Executive Summary

Why it matters

1 Corinthians is a pastoral-occasional letter that touches nearly every live doctrinal and cultural fault line documented in the Romans baseline — and adds several acute, curriculum-specific new ones the baseline never had to address. Unlike Romans’ sustained single argument, this book distributes Critical-risk theological content across 15 of its 16 chapters, culminating in the core passage (1 Corinthians 15:1-11) and its resurrection argument, the single most concentrated bodily-resurrection case in the NT. Two of the new collisions introduced here (the Lord’s Supper vs. Karbala/Hussein commemorative meals; head-covering vs. Iran’s mandatory hijab law) carry real physical and legal safety stakes for underground house-church readers, not merely comprehension risk. This package cannot be produced by mechanically extending the Romans glossary; it requires dedicated new-term ratification and explicit safety-aware pastoral framing before Phase 2 begins.

Key findings

• 24 doctrines tracked in the extended registry (14 inherited/reinforced from Romans, 10 curriculum-specific new): 9 Critical, 14 High, 0 Medium, 1 Low — 23 of 24 require mandatory human theologian review; only 1 (Mutual Edification) is automated-review-only.
• 85 total terms in the extended translation memory (37 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 48 new to this curriculum): 20 Critical, 29 High, 24 Medium, 12 Low — 49 terms (Critical + High) require human theologian review at every occurrence.
• New Critical-risk terms with no Romans-baseline precedent: cross (صلیب), wisdom (حکمت), the Lord’s table/Supper (سفره خداوند/عشای ربانی), body and blood (بدن و خون), head covering (پوشاندن سر), women’s silence (زنان ساکت باشند), Maranatha (مارانا ثا), and burial (دفن شد).
• The single highest-severity new collision is the Lord’s Supper’s structural resemblance to Twelver Shia sofreh-ye nazri/Muharram ritual meals commemorating Imam Hussein’s martyrdom — closer in form to Paul’s own κοινωνία argument than any collision documented in the Romans baseline.
• Two collisions carry direct, real-world physical/legal safety consequences beyond doctrinal confusion: head covering (11:2-16, Iran’s compulsory hijab law and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement) and sexual immorality/church discipline (5:1-13, 6:1-11, Iran’s shari’a hadd criminal code for زنا).
• Every chapter of 1 Corinthians was reviewed for full-book coverage; no chapter contributes zero doctrinal content, though chs. 4, 9, and 16 carry comparatively lighter new-term load and are explicitly noted as reviewed rather than omitted.

Risks

• Syncretistic absorption, not mere confusion, is the dominant risk pattern in this curriculum, sharper than in Romans: the Lord’s Supper, Maranatha (vs. Shia “entezar”/Mahdi-awaiting devotion), and mystery (vs. Imamate esoteric knowledge) all have structurally similar, popularly central Shia devotional analogues that could fully absorb rather than merely distort the biblical content if not actively fenced in teaching.
• Prestige-inversion risk is new to this curriculum: حکمت (wisdom) and معرفت-adjacent شناخت (knowledge) both risk elevating Paul’s deliberately humble/subordinate categories into Iran’s own prestigious philosophical-mystical achievement traditions (Illuminationism, Mulla Sadra hekmat, Sufi erfan), inverting rather than merely softening his argument.
• Live socio-political volatility — unparalleled elsewhere in either curriculum — attaches to head covering (11:2-16) and women’s silence (14:34-35), both of which intersect an active, currently contested Iranian public discourse with real consequences for how the text could be weaponized or suppressed.
• Life-and-death legal conflation risk attaches to church discipline (5:1-13, 6:1-11): زنا is a defined shari’a hadd criminal offense in Iran, and Paul’s internal, restorative, civil-force-free discipline model must be kept sharply distinct from the state’s actual criminal-legal apparatus for named individuals in house-church settings.

Opportunities

• Persian’s existing, genuinely rich devotional-love vocabulary (Sufi ishq, the Hafez/Rumi Beloved-lover tradition) gives محبت a homiletical richness Romans never had occasion to draw on for ch. 13, provided it stays anchored to Paul’s concrete behavioral content (13:4-7).
• Shared shirk-category vocabulary around idols (بت) gives Persian Muslim-background readers an unusually strong pre-existing negative category to build the idol-meat conscience argument on, once decoupled from a halal/haram legal-purity default.
• The book’s own house-church data point (16:19, “the church in their house”) gives this curriculum a built-in, textually-grounded validation of the underground house-church model already documented as the lived reality for the audience.
• The resurrection chapter’s evidential structure (named eyewitnesses, burial-then-appearance sequence) offers a rare opportunity to engage the Quranic crucifixion-denial directly and evidentially, rather than merely assert against it.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 23 theologian-required doctrines and 49 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 segment translation, per the extended doctrine_risk_registry.json and translation_memory.json.
2. Commission dedicated in-country pastoral/security consultation — beyond standard theologian review — specifically for 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 (head covering), 14:34-35 (women’s silence), and 5:1-13/6:1-11 (church discipline/lawsuits) before finalizing teaching framing for these passages.
3. Lock the transliteration decisions (Maranatha preserved as مارانا ثا; Passover as فصح with gloss; Lord’s Supper compounds retained as established Persian Christian terms) into the translation memory now, so parallel Phase 2 workers do not independently re-decide them.
4. Operationalize every §3-style “fencing note” identified in the linguistic gap analysis as a mandatory inline [TRANSLATOR NOTE: ...] trigger in Phase 2 tooling, prioritizing wisdom/cross (chs.1-3), the Lord’s Supper (chs.10-11), and resurrection body language (ch.15).
5. Brief all Phase 2 reviewers on the two-axis nature of the Shia collision risk (tawhid/shirk shared with Sunni Islam, plus the Shia-specific Imamate/Karbala/Mahdi axis) before translation begins, since several of this curriculum’s highest-risk items (Lord’s Supper, Maranatha, mystery) depend on recognizing the second axis specifically.

Prepared per PRD Phase 1 Step 11. See assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, and analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md for full supporting detail.