Executive Summary: Ephesians — Pashto Language Package (Phase 1)

Why it matters: Ephesians pushes the Pashto Romans baseline into new, higher-density doctrinal territory — the core passage (2:1-10) is the sharpest grace-versus-works collision point in this entire pipeline, and the letter’s armor-of-God and household-code material introduces the single most acute real-world physical safety risk of any curriculum built so far, given active armed conflict and Taliban jihadist rhetorical framing in parts of the Pashto-speaking world.

---

Key findings

• 92 registered terms, 61 Critical/High risk. Of 92 terms in the Ephesians-extended term registry (39 inherited from Romans, 53 newly introduced), 18 are Critical and 43 are High risk — 61 terms (66%) require human theologian enforcement, not automated or native-speaker-only review.
• 18 doctrines, 15 requiring theologian review. Of the 9 curriculum doctrines (mapped to 18 tracked doctrine entries in the risk registry once shared cross-cutting doctrines like Christ’s deity and the Spirit’s personhood are counted), 10 are Critical and 5 High — 15 of 18 (83%) route to mandatory human theologian review; 2 to native speaker review; 1 (Thanksgiving and Praise) to automated review only.
• Two genuinely new collision classes beyond Romans: (1) راز (mystery) and بشپړتیا (fullness) collide with the region’s Sufi devotional tradition (elite-initiate secrets; wahdat al-wujud pantheism) — a risk class absent from the Romans baseline entirely; (2) د خدای وسله (armor of God) collides with literal armed-conflict and Taliban jihad framing — the most acute safety risk yet identified in this pipeline, exceeding even the Romans baseline’s Mission/Evangelism caution.
• The core passage (2:8-10) is now the pipeline’s highest-density single unit. فضل (grace), ایمان (faith), نجات (salvation), ډالۍ (gift), کارونه/ښه کارونه (works excluded/works as fruit), and فخر کول (boast) converge in three verses, each independently colliding with either Islamic mizan deeds-weighing theology or Pashtunwali’s melmastia gift-reciprocity code — a triple-stacked cultural default against grace unmatched elsewhere in the curriculum.

---

Risks

• Physical safety risk (Critical): د خدای وسله and evangelist/ambassador-in-chains vocabulary (6:10-20; 4:11; 6:19-20) could, if under-explained, be misread as endorsing literal armed struggle or expose identifiable gospel-proclaimers to real legal/social danger.
• Doctrinal collapse risk (Critical): غاړه ایښودل (submission, 5:21-24) sits at a triple collision — Islamic submission-to-God-alone, Pashtunwali tribal-elder authority, and the internal risk of losing 5:21’s mutuality beneath 5:22 — with real potential to either erase the household code or reinforce exactly the stern-authority pattern the text challenges.
• Procedural/tooling risk (High): مالک (required for the human “master,” 6:5-9) is the same word the Romans baseline explicitly rejected for divine Lordship; without an explicit reversal flag in tooling, a future worker could “correct” it back to خداوند, either divinizing a human slave-owner or diluting Christ’s exclusive title.
• Fatalism-substitution risk (Critical): مخکې ټاکل شوی (predestined, 1:5, 1:11) risks collapsing into Sunni qadar’s fatalistic-resignation default if not bound, every occurrence, to the qualifying phrase “in Christ.”

---

Opportunities

• پخلاینه and سوله (reconciliation and peace, 2:14-18) remain genuine positive cultural assets, resonant with lived regional experience of feud-ending jirga negotiation and war-ending settlement — provided Christ’s unilateral cross-achievement is calibrated against bilateral-negotiation defaults.
• شپون (shepherd, 4:11) and نانواتی-style intercession framing (منځګړیتوب, 1:16-19; 3:14-19; 6:18-20) draw on well-established, positively-resonant regional imagery with low independent collision risk.
• حکمت (manifold wisdom, 3:10) and برکت (blessing, 1:3) are shared, positively-loaded Islamic theological categories that can be anchored productively to Christ-centered content with only light calibration.
• د اسرائیل ټولنه (commonwealth of Israel, 2:12) is a lower-acuity term in Afghanistan/Pakistan than in the Arab world or Iran, giving more room to foreground the covenant-historical argument without immediate contemporary political interference.

---

Recommended actions

1. Route Ephesians 2 (core passage), 5:21-6:9 (household codes), and 6:10-20 (armor of God) to theologian-reviewed translation workers preferentially in Phase 2, rather than treating all six chapters as uniformly low-touch.
2. Apply mandatory per-occurrence (not first-use-only) theologian review to راز, بشپړتیا, and د خدای وسله — a stricter routing than any single term required under the Romans baseline.
3. Hard-code the مالک/خداوند reversal rule into Phase 2 tooling validation (not just prose documentation) so automated “consistency correction” cannot silently reintroduce خداوند at 6:5-9.
4. Pair every occurrence of د خدای وسله with an explicit, non-negotiable non-violence clarification in accompanying teaching material, treating this with at least the same procedural weight the Romans baseline already gives Mission and Evangelism.
5. Carry all Romans-baseline-inherited terms (39 identified) forward into Phase 2 without re-litigating their renderings; concentrate review effort on the 53 newly introduced Ephesians terms, where the collision surface is least tested.

See assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (all Ephesians versions) for full supporting detail behind every figure cited above.