回祭, 中保) require compound construction with mandatory fencing notes (see §3). Established items (认罪, 赦免, 洗净, 血) are retained but each requires a one-line distinguishing note against its nearest folk/secular neighbor. |
| Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth | 从神生的 (cóng Shén shēng de); 神的儿女 (Shén de érnǚ); 神的种 (Shén de zhǒng); 弟兄 (dìxiong) | 从神生的 must resist collapse into 轮回/投胎 (reincarnation/rebirth-cycle, already baseline-forbidden) and into ordinary biological birth into a family line (香火, 血脉延续). 弟兄 today functions mostly as a polite secular address for a male acquaintance, evacuating spiritual-family content unless anchored. | New compound coinages (从神生的, 神的种) required; must cross-reference the baseline’s 复活 guard against cyclical-rebirth vocabulary. 弟兄 retained but fenced against secular flattening and against biological-clan (宗族) or sworn-brotherhood (结拜) readings. |
| The Incarnation and Antichrist | 道成肉身 (dào chéng ròushēn, baseline); 生命之道 (shēngmìng zhī dào); 独生的(儿子) (dúshēng de érzi); 敌基督 (dí Jīdū); 水和血 (shuǐ hé xuè) | 生命之道 inherits the baseline’s 道/Dao-as-impersonal-cosmic-principle risk. 敌基督 risks assimilation into the crowded, negotiable folk-religious spirit-world (a generically hostile spirit among many, subject to ritual placation/exorcism) rather than a Christologically-defined denial-category. | Reuse baseline 道成肉身 guard verbatim for 生命之道. 敌基督 is Critical-tier and must always be introduced with the specific 2:22/4:3 definition (denial that Jesus is the Christ / has come in the flesh), never left as an undefined “evil spirit” label. |
| Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life | 永生 (yǒngshēng); 坦然无惧 (tǎnrán wújù); 审判的日子 (shěnpàn de rìzi); 救主 (jiùzhǔ); 完全/得以完全 (wánquán) | 永生 collides with Daoist longevity/immortality cultivation (长生不老, 成仙) and with Buddhist denial of a permanent self capable of personal eternal existence. 坦然无惧 and 审判的日子 both risk being read through the lens of an unsettled merit-ledger tribunal (功德, 阴间审判/阎王). 完全 must avoid the loaded Buddhist term 圆满 (consummate spiritual attainment). | All five terms require fencing notes anchoring assurance in a present, personal, relational, Christ-secured status — never an achieved outcome pending a posthumous accounting. |
| Overcoming the World | 世界 (shìjiè); 胜/胜过 (shèng/shèngguò); 胜过世界 (shèngguò shìjiè); 偶像 (ǒuxiàng) | 世界 is polyvalent within the letter itself (created order loved by God / opposed system / sphere overcome by faith) — a single gloss will mislead readers at some occurrences. 胜/胜过 risks collision with martial-arts/Daoist cultivated-power vocabulary (气, 法力, already baseline-forbidden). | 世界 requires per-occurrence context notes rather than a single fixed gloss. 胜/胜过 must always attribute victory to “he who is in you” (4:4), never to trained personal power; 偶像 pastoral scope must be extended explicitly to ancestor tablets and modern secular idols. |
| Testing the Spirits | 试验 (shìyàn); 那些灵 (nàxiē líng); 真理的灵/谬妄的灵 (zhēnlǐ de líng/miùwàng de líng); 恩膏 (ēngāo) | This doctrine contains the single most dangerous term-collision in the letter: 灵 alone is the baseline’s blanket-forbidden generic noun for ancestral/nature/folk spirits, yet 4:1-6 requires the Greek generic πνεῦμα to be rendered in Mandarin. 试验 risks collision with divinatory verification (占卜). | Documented, qualification-bound exception (see baseline cross-reference in bible_term_registry.json “spirits_generic”): every occurrence of the generic plural must carry an explicit Christological qualifying phrase, never bare 灵. 试验 must be glossed as doctrinal discernment against a fixed public confession, not intuitive/occult sensing. |
3. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
3.1 Missing Vocabulary (no ready Mandarin equivalent; new compound construction required)
These concepts have no pre-existing, doctrinally adequate single Mandarin term and require constructing a compound (already reflected in the term registry) with a mandatory explanatory note at first and every subsequent doctrinally-active occurrence:
| Concept | Constructed rendering | Construction logic | Note requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Propitiation (ἱλασμός) | 挽回祭 | Reuses the Romans 3:25 cognate rendering (挽回 “to turn back/reverse” + 祭 “offering/sacrifice”) | Must explicitly reverse the folk-ritual direction of appeasement: God supplies the offering himself; the worshipper performs no placating rite (献祭/化解/烧纸 all move the opposite direction). |
| Advocate (παράκλητος) | 中保 | Existing legal/commercial “intermediary/guarantor” compound repurposed | Must clarify Christ is not a hired third-party broker but the sinless Son himself pleading his own atoning work. |
| Born of God (γεννάω ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ) | 从神生的 | Literal “born from God” construction, deliberately avoiding any existing single-character verb that could suggest a cycle | Must explicitly deny any 轮回/投胎 reading and any biological-lineage (香火/血脉) reading. |
| Children of God (τέκνα θεοῦ) | 神的儿女 | Parallel-but-distinct construction from baseline’s 儿子的名分 (adoption/υἱοθεσία) | Must clarify this is a complementary birth-origin emphasis, not a lesser status than “sonship,” and must avoid 子孙/后代 lineage-continuation framing. |
| Seed of God (σπέρμα θεοῦ) | 神的种 | Literal “seed” retained, since English/Greek and Mandarin agree on the botanical root metaphor | Must be distinguished from 香火/血脉 clan-seed-line continuity language. |
| Only-begotten (μονογενής) | 独生的（儿子） | 独生 (“only-born,” reused from the modern 独生子女 one-child-policy vocabulary) + baseline 儿子 | Must clarify uniqueness of kind, not merely numerical singularity — guards against “one favored son among several” misreadings. |
| Sin unto death (ἁμαρτία πρὸς θάνατον) | 至于死的罪 | Literal, deliberately non-technical construction | Must resist over-specification into a mechanical-causal/karmic category; teach as a pastoral caution, not a fixed doctrine of unforgivable-sin categories. |
| Confess Jesus come in flesh (ὁμολογεῖ…ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα) | 承认耶稣基督是成了肉身来的 | Full explanatory clause rather than a compressed compound, given the doctrinal weight | Must align verbatim in force with baseline 道成肉身 Critical guard; this is the letter’s single decisive anti-docetic test statement. |
3.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (existing term, incompatible associations, fencing required)
These concepts already have an obvious, natural Mandarin word — the risk is not absence of vocabulary but the word’s occupancy by a competing, doctrinally incompatible framework. Each requires “fencing”: a mandatory clarifying note distinguishing the biblical sense from its dominant cultural neighbor, at every doctrinally load-bearing occurrence (not merely on first use).
