Linguistic Gap Analysis
Linguistic Gap Analysis: 1 Thessalonians (English–Thai)
0. Purpose and Method
This document identifies where Thai lacks vocabulary the letter needs (missing vocabulary), where Thai has too much relevant vocabulary already occupied by Buddhist-Brahmanic or folk-animist doctrine (crowded semantic neighborhoods requiring fencing), and where the choice between transliterating a term and paraphrasing it carries doctrinal weight. It closes with a ranked list of the letter’s highest-risk ambiguities for Phase 2 routing.
All five chapters of 1 Thessalonians were reviewed. Chapter-by-chapter coverage notes:
- Chapter 1 — conversion narrative (idols, living/true God), founding triad (faith/love/hope), election, gospel-in-power. Reviewed; contributes idols, wrath, hope, power_of_god.
- Chapter 2 — apostolic ministry model, persecution, Satan, Paul’s own Parousia-joy (crown of boasting). Reviewed; contributes satan, glory (human-honor sense), parousia (first occurrence, 2:19), own_selves_psyche.
- Chapter 3 — affliction, Timothy’s report, prayer for holiness at the Parousia. Reviewed; contributes affliction_thlipsis, parousia (3:13), holiness_hagiosyne, saints.
- Chapter 4 — CORE PASSAGE (4:13-18): sanctification ethics (4:1-8) plus the Return of Christ / Resurrection of Believers unit (4:13-18). Reviewed in full depth; contributes asleep_koimao, caught_up_harpazo, meeting_apantesis, archangel, trumpet_of_god, cry_of_command, lust_epithymia, vessel_skeuos, impurity_akatharsia, brotherly_love_philadelphia.
- Chapter 5 — Day of the Lord (5:1-11), closing exhortations, tripartite anthropology benediction (5:23). Reviewed; contributes day_of_the_lord, thief_in_the_night, sudden_destruction_olethros, sons_of_light, quench_the_spirit, spirit_soul_body, blameless_amemptos.
No chapter is silently omitted. Chapters 1-3 are lower-density but establish terms (idols, wrath, satan, affliction) load-bearing for the eschatological units in 4-5.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the curriculum’s five governing doctrines: the Thai vocabulary presently available, its specific weaknesses in this destination culture, and the recommended translation strategy. This matrix governs Step 2’s doctrine_risk_registry.json additions and Phase 2’s segment-level enforcement.
1.1 The Return of Christ (Parousia)
| Available Thai Vocabulary | Weakness | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| เสด็จ (royal/divine honorific verb of motion) | Thailand’s lèse-majesté-sensitive register makes this verb feel, to a Thai ear, primarily bound to the monarchy; risk of the doctrine being heard as commentary on or borrowed from royal ceremony rather than a unique claim about Christ. | Required — this is the only Thai verb that carries sufficient honorific weight for a divine sovereign’s arrival. Retain, but pair consistently with explicit teaching that this honors Christ’s own unique kingship, never the reverse borrowing. |
| มา (plain verb “to come”) | Doctrinally too weak; strips the term of any sense of majesty, authority, or ceremony. Would flatten Parousia into an ordinary arrival. | Reject as primary rendering; usable only in non-technical narrative asides. |
| กลับมา (“return/come back”) | Directionally accurate but colloquial; lacks the technical, ceremonial-arrival sense of the Greek parousia (a dignitary’s state visit). | Reject as primary rendering for the technical doctrine; may appear in explanatory glosses. |
| การเสด็จมาของพระคริสต์ (compound, established in this curriculum’s Table B) | None internal to the phrase; risk lies entirely in audience reception (see เสด็จ above), not in the phrase’s own ambiguity. | Adopt. Enforce identical wording at all four occurrences (1:10; 2:19; 3:13; 4:15) plus the coordinated 5:23 use, per full-book consistency rule. |
1.2 Resurrection of Believers
| Available Thai Vocabulary | Weakness | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| การเป็นขึ้นจากตาย (baseline term, Christ’s own resurrection) | None inherent; the risk is omission — failing to extend this exact phrase to believers’ future resurrection at 4:16, leaving open a rendering gap that invites substitution with rebirth vocabulary. | Extend unchanged to 4:14 (“those who have fallen asleep in Jesus”) and 4:16 (“the dead in Christ will rise”). Identical phrase for both the Head’s resurrection and the members’ resurrection is the doctrinal point (4:14’s “even so”). |
