Executive Summary — 1 Corinthians | English → Nepali Language Package

Why it matters

1 Corinthians is the most culturally live book this pipeline has processed for Nepali. Where Romans’ hardest collisions were mostly abstract-soteriological (मोक्ष, अवतार, धर्म), 1 Corinthians adds a second, more concrete layer: active, observable ritual-practice collisions — a currently-worshiped living goddess (कुमारी), a nationally visible temple-worship tradition (मन्दिर), a weekly-practiced shared-offering-food custom (प्रसाद), and still-practiced shamanic trance and spirit-diagnosis rites (jhākri/dhāmi) — all surfacing directly against this letter’s own vocabulary for virginity, temple imagery, idol meat, tongues, and discerning spirits. Getting this Language Package right determines whether Nepali readers receive Paul’s actual argument or an unintentionally syncretized substitute.

Key findings

• 103 total glossary terms now govern this curriculum: 36 inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline, 67 newly established for 1 Corinthians.
• 52 terms (12 Critical + 40 High) require mandatory human theologian review under the risk-tier framework — roughly half of the entire glossary.
• At the doctrine level, 34 named doctrines are tracked; 28 require human theologian review (2 Critical, 26 High), 3 require native speaker review, and 3 are automated-only.
• The core passage (1 Corinthians 15:1-11) is the single densest concentration of Critical-tier material in the curriculum: resurrection (पुनरुत्थान), resurrection-appearance (देखा पर्नुभयो), gospel, faith, salvation, sin, Christ, and Lord all converge in eleven verses.
• Four terms require a “recurring note” at every occurrence, not just first use — a stricter standard than anything in the Romans baseline: कुमारी (virgin), मन्दिर (temple metaphor), अमरता (immortality), and प्रेम (love, ch.13).
• Two forbidden substitutions carry Critical-tier, evidentiary consequences unique to this book: दर्शन for resurrection appearances (would recast Paul’s eyewitness list as devotional vision) and unqualified कुमारी for “virgin” (names Nepal’s living-goddess cult).

Risks

• Highest-severity risk: कुमारी unqualified — collides with a real, currently-worshiped, state-connected religious title, not a textual abstraction.
• Second-highest: देखा पर्नुभयो vs. दर्शन — a single wrong choice destroys the evidentiary logic of the entire core passage.
• Concrete, weekly-recurring risk: मूर्तिलाई चढाइएको भोजन (food offered to idols) mirrors the live, ordinary Nepali Hindu practice of प्रसाद — this is not a first-century curiosity for Nepali believers but an active pastoral decision point at family and community festivals.
• Shamanic-practice collisions (High): अन्य भाषा (tongues) and आत्माहरूको पहिचान गर्ने वरदान (discerning of spirits) sit directly beside jhākri/dhāmi trance-speech and spirit-diagnosis ritual still practiced in hill and Himalayan communities.
• Caste-history collision (High): मण्डलीबाट बहिष्कार गर्ने (church discipline) risks unconsciously importing the memory of caste-based excommunication/untouchability, formally codified in Nepali law (Muluki Ain) until 1963.
• Devotional-romantic collision (High): प्रेम for agapē risks assimilation to Nepal’s bhakti-प्रेम devotional-romantic tradition (Radha-Krishna), softening ch.13’s non-erotic, non-preferential love into sentiment.
• Root-level collision (High): बुद्धि (wisdom) and रहस्य (mystery) both sit adjacent to live Buddhist/Tantric vocabulary (बोधि, गुह्य) with structurally opposite theological logic (self-attained vs. revealed; secret-kept vs. secret-now-disclosed).

Opportunities

• Nepali already has strong, established, safe baseline vocabulary for the Critical soteriological core (उद्धार, पुनरुत्थान, धार्मिकता) — this curriculum builds on solid ground rather than starting from zero.
• The Passover typology (निस्तार-चाड, Christ our Passover) and Old Testament-dependent terms (आदम, पहिलो फल) offer a natural teaching opportunity to deepen the audience’s OT literacy, which the baseline already flagged as generally low for this young, first-generation church.
• Ch.13’s love material, handled with the required recurring framing, offers strong positive common ground with Nepali Buddhist maitrī/karuṇā (impartial loving-kindness/compassion) — the closest cross-cultural analogue identified in the comparative theology analysis — usable as a bridge illustration once agapē’s distinctiveness is established.
• The letter’s practical, case-based structure (idol meat, marriage, worship order, gifts) gives this curriculum unusually concrete, real-life teaching material for a young church still forming its practical Christian ethic in a Hindu-majority, historically restrictive legal environment.

Recommended actions

1. Adopt the four “recurring-note” terms (कुमारी, मन्दिर, अमरता, प्रेम) as a new, stricter enforcement category in Phase 2 tooling — do not rely on standard first-use-only glossary caching for these.
2. Route all core-passage segments (15:1-11) and all ch.13 love-definition segments (13:4-7) to human theologian review as a blanket rule, regardless of whether an individual segment appears to contain only Low-risk vocabulary in isolation.
3. Brief Phase 2 native-speaker reviewers specifically on the live, present-day प्रसाद-sharing and jhākri/dhāmi ritual-practice contexts before they review chs.8, 10, 12, and 14 — these are not background cultural trivia but active pastoral realities for the target readership.
4. Carry the Romans baseline’s forbidden-substitution enforcement forward unchanged, and add this curriculum’s new forbidden-substitution list (दर्शन, unqualified कुमारी, unglossed मन्दिर, unpaired रहस्य, self-attainment-framed बुद्धि, unglossed अमरता, परम्परा, shamanic-framed अन्य भाषा/आत्माहरूको पहिचान गर्ने वरदान) to the automated Phase 2 validation checklist with equal severity weighting.
5. When this Language Package is extended to future curricula (e.g. 2 Corinthians), reuse this document’s 103-term translation memory as the new baseline layer, following the same “copy exactly + inherit” pattern this document itself used for the Romans baseline.

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This summary synthesizes 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, 04_comparative_theology.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, 05_translation_landscape.md, assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json for the 1 Corinthians curriculum, English–Nepali language pair.