| Term | Existing word | Competing occupant | Fencing requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spirits (generic) | 灵 | Ancestral spirits (祖灵), nature spirits, ghosts (鬼, 邪灵) invoked in ancestor-veneration ritual | NEVER bare 灵; always 那些灵 / 真理的灵 / 谬妄的灵 with an explicit Christological qualifier per occurrence — the sole documented exception to the baseline’s absolute 灵-prohibition. |
| Light / Darkness | 光 / 黑暗 | Buddhist attainable enlightenment (悟); Daoist yin-yang balanced cosmic polarity | Fence as an absolute moral/ontological claim about God’s unmixed purity, never a balance-partner pairing or a self-attainable inner state. |
| Love | 爱 | Confucian graded relational benevolence (仁); romantic 爱情; secular 爱 (patriotism, hobbies) | Fence every doctrinally load-bearing occurrence (esp. 4:7-21) as God’s self-giving, unmerited, prior love that generates human love — not graded reciprocal benevolence or romantic affection. |
| Abide | 住 | Buddhist meditative abiding (安住); metaphysical-permanence/monastery term 常住 | Fence as personal, reciprocal, relational indwelling communion, never a meditative-stillness or impersonal-permanence state. |
| Eternal life | 永生 | Daoist immortality-cultivation (长生不老, 成仙); Buddhist denial of a permanent self | Fence as present, personal, relational, knowable life given now through the Son — not extended lifespan via technique, nor incompatible with a “no-self” framework since it centers on relationship, not metaphysical self-persistence per se. |
| Righteousness (ethical-fruit sense) | 义 | Confucian Five Constant Virtue of 义 (yì), cultivated moral duty within relationships | Fence every occurrence (esp. 2:29; 3:7,10) as fruit flowing from a birth God accomplished (γεννάω), never self-achieved moral cultivation — direct extension of the baseline Critical guard. |
| Perfected | 完全 | Buddhist consummate spiritual attainment (圆满) | NEVER 圆满; fence 完全/得以完全 as a relational goal reached through God’s own indwelling work, continuous with baseline sanctification (成圣) guard. |
| Confidence/Boldness; Day of judgment | 坦然无惧; 审判的日子 | Merit-ledger anxiety (功德, 阴德); folk-Buddhist/Daoist underworld tribunal (阎王, 城隍, 阴间审判) | Fence both as a present, settled confidence and a judgment administered by one personal God on the basis of relationship to Christ — not an unresolved cosmic tally pending a posthumous court. |
| Forgive / Cleanse | 赦免 / 洗净·洁净 | Psychological “letting go” (放下); imperial amnesty (大赦); self-performed ritual purification (斋戒, 净身) | Fence as a judicial pardon and purification accomplished by God through Christ’s blood upon confession — not self-generated release, arbitrary clemency, or a rite the worshipper performs on themselves. |
| Ought (moral obligation) | 应当 | Confucian reciprocal-debt ethic (报, 报恩) | Fence 4:11’s ὀφείλομεν as a Spirit-produced grateful response to love already received, not a repayable debt that could balance a ledger or place God in a creditor’s position. |
| World | 世界 | (Internal collision, not cultural) — the letter itself uses κόσμος in three senses | Fence per-occurrence: created order loved by God (4:9,14) vs. opposed system (2:15-17) vs. sphere overcome by faith (5:4-5); a single uniform gloss will actively mislead. |
| Brother | 弟兄 | Contemporary secular polite address for any male acquaintance; biological clan-kinship (宗族); sworn-brotherhood ritual (结拜, already baseline-rejected) | Fence as spiritual family in Christ specifically, at every occurrence in the love-command passages (3:14-17; 4:20-21). |
| Manifested | 显现/显明 | Folk/Buddhist deity “manifestation” (顯靈) in temple visionary contexts | Fence as a definite, historical, once-for-all event centered on the incarnate Son, not a recurring spiritual apparition. |
| Test (the spirits) | 试验 | Divinatory verification (占卜) | Fence as doctrinal discernment against the fixed public Christological confession of 4:2-3, not intuitive/occult spiritual detection. |
| Overcome / Overcome the world | 胜/胜过; 胜过世界 | Martial-arts/Daoist cultivated internal power (气, 法力, baseline-forbidden); Buddhist renunciation/escape (出世, 超脱) | Fence as victory credited to God’s indwelling presence achieved through faith while remaining engaged in the world — not trained personal power, nor withdrawal from worldly existence. |
| Sin | 罪 | Karmic retribution (报应, already baseline-flagged) | Reinforce baseline note across the letter’s repeated confession-as-ongoing-pattern teaching (1:8-10). |
4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Item | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Proper names (Jesus, Christ, Paul-adjacent NT figures) | Transliterate using established CUV forms (耶稣, 基督) | Baseline consistency rule; no paraphrase risk. |
