Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 Linguistic Gap Analysis — 1 Thessalonians (English → Mandarin)
1. Purpose and Scope
This analysis identifies where existing Mandarin theological vocabulary (as fixed by the Romans baseline translation_memory.json) is sufficient for 1 Thessalonians, where it is insufficient and requires new terms, and where the destination language’s existing semantic neighborhoods create collision risk that must be actively fenced off in teaching material and translator notes. It covers all five chapters of 1 Thessalonians and gives special theological weight to the core passage (4:13–18) and the curriculum’s five named doctrines: The Return of Christ, Resurrection of Believers, Sanctification, Hope in Grief, The Day of the Lord.
This document does not re-derive term choices already settled in analysis/08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json; it analyzes why those choices were necessary — the structural gaps and crowded-neighborhood risks that drove them — and ranks the resulting ambiguities for Phase 2 attention. It extends, and never contradicts, the Romans baseline.
2. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the five curriculum doctrines: the Mandarin terms available, the specific weaknesses of the existing lexical stock, and the recommended mitigation strategy.
2.1 The Return of Christ
| Available Mandarin terms | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 降临 (jiànglín) — new coinage for parousia | No single existing Christian-tradition Mandarin word denotes “a person’s official, royal, visible arrival” the way Greek parousia does; 降临 is a general verb meaning “to descend/arrive” used broadly (e.g., 圣诞节降临, “Christmas arrives”) and does not by itself exclude repeatable-descent readings | Always pair 降临 with a modifier anchoring it to Christ’s unique, future, bodily, visible return (e.g., 主耶稣的再来/降临); never let it stand as a bare verb without the doctrinal anchor. Footnote required on first occurrence per chapter (2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23). |
| 再来 (zàilái, “to come again”) | Neutral, non-technical; useful as a plain-language gloss alongside 降临 but by itself lacks the royal/official register of parousia | Use 再来 as the accessible teaching gloss; use 降临 as the more formal, CUV-register term. Both may appear together in study notes: “主的降临（再来）”. |
| 迎见主 (apantēsis) | Correctly captures the royal-welcome-procession sense of 4:17, but risks being read as a one-time ceremonial phrase disconnected from the larger 降临 theme unless explicitly cross-referenced | Teach 迎见主 and 降临 as two halves of one scene: Christ descends (降临), the church rises to welcome him (迎见主) |
| Gap | No existing Mandarin Christian vocabulary distinguishes “the Second Coming” from the folk-Buddhist expectation of Maitreya’s first future coming (弥勒下生/弥勒降世) — both are, on the surface, “a promised future divine arrival that has not yet happened” | Every occurrence of 降临 in this curriculum requires an explicit theologian-reviewed note: Christ has already come once (道成肉身, fulfilled), and this is his return, not an inaugural appearance of a still-unmet savior figure. This distinguishes Christian linear eschatology from millenarian folk expectation. |
2.2 Resurrection of Believers
| Available Mandarin terms | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 复活 (fùhuó) — Reused, Critical, from Romans baseline | Sufficient and already fenced against 轮回/投胎/还魂 in the baseline. However, 1 Thessalonians extends this term from Christ’s resurrection (established in Romans) to believers’ future resurrection (4:14,16) — a novel application requiring reinforcement, not a novel term | Reaffirm the baseline fencing at every 4:13-18 occurrence; add note that believers’ future resurrection is patterned on, and guaranteed by, Christ’s own past resurrection (4:14, “even so”) |
| 睡了(的人) (koimaomai) — New, Medium | 睡 alone is a completely ordinary word for physical sleep; without contextual signaling it under-communicates that this is a euphemism specifically for death of the body awaiting resurrection, not unconsciousness generally, and not a claim about the intermediate state of the soul | Always render with the fuller phrase 睡了的人 (“those who have fallen asleep”) rather than a bare verb, and pair with a note that this describes the body, with the person’s ongoing standing “in Christ” unaffected (see 4.16 term below) |
| 在基督里死了的人 — New, High | Long descriptive phrase rather than a single lexical item; risk of translators shortening it to a bare “死了的人” (the dead), losing the “in Christ” qualifier that is the doctrinal point | Never truncate; the full phrase must appear intact at every occurrence in 4:16 and any cross-reference |
| Gap | No existing Mandarin term captures “resurrection order” (the dead rising first, then the living being caught up) as a single technical phrase — this must be conveyed through sentence-level sequencing (先…然后…) rather than a lexical item | Handle at the sentence-construction level in Phase 2; flag 4:16-17’s temporal sequencing (πρῶτον, “first”) for native-speaker review to ensure 先 is not lost in translation |