| การเกิดใหม่ / การกลับชาติมาเกิด (rebirth/reincarnation) | Forbidden (baseline). Doctrinally catastrophic here specifically because 4:13-18 is a grief-comfort passage; a grieving hearer processing loss is at maximum vulnerability to accept a comforting-sounding but false alternative (rebirth as consolation) if resurrection vocabulary is not airtight. | Never use. Flag any Phase 2 back-translation return of this phrase for immediate escalation. |
| ล่วงหลับ (established death-euphemism for koimaomai) | Semantically correct (sleep implies waking) but underdetermined on its own — a euphemism for death is compatible with almost any afterlife framework, including a next-rebirth framework, unless the surrounding resurrection vocabulary anchors it. | Use, but never in isolation; every occurrence (4:13,14,15) must appear within one sentence or immediate co-text of การเป็นขึ้นจากตาย so the euphemism cannot be read on its own steam. |
| ถูกรับขึ้นไป (harpazō, “caught up”) | Correct passive-voice, divine-agency construction; risk is drift toward self-attained levitative/psychic feats (อิทธิฤทธิ์) attributed in Thai popular religion to advanced meditation masters, or toward folk-animist spirit-seizure imagery. | Retain passive voice and explicit subject (พระองค์/Christ as agent understood from context); avoid any verb suggesting self-generated power. |
1.3 Sanctification
| Available Thai Vocabulary | Weakness | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| การทรงชำระให้บริสุทธิ์ (baseline hagiasmos) | None inherent to the phrase itself. Risk is in the surrounding ethical content (4:3-8) being heard through a merit/precept framework rather than as the Spirit’s ongoing work. | Retain unchanged as the programmatic term; reinforce in teaching notes at every occurrence (4:3-4,7; 5:23) that this is the Spirit’s action upon the believer, not the believer’s own precept-observance. |
| ศีล (Buddhist moral precepts, e.g. the Five Precepts) | Tempting bridge-term for “holy living” because it is the most fluent Thai vocabulary for structured moral conduct, but ศีล is self-undertaken vow-keeping toward one’s own merit accumulation — the opposite causal direction from Spirit-worked sanctification. | Avoid as any gloss for ἁγιασμός/ἁγιωσύνη; acceptable only as a contrast term in explanatory teaching (“unlike ศีล, which a person undertakes personally, ฯลฯ”). |
| กิเลส (Buddhist “defilements”) | Already forbidden in the Galatians baseline as a gloss for “flesh”; the same collision recurs here at 4:5’s ἐπιθυμία (see §2.1 below) and by extension threatens the whole sanctification unit if translators reach for Buddhist ethical vocabulary generally. | Avoid throughout the sanctification passages (4:1-8; 5:23). |
| ความบริสุทธิ์ (hagiōsynē, [NEW]) | Built cleanly on the baseline adjective บริสุทธิ์; low internal risk, but shares the same ศีล/กิเลส neighborhood pressure as hagiasmos above. | Adopt; apply identical safeguard notes as hagiasmos. |
1.4 Hope in Grief
| Available Thai Vocabulary | Weakness | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| ความหวัง (elpis, [NEW]) | No forbidden-term collision in the word itself, but the doctrinal direction runs opposite to the dominant Thai-Buddhist diagnosis of suffering: unfulfilled longing/craving (ตัณหา) is the problem to be extinguished, not a virtue to be held onto. A grieving reader’s cultural instinct may be “let go of hope/attachment” where Paul commands “hold onto hope.” | Adopt ความหวัง, but every occurrence in the grief-comfort unit (4:13,18) requires accompanying teaching content stating hope here is confident reliance on an already-secured promise (Christ’s own resurrection), not a craving to be relinquished. |
| ตัณหา (Pali “craving,” Second Noble Truth) | Forbidden as a gloss for hope or for any positively-valenced longing in this letter; also independently forbidden as a gloss for ἐπιθυμία (see below). Using it anywhere near the hope vocabulary would associate biblical hope with the very thing Buddhist doctrine teaches must be extinguished. | Never use in connection with hope. |
| ปลง / ปลงตก (Thai idiom, “to come to acceptance/let go” of grief, often with Buddhist impermanence overtones) | A natural-sounding pastoral idiom for grief-comfort in ordinary Thai speech, but its cultural payload is acceptance of loss as final and impermanent, precisely the opposite comfort structure Paul offers (4:13’s “so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” implies the grief itself is transformed by a future certainty, not merely accepted as impermanent). | Avoid as the operative comfort-strategy in 4:13-18 exposition; may be named explicitly as the contrast being corrected. |