| Antichrist (ἀντίχριστος) | Hybrid: retain 基督 transliteration, prefix with native 敌 (“enemy/opposing”) rather than transliterating “anti-” phonetically | A phonetic transliteration of the Greek prefix would produce an opaque, unmemorable neologism; 敌基督 is already the settled Chinese Christian convention and is semantically transparent (opposed-to-Christ), which better serves the doctrine’s Christological-denial definition than a phonetic loan. |
| Abba (if retained from Romans cross-reference material) | Transliterate (阿爸), per baseline | Not directly present in 1 John’s Greek text but relevant if teaching materials cross-reference Romans 8:15; baseline transliteration retained for consistency. |
| Word of life (λόγος τῆς ζωῆς) | Paraphrase/compound, not transliteration | 道 already exists as the settled (if risk-flagged) Chinese Christian rendering of λόγος via 道成肉身; compounding with 生命 (life) is preferable to any transliterated loan, which would be unintelligible to the target reading level. |
| Propitiation (ἱλασμός) | Paraphrase/compound (挽回祭) | No transliteration tradition exists for this term in Chinese Bible history; a phonetic loan would be theologically opaque. Compound construction reusing the Romans 3:25 cognate is required for cross-document consistency. |
| Advocate (παράκλητος) | Paraphrase (中保), not transliteration, not a new coinage | 中保 is already the settled CUV rendering; introducing a novel term would break consistency with existing Chinese Bible tradition without proportionate benefit — the risk lies in under-explanation, not in the term choice itself. |
| Anointing (χρίσμα) | Paraphrase (恩膏), an existing Chinese Christian coinage | Reject transliteration (would be unintelligible) and reject literal “oil” translation (油, too concrete/ritual-sounding); 恩膏 already carries the “grace-unction” sense in Chinese charismatic/evangelical usage and requires only a fencing note, not reconstruction. |
| Eternal life (ζωὴ αἰώνιος) | Reuse existing compound (永生), fenced rather than replaced | A functioning, universally recognized CUV term already exists; the correct linguistic-gap response is a mandatory clarifying note, not a new coinage, since any invented alternative would fail to achieve recognition among Chinese Bible readers. |
| Only-begotten (μονογενής) | Paraphrase (独生的), not transliteration | Draws on existing modern vocabulary (独生子女) for immediate intelligibility at the target reading level, while requiring a fencing note to correct the “only child” (numerical) connotation toward “unique in kind.” |
| Water and blood (ὕδωρ καὶ αἷμα) | Literal paraphrase (水和血), no transliteration, no substitution with a ritual-purification idiom | A literal rendering best preserves the historical-testimonial (not symbolic-ritual) function of the phrase; substituting an existing Chinese ritual-purification idiom would import unwanted associations. |
General rule derived from this section: transliteration is reserved for proper names and a small class of established liturgical loanwords (阿们, 哈利路亚) already fixed by the baseline; every new theological concept in 1 John is better served by a semantically transparent Mandarin compound (paraphrase/construction) than by a phonetic loan, because the target reading level (general-audience, low OT/NT background literacy) cannot be expected to absorb new phonetic loanwords without an intelligibility cost that a transparent compound avoids.
5. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity of doctrinal consequence and likelihood of collision, given this letter’s dense concentration of Critical-tier Christological and pneumatological material within a short text.
-
Generic “spirits” (πνεῦμα/πνεύματα) at 4:1-6 — the single highest-risk item in the letter. The baseline’s otherwise-absolute prohibition on unqualified 灵 must be broken by the biblical text’s own generic usage, creating the letter’s only documented exception to a Critical-tier baseline rule. Every occurrence must carry an explicit Christological qualifying phrase (那出于神的灵 / 那不出于神的灵); the risk of readers interpreting this as license to engage the ambient folk spirit-world (祖灵, 邪灵) via general spiritual sensing rather than the one Christological test given (4:2-3) is severe and immediate.
-
Confess Jesus come in the flesh (4:2-3; 5:6-8, water and blood) — the letter’s doctrinal center of gravity. This is a direct extension of the baseline’s Critical Incarnation guard against 化身/下凡/转世, but here the stakes are sharper because the text makes this confession the sole diagnostic separating the Spirit of God from every deceiving spirit. Any softening toward a docetic-compatible rendering (a temporary or non-substantial “appearance”) would collapse the letter’s central polemic.