2.3 Sanctification
| Available Mandarin terms | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 成圣 (chéngshèng) — Reused, Critical | Already flagged in the Romans baseline as a direct borrowing of the Neo-Confucian self-cultivation-into-sagehood term. 1 Thessalonians intensifies this risk because it defines sanctification concretely in terms of sexual ethics (4:3-8) — a domain where “self-discipline achieves moral improvement” is culturally intuitive and could reinforce, rather than correct, a self-effort reading | Every 4:3-8 occurrence requires the standing theologian note (Spirit’s work in an already-called believer, not self-perfection) PLUS an additional note specific to this passage: the concrete behavior commanded (self-control, 4:4) is the fruit of Spirit-sanctification, not the method by which a person sanctifies themselves through discipline |
| 灵、魂、身子 (5:23) — New, Critical | The single highest-density collision zone in the letter: 灵 must be disambiguated from 圣灵 (Holy Spirit, Critical baseline term) at every occurrence since bare 灵 is forbidden by the baseline for exactly this reason; 魂 collides with the hún-pò folk dual-soul anthropology underlying ancestor ritual (招魂/安魂) | Mandatory theologian-reviewed footnote at 5:23 distinguishing (a) 灵 = the human spirit, not 圣灵; (b) 魂 = one integrated component of the single person kept blameless by God, not a ritually-manageable wandering soul. This is the single highest-priority footnote requirement in the whole letter. |
| 圣洁 (holy) — Reused, High | Sufficient; already fenced against 清净 in the baseline | No new mitigation required beyond baseline; reinforce the 3:13 link between holiness and the parousia (Christ’s coming establishes hearts blameless in holiness) |
| 不要消灭圣灵的感动 (5:19) — New, High | Preserves CUV’s “的感动” addition, but a careless paraphrase could drop this qualifier and produce “不要消灭圣灵” — a sentence that (a) is theologically incoherent (a divine Person cannot be extinguished) and (b) invites an impersonal-force/气-like reading of the Spirit | Validation rule: any Phase 2 output of 5:19 lacking “的感动” must be auto-flagged and rejected before submission |
2.4 Hope in Grief
| Available Mandarin terms | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 盼望 (pànwàng) — New, High | Mandarin has two words in this semantic space: 盼望 (confident, settled expectation) and 希望 (hope-so, uncertain wish). Modern colloquial usage sometimes blurs this distinction, especially among younger/secular-leaning readers, risking 4:13’s contrast (“hope” vs. “no hope”) collapsing into a merely optimistic-vs-pessimistic mood distinction rather than a certainty-vs-uncertainty theological claim | Consistently use 盼望, never 希望, for this doctrine; a translator note on first occurrence (1:3) should explicitly state the certainty distinction, since this is the term’s load-bearing function throughout the letter |
| 忧伤 (grief) — New, Medium | Risk of over-correction in application: teachers/readers may infer from 4:13’s “do not grieve like those without hope” that grief itself is forbidden to a person with genuine hope, producing either denial of real sorrow or false guilt for feeling sorrow | Preserve the contrastive grammatical structure exactly (不要…像那没有指望的人一样忧伤 = “do not… grieve like those without hope” — grief is qualified, not negated); flag for native-speaker review to confirm the contrastive clause is not simplified into an absolute prohibition |
| 劝慰 vs 劝勉 (parakaleō, comfort vs. exhort senses) — New, Medium, contextual-variant pair | Both renderings translate the same Greek verb (παρακαλέω), and 1 Thessalonians uses it in both senses within a few verses of each other (4:18 comfort; 4:1,10; 5:14 exhort) — the single largest same-word/different-sense disambiguation burden in the letter | Translation memory must record BOTH renderings under one Greek headword with explicit per-occurrence disambiguation guidance (see baseline entries exhort and exhort_comfort); Phase 2 workers must select 劝慰 specifically at 4:18, 5:11, and the comfort-sense clause of 5:14, and 劝勉 at 4:1, 4:10, and the admonish-sense clause of 5:14 |
| 我们就要和主永远同在 (4:17b) — New, High | The doctrinal capstone of the whole passage; risk is not a false-friend collision but softening — a fluent Mandarin stylist might be tempted to compress or qualify “forever” (永远) for rhythm, producing an unintentionally conditional-sounding promise | Lock this exact rendering as verbatim-required (see baseline’s Theological Consistency Rules on Romans 8:28-style pastoral verses); no paraphrase permitted |
| Gap | No existing Mandarin Christian phrase corresponds to a “grief with hope” register distinct from either (a) stoic/Buddhist non-attachment teaching that discourages strong grief altogether, or (b) unrestrained folk mourning ritual (formal wailing, extended ritual mourning periods) that assumes no larger hope framework | This is a conceptual gap, not a lexical one — address through expanded teaching notes / sidebar commentary in the curriculum material rather than a single-term coinage; flag for native-speaker pastoral review given the real grief-practice context of Chinese readers |