| ไม่ต้องเศร้าโศกอย่างไม่มีความหวัง (established periphrastic rendering of 4:13’s negative clause) | None significant; risk is only in truncating the clause and losing “as others who have no hope,” which supplies the entire doctrinal contrast. | Retain full clause structure; do not compress. |
1.5 The Day of the Lord
| Available Thai Vocabulary | Weakness | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| วันขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า (established compound, [NEW]) | No internal lexical weakness; risk is conceptual assimilation to a cyclical cosmology (recurring world-ages; the gradual decline of the Buddhist sāsana toward its eventual disappearance and future renewal under Phra Si Ariya Metrai). | Adopt; teaching content must state explicitly this is a single, unrepeatable, historically final event, terminologically distinct from but doctrinally coordinated with “the coming wrath” (1:10) and the Parousia (4:15; 5:23). |
| กัปป์ / ยุค (Buddhist-cosmological “age/aeon” vocabulary) | Carries strong cyclical-cosmology overtones (the rise and fall of world-cycles under Brahmanic-Buddhist cosmology). | Avoid in any explanatory paraphrase of “the Day of the Lord” or “the times and seasons” (5:1). |
| ขโมยที่มาในเวลากลางคืน (thief-in-the-night idiom, established) | Low internal risk; the danger is external — pairing this unpredictability image with Thai astrological timing-calculation practice (ฤกษ์งามยามดี, auspicious-moment calculation for weddings, ordinations, and business openings) would contradict the very point of the image. | Retain; explicitly avoid co-occurrence with any auspicious-timing vocabulary. |
| ความพินาศ (olethros, “sudden destruction,” [NEW]) | Must be read as the personal judgment of a personal God (consistent with wrath), not an impersonal cosmic catastrophe or a karmic reckoning (a live folk-inference pattern when disaster strikes). | Adopt; anchor grammatically to พระเจ้า as agent wherever the surrounding clause permits. |
2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
2.1 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (too many candidate Thai terms, requiring active fencing)
These are cases where Thai’s problem is abundance: multiple fluent, doctrinally loaded terms compete for the translator’s attention, and the wrong choice would import an entire alien theological system rather than merely sounding awkward.
| English/Greek Term | Competing Thai Terms in the Neighborhood | Doctrinally Correct Choice | Fencing Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| lust/illicit desire (ἐπιθυμία, 4:5) | ตัณหา (Pali technical term, Second Noble Truth); กิเลส (defilements); ความใคร่ / ความปรารถนาที่ชั่ว | ความใคร่ / ความปรารถนาที่ชั่ว | NEVER ตัณหา or กิเลส. These name Buddhism’s own diagnosed root-cause-of-suffering and its remedy-vocabulary; using either would silently substitute Paul’s sin-against-a-personal-God frame with a self-discipline/detachment soteriology. |
| hope (ἐλπίς, throughout) | ความหวัง; (implicitly contrasted with) ตัณหา, อุปาทาน (clinging/attachment) | ความหวัง | Fence against explaining hope using any vocabulary from the attachment/craving family, even by way of contrast, without a full doctrinal note (risk of the contrast itself normalizing the association). |
| flesh/sinful nature (indirectly relevant via sanctification ethics) | กิเลส; เนื้อหนัง (Galatians baseline term) | เนื้อหนัง | Reuse the Galatians baseline fencing rule unchanged; this letter’s sanctification unit (4:1-8) is a natural site for translators to reach for กิเลส as a “more natural” gloss and must be actively guarded against. |
| sleep-death euphemism (κοιμάομαι, 4:13-15) | ล่วงหลับ (established Christian usage); ดับขันธ์ (a Buddhist honorific term for a monk’s/the Buddha’s death, literally “the extinguishing of the aggregates”); เกิดใหม่/กลับชาติมาเกิด (rebirth) | ล่วงหลับ, always co-textually anchored | NEVER ดับขันธ์ (imports the five-aggregates/anattā framework directly into a Christian death-euphemism) and never adjacent to rebirth vocabulary. |
| the human person, in its parts (πνεῦμα, ψυχή, σῶμα, 5:23) | วิญญาณ/จิต/ร่างกาย (proposed); ขันธ์ 5 (the five aggregates: rūpa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra, viññāṇa) | วิญญาณ / จิต (จิตใจ) / ร่างกาย, with explicit unifying teaching | Never present as a Christian equivalent or three-part restatement of the five aggregates. The doctrinal point (one continuing person, sanctified and kept whole by God) is the opposite of anattā’s componential, ownerless-process analysis. This is the single highest anthropological fencing requirement in the letter. |