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Antichrist (2:18-22; 4:3) — risk of folk-religious assimilation. Because Chinese folk religion operates with a crowded, negotiable spirit-world in which hostile supernatural figures are managed through ritual technique (exorcism, placation), 敌基督 risks being read as one more manageable hostile spirit rather than a strictly Christological denial-category. Requires the doctrine to be taught by definition (denial that Jesus is the Christ / has come in the flesh), not by generic malevolence.
-
Born of God / Children of God / Seed of God (2:29-3:10; 4:7; 5:1-4,18) — cluster risk. Three related new-birth terms (从神生的, 神的儿女, 神的种) must simultaneously avoid (a) the baseline’s forbidden reincarnation/rebirth-cycle vocabulary, (b) biological clan-lineage framing (香火/血脉/子孙), and (c) unintended status-hierarchy implications relative to the baseline’s Romans “adoption” (儿子的名分) term. The cluster’s internal consistency is itself a risk: inconsistent handling across the three related terms would confuse readers moving between this letter and Romans.
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Love (ἀγάπη/ἀγαπάω) throughout the core passage (4:7-21). Precisely because 爱 is the most common, most “obviously correct” word in the entire glossary, it is also the most likely to be taught without any fencing at all — every occurrence risks silent collapse into Confucian graded benevolence (仁) or romantic 爱情 unless the curriculum materials repeatedly and explicitly anchor it to God’s own prior, unmerited, self-giving initiative (4:10,19). High frequency plus low perceived risk (because the word feels transparent) is itself the danger.
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Eternal life (5:11-13,20) vs. Assurance cluster (坦然无惧, 审判的日子, 惧怕, 刑罚). These four terms cluster around the letter’s closing assurance argument and collectively risk being absorbed into a single competing framework: the merit-ledger/karmic-tribunal worldview (功德, 报应, 阎王/城隍, 阴间审判). Any one term left unfenced will tend to pull its neighbors back toward that framework by contextual association, even if each is individually rendered correctly.
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Abide (μένω, 24+ occurrences across the letter, dense in 4:12-16). The sheer frequency of this term means a single unfenced occurrence could establish a Buddhist-meditative-abiding (安住) reading in a reader’s mind that then colors every subsequent occurrence. Volume itself elevates this from a Medium-lexical-risk term to a High-cumulative-risk term.
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World (κόσμος) — internal polyvalence risk, not cultural collision. Unlike the other items on this list, the danger here is not a competing Chinese religious framework but the letter’s own use of a single Mandarin word (世界) across three theologically distinct senses (4:9,14 positive; 2:15-17 negative; 5:4-5 contested-and-overcome). A teaching sequence that does not flag the shift at each turn risks readers assuming a single fixed valence and missing the argument’s structure.
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Ought (ὀφείλω, 4:11) — narrow but doctrinally consequential. A single verse, but it sits at the rhetorical hinge of the core passage (“since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another”); a reciprocal-debt (报恩) misreading here would quietly convert the entire love-command into a repayment obligation, undermining the passage’s grace-logic at its most pastorally quoted verse.
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Advocate / Propitiation (2:1-2; 4:10) — lower frequency, but Critical/High doctrinal weight. Ranked lower only because these terms occur less frequently than items 1-9 above, not because the doctrinal stakes are smaller; both require sustained fencing (see §3.1) and both feed directly into the Confession and Forgiveness of Sin doctrine’s Critical-tier status.
6. Downstream Handoff
This analysis directly informs:
analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md(term-by-term semantic domain mapping)analysis/08_core_glossary.md(already produced; all renderings above are consistent with, and were sourced by, that glossary)- The forthcoming extension of
translation_memory.jsonanddoctrine_risk_registry.jsonfor the 1 John curriculum (Phase 1 Steps 2-4), which must incorporate the fencing requirements in §3.2 as mandatory per-occurrence translator notes, not merely first-use footnotes.
No recommendation in this document contradicts any entry in the baseline Romans Language Package. All baseline renderings (神, 耶稣, 基督, 神的儿子, 父, 圣灵, 罪, 义, 信心, 团契, 道成肉身, 复活, 神的大能) are reused exactly as fixed.