2.5 The Day of the Lord
| Available Mandarin terms | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 主的日子 (day_of_the_lord) — New, High | Compositionally transparent (主 + 的 + 日子) and therefore low lexical risk, but high conceptual risk: Mandarin readers’ intuitive frame for “the end/climax of an age” is the cyclical 治乱循环 (order-chaos-order dynastic pattern) already flagged in the Romans baseline, plus the Buddhist-Daoist 末劫 (catastrophic but cyclically recurring kalpa-close) | Every occurrence (5:2 and cross-references) requires explicit linear/final framing: this is the day, not a day within a repeating cycle. Best mitigated by consistent co-occurrence with 忽然/突然 (suddenness) and a stated one-time-only clause rather than by any single lexical substitution |
| 忿怒 (wrath) — New, High | 忿怒 correctly conveys personal anger (avoiding an impersonal-force reading) but Mandarin readers may still default to a background assumption of 报应 (karmic retribution) when reading judgment-and-consequence narratives, since this is the dominant folk-cultural script for “bad outcome follows bad behavior” | Reinforce personal/judicial framing explicitly wherever 忿怒 appears (1:10; 2:16; 5:9); pair consistently with 神 (a personal agent) as grammatical subject, never left as an unattributed impersonal force |
| 光明之子/白昼之子 vs. 属黑夜的/属幽暗的 (5:5) — New, High | The light/darkness moral pairing is structurally similar to the historic Chinese Manichaean (明教) dualism of two co-eternal cosmic principles in perpetual conflict — a genuine, documented historical religious movement (active Tang–Ming, influential on rebel/millenarian movements), not merely a hypothetical collision | Explicit note required distinguishing moral/covenantal identity (assigned by God’s grace to those he has saved) from metaphysical dualism (two equally ultimate opposing powers) |
| 灭亡 / 生产的疼痛 (destruction/labor pains, 5:3) — New, Medium | 灭亡 alone risks reading as generic catastrophe or extinction without a clear judicial cause; 生产的疼痛 (labor pains) is a vivid, well-understood metaphor with low collision risk on its own but needs to stay tethered to 灭亡’s judgment-context rather than being read as a neutral “inevitable natural process” metaphor that drains the moral force from the warning | Keep 灭亡 grammatically tied to unbelief/false security (“和平安全了” — false claims of peace and safety) as its stated cause, not as an unexplained catastrophe |
| 贼 (thief, 5:2) / 谨守警醒 (sober/watchful, 5:6-8) | Low risk; standard vocabulary | No additional mitigation required beyond confirming these remain purely suddenness/alertness metaphors, without moralizing Christ as a thief |
3. Missing Vocabulary Requiring New Coinage or Compound Construction
Unlike Romans, where nearly all central doctrinal vocabulary already existed in the CUV tradition, 1 Thessalonians’ concentrated eschatological focus (especially 4:13–5:11) surfaces several concepts with no prior Mandarin Christian lexical item at all, requiring the compound constructions recorded in bible_term_registry.json:
| Concept | Status | Construction type | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| παρουσία (parousia) | No prior single-word Mandarin equivalent | Repurposed existing verb (降临) + mandatory qualifying context | Highest-risk new coinage in the curriculum; see 2.1 |
| ἁρπάζω (rapture) | No prior term; the concept itself (a sudden, corporate, bodily seizure into the sky) has no native Chinese religious analogue | New two-character compound (被提, “caused to be lifted/carried”) | Passive construction (被) correctly signals God as the acting agent, believers as recipients — grammatically reinforces grace-not-merit |
| ἡμέρα κυρίου as a fixed technical phrase | No prior fixed phrase (though 主 and 日子 both exist independently) | Transparent compound (主的日子) | Low lexical risk, high conceptual risk (see 2.5) |
| πνεῦμα μὴ σβέννυτε | No idiomatic Mandarin equivalent for “extinguishing” applied to a Person | CUV’s existing interpretive expansion (的感动) reused | Not a new coinage but an essential interpretive addition that must not be dropped |
| ἁπλαδελφία (brotherly love, Spirit-taught) | 弟兄相爱 exists as ordinary compound but the theodidaktoi (God-taught) qualifier is new | Compound 蒙神所教 | Addresses the absence of a term for “learning taught directly by God without a human teacher-lineage,” a genuine gap against the Confucian sage-transmission model |
| ἀπάντησις (royal welcome-procession) | No existing single Mandarin term carries the full Greco-Roman civic-welcome background | Descriptive phrase 迎见主 | Requires background-explanation footnote rather than lexical substitution — the concept (going out from a city to welcome an arriving dignitary) has no ready Chinese ceremonial equivalent to borrow from |
General finding: the vocabulary gap in 1 Thessalonians is concentrated almost entirely in eschatological event description (chapters 4–5), not in soteriological or ecclesial vocabulary, which the Romans baseline already supplies. This matches the letter’s distinctive theological center of gravity.
4. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
Several Mandarin lexical fields contain multiple existing terms that legitimately compete for the same English/Greek source word, each carrying different — and in several cases doctrinally dangerous — connotations. These neighborhoods require explicit fencing (naming the forbidden neighbor and stating why) rather than mere term selection.
4.1 The “future divine arrival” neighborhood
- 降临 (chosen) vs. 弥勒下生/弥勒降世 (Maitreya’s future descent, forbidden) vs. 下凡/化身/转世 (already forbidden for incarnation in the Romans baseline, equally forbidden here)
- Fence: Christ’s parousia is a return, presupposing a completed prior incarnation and resurrection already taught in Romans; it is not a first/inaugural arrival of an as-yet-unmet savior.
4.2 The “removal from earth to heaven” neighborhood
- 被提 (chosen) vs. 羽化登仙 (Daoist self-cultivated immortal ascension, forbidden) vs. 升天 (generic death euphemism, forbidden as a substitute) vs. 天道/deva-rebirth (Buddhist karma-earned heavenly rebirth, forbidden)
- Fence: the rapture is sudden, corporate, sovereign, and bodily, granted by grace to the already-justified — not a personal attainment through practice, and not merely another word for dying.
4.3 The “death of a believer” neighborhood
- 睡了(的人) (chosen euphemism, body-focused) vs. folk hún-pò soul-anthropology triggering 招魂/安魂 ritual language (forbidden framing) vs. bare 死了 (too blunt/theologically flat for 4:13-15’s argument)
- Fence: “sleep” describes the body awaiting resurrection; it makes no claim requiring ritual soul-management, and the person’s standing before God (in Christ) is unaffected by death.
4.4 The “final judgment day” neighborhood
- 主的日子 (chosen) vs. 末劫 (Buddhist-Daoist cyclical kalpa-close, forbidden framing) vs. 治乱循环 (cyclical dynastic-collapse pattern, forbidden framing, per Romans baseline)
- Fence: linear, one-time, final; not one iteration of a repeating cosmic or historical cycle.
4.5 The “hope” neighborhood
- 盼望 (chosen, certain expectation) vs. 希望 (forbidden as primary rendering, uncertain colloquial “hope so”) vs. 缘分/祈福 (folk fate-adjustment/fortune-seeking hope, forbidden framing, per Romans baseline gospel/grace notes)
- Fence: certainty grounded in a historical fact (Christ’s resurrection) and a divine promise, not a wish, a lucky coincidence, or a fortune one might cultivate.
4.6 The “human inner constituents” neighborhood (5:23)
- 灵 (human spirit, must be disambiguated from 圣灵) / 魂 (must be disambiguated from folk hún-soul anthropology and 招魂/安魂 ritual practice) / 身子 (body, low risk)
- Fence: one integrated person kept whole by God; 灵 is never the Holy Spirit in this verse; 魂 is never a ritually-manageable wandering entity.
4.7 The “light vs. darkness” neighborhood (5:5)
- 光明之子/白昼之子 vs. 属黑夜的/属幽暗的 (chosen, moral-covenantal identity under one God) vs. Manichaean 明教 dualism of two co-eternal cosmic powers (forbidden framing)
- Fence: one sovereign God has assigned believers to the light by grace; darkness is not an equally ultimate rival power.
4.8 The “divine anger” neighborhood
- 忿怒 (chosen, personal judicial anger) vs. 报应 (impersonal karmic retribution, forbidden framing, already flagged for “sin” in the Romans baseline)
- Fence: God’s own personal, judicial response to sin and unbelief — not a self-operating cosmic mechanism of moral cause-and-effect.
4.9 The “extinguishing the Spirit” neighborhood
- 不要消灭圣灵的感动 (chosen, activity extinguished, Person preserved) vs. a bare “不要消灭圣灵” (forbidden — implies the divine Person himself could be extinguished, inviting an impersonal 气-like reading)
- Fence: the Spirit’s promptings/activity can be resisted or suppressed by believers; the Spirit’s Person cannot be extinguished.
4.10 The “sanctification as achievement” neighborhood (carried over and intensified from Romans)
- 成圣 (chosen, Spirit’s work in the already-justified) vs. Neo-Confucian self-cultivation into sagehood (forbidden framing) vs. 修身/修炼 (forbidden alternatives per Romans baseline)
- Fence, intensified here: 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8 defines sanctification concretely via sexual self-control, which is precisely the domain where a self-effort/self-discipline reading is culturally most plausible and therefore most dangerous; the note must clarify that the command to control oneself is addressed to a person the Spirit is already at work sanctifying, not a technique of self-perfection offered independently of grace.
5. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| παρουσία | Paraphrase (降临), not transliteration | No Mandarin transliteration tradition exists for this term (unlike 基督/阿爸); a transliterated loanword would be theologically opaque to readers and provide no doctrinal content on its own |
| ἁρπάζω (rapture) | Paraphrase/compound (被提), not transliteration | Same reasoning; additionally, the passive-voice compound carries essential theological information (God as agent) that a transliteration would lose entirely |
| Σατανᾶς (Satan) | Transliteration (撒但) | Retained per established, universal Chinese Bible tradition; no paraphrase needed or appropriate, since this is a proper name, not a descriptive concept |
| ἀμήν / ἀλληλουϊά (if present in doxological material) | Transliteration (阿们/哈利路亚) | Per baseline transliteration standards; no occurrence requiring new decision in this letter beyond reaffirming the standing rule |
| Ἰησοῦς, Χριστός, Παῦλος, Θεσσαλονικεῖς (proper names) | Transliteration, CUV-established forms (耶稣, 基督, 保罗, 帖撒罗尼迦人) | Standard baseline rule; 帖撒罗尼迦 (Thessalonica) is the CUV-established form and must be used for the book title and all city references |
| ἁγιασμός (sanctification) | Paraphrase using existing (borrowed) term 成圣, not a new transliteration or coinage | Reuses Romans baseline term rather than inventing an alternative, per consistency mandate; the doctrinal fencing burden (§4.10) is carried by footnotes, not by term substitution |
| πνεῦμα, ψυχή, σῶμα (5:23 triad) | Paraphrase using existing characters (灵、魂、身子), not coinage of new characters | Existing vocabulary is adequate at the lexical level; the risk is exclusively at the disambiguation/teaching-note level (§2.3, §4.6), not at the term-selection level |
| ἀπάντησις | Paraphrase (迎见主), not transliteration | Conveys the ceremonial welcome-procession sense functionally; a transliteration of the Greek term would be meaningless to a Mandarin reader with no Greco-Roman civic background |
General principle applied: transliteration is reserved for proper names and a small closed set of established liturgical exclamations (阿们, 哈利路亚) per the Romans baseline; every new theological concept in this letter is handled by paraphrase/compound construction using existing Chinese characters, load-bearing footnotes, and — where necessary — explicit fencing against a named cultural/religious neighbor. This matches the pattern already established for 复活, 道成肉身, and 称义 in the Romans baseline.
6. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in 1 Thessalonians
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision groundedness × likelihood of translator/reader default toward the wrong neighbor), highest risk first:
-
παρουσία → 降临 vs. Maitreya’s future descent (弥勒下生/弥勒降世) — the letter’s central topic is a still-future divine arrival, which is exactly the frame in which a millenarian folk-Buddhist reading is most tempting to import. Every occurrence (2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23) requires theologian review.
-
πνεῦμα, ψυχή, σῶμα (5:23) → 灵、魂、身子 vs. hún-pò dual-soul ancestor-ritual anthropology — the single verse with the highest density of folk-religious collision surface area in the letter; 灵 must never be mistaken for 圣灵, and 魂 must never be read as a ritually-manageable wandering soul.
-
ἁρπάζω → 被提 vs. 羽化登仙 (merit-earned Daoist immortal ascension) / 升天 (flattened death euphemism) / deva-realm rebirth — the doctrinal core of the passage (4:17); a merit-earned or death-synonym misreading directly contradicts the grace-given, corporate, bodily nature of the event.
-
ἡμέρα κυρίου → 主的日子 vs. 末劫 / 治乱循环 (cyclical world-age or dynastic-cycle framing) — lexically transparent but conceptually the highest-risk item in chapter 5, since Chinese readers’ default historiographical intuition is cyclical, not linear-terminal.
-
ἁγιασμός in its 4:3-8 concrete application → 成圣 vs. Neo-Confucian self-cultivation, intensified by the sexual-ethics context — carried over from the Romans baseline but sharpened here because the concrete behavioral command (self-control) is precisely where a self-effort misreading is most plausible.
-
παρακαλέω’s dual sense → 劝慰 (comfort) vs. 劝勉 (exhort), same Greek word, adjacent occurrences (4:1,10,18; 5:11,14) — the highest-frequency same-word/different-sense disambiguation task in the letter; a wrong selection at 4:18 would turn the passage’s pastoral climax into a moral exhortation, undercutting the Hope in Grief doctrine at its point of application.
-
ἐλπίς → 盼望 vs. colloquial 希望 — foundational to the letter’s faith/love/hope triad and the entire Hope in Grief doctrine; a slide toward 希望’s “hope-so” register would convert a certainty claim into a mere wish precisely where the text’s argument requires certainty.
-
υἱοὶ φωτός/σκότους (5:5) → moral-covenantal light/darkness vs. Manichaean (明教) metaphysical dualism — a genuine historical religious-movement collision (not merely hypothetical), requiring explicit theologian note to prevent a two-co-eternal-powers misreading.
-
ὀργή → 忿怒 vs. 报应 (impersonal karmic retribution) — recurring background risk across 1:10, 2:16, and 5:9; less acute than items 1–8 because the Romans baseline has already established the fencing pattern for “sin,” but reinforced here by the letter’s judgment-day focus.
-
πνεῦμα μὴ σβέννυτε (5:19) → dropping “的感动” — lower doctrinal centrality than items above but carries a concrete, mechanically checkable failure mode (a validator can programmatically detect the missing qualifier), making it a high-priority automated rather than theologian review item.
7. Full-Book Coverage Confirmation
All five chapters of 1 Thessalonians were reviewed for this analysis:
- Chapter 1 — reviewed; contributes 福音, 恩典, 信心, 拣选, 圣灵, 神的大能, 患难, 效法, 又真又活的神, 偶像, 忿怒 (see §2.5, §4.8), 忍耐, 爱心.
- Chapter 2 — reviewed; contributes 使徒, 荣耀, 神的国, 呼召, 撒但/那试探人的 (background), reinforces 忿怒 (2:16) and 患难 (2:14).
- Chapter 3 — reviewed; contributes 圣洁/圣徒 in explicit link to the parousia (3:13, see §2.1), reinforces 患难, 信心, 神的旨意 (background to 5:18 but rooted in 3:11 prayer language).
- Chapter 4 — reviewed; the letter’s highest-density chapter for new terminology and the core passage (4:13-18): 睡了的人, 在基督里死了的人, 被提, 降临, 迎见主, 云里, 神的号筒/呼叫的声音, 我们就要和主永远同在, 忧伤, 劝慰/劝勉 disambiguation, 成圣 (4:3-8 concrete application), 淫乱, 私欲, 弟兄相爱, 蒙神所教, 身体 (σκεῦος).
- Chapter 5 — reviewed; contributes 主的日子, 贼, 光明之子/白昼之子 vs. 属黑夜的/属幽暗的, 灭亡/生产的疼痛, 谨守/警醒, 护心镜/头盔, 救恩 (5:8-9 pairing with 忿怒), 互相建立, 治理/劝戒, 不要消灭圣灵的感动, 察验, 灵、魂、身子 (5:23), 圣洁的亲嘴问安 (5:26, cultural not doctrinal flag).
No chapter contributed zero load-bearing vocabulary; this statement is recorded explicitly per the full-book-coverage mandate.
This analysis extends, and does not contradict, the baseline Romans translation_memory.json, bible_term_registry.json, and doctrine_risk_registry.json. All fencing statements above are proposed for confirmation alongside the Critical/High entries in analysis/08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json prior to Phase 2 translation of 1 Thessalonians.