| holy living / holiness (ἁγιασμός, ἁγιωσύνη) | การทรงชำระให้บริสุทธิ์ / ความบริสุทธิ์ (baseline-derived); ศีล (precepts); ภาวนา (meditative cultivation) | การทรงชำระให้บริสุทธิ์ / ความบริสุทธิ์ | Fence against ศีล and ภาวนา as explanatory bridges; both name self-undertaken disciplines whose telos is one’s own merit or insight, not Spirit-worked transformation credited to another’s initiative. |
| quench (the Spirit), 5:19 | ดับ (ordinary “extinguish”); ดับ as in นิพพาน’s root sense (“blow out” the flame of craving) | ดับ (ordinary usage retained; term itself not replaced) | Not a substitution risk (no forbidden term to avoid — ดับ is the correct ordinary verb), but a root-metaphor collision requiring a brief translator note so the positive Buddhist associations of “extinguishing” are not accidentally transferred to this negative warning. |
| Day of the Lord / eschatological time (5:1-11) | วันขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า; กัปป์/ยุค (cosmological ages); การสิ้นสุดของศาสนา (the sāsana’s decline) | วันขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า | Fence against cosmological-age vocabulary in any explanatory paraphrase of “times and seasons” (5:1). |
2.2 Missing Vocabulary (no adequate existing Thai term; requires calque, compound coinage, or explanatory expansion)
These are concepts for which Thai possesses no ready-made lexical stock at all — the opposite problem from §2.1. The risk here is not doctrinal collision but comprehension failure or accidental flattening into an unrelated register.
| English/Greek Term | Nature of the Gap | Recommended Approach |
|---|---|---|
| ἀπάντησις — the technical “state-visit escort” protocol (4:17) | Thai has no dedicated single word for the ancient practice of a city’s delegation going out to formally meet and then escort an arriving dignitary back into the city. A literal “meet” (พบ, เจอ) or “welcome” (รับ) alone loses the escort-back structure entirely, risking a “final departure to heaven” misreading. | Use a short descriptive phrase (ออกไปรับเสด็จ, “go out to receive [the honored one]”) rather than a single noun, and supply a translator/teaching note explaining the royal-visit background so the escort-back-to-earth trajectory is not lost. |
| ἀρχάγγελος — a graded angelic rank distinct from “angel” generally (4:16) | Thai’s existing angel term (ทูตสวรรค์, already established as distinct from เทวดา) has no native rank-marking vocabulary; a coinage is needed. | Adopt the compound หัวหน้าทูตสวรรค์ (“chief/head messenger of heaven”); explicitly avoid borrowing devarāja-style hierarchy vocabulary from Buddhist-Brahmanic cosmology (e.g., don’t reach for เทวราช or graded deva-class terms). |
| στέφανος καυχήσεως — the Greco-Roman athletic victor’s wreath as reward-metaphor (2:19) | Thai lacks a native cultural referent for a competitive wreath-crown of this specific kind (as distinct from a royal crown, มงกุฎ, which carries sovereignty connotations Paul does not intend here). | Use the compound มงกุฎแห่งความยินดี (“crown of joy/gladness”) rather than a bare มงกุฎ, to keep the sovereignty sense from bleeding in; a brief note on the ancient athletic-victory background aids comprehension for readers unfamiliar with the image. |
| υἱοὶ φωτός / ἡμέρας — the Hebraic “sons of X” idiom naming moral-identity-by-membership (5:5) | Thai does not use a “son/child of [abstract quality]” construction as a natural idiom for moral characterization; a literal calque (บุตรของความสว่าง) is intelligible but is a borrowed structure, not native Thai idiom. | Retain the calque (as already adopted in the core glossary) rather than substituting a native Thai idiom, since any native substitute (e.g., “people of the light”) would lose the covenantal/familial “sonship” resonance this letter’s adoption theology elsewhere depends on. Flag for a brief explanatory note on first occurrence. |
| κέλευσμα — a specifically military/naval command-shout register (4:16) | Thai has command vocabulary (คำสั่ง, บังคับ) but these are administrative/legal registers, not the specific “commander’s shout that a fleet or army obeys instantly” register the Greek evokes. | Use เสียงบัญชา (“voice of command”) rather than a bureaucratic-register alternative (คำสั่ง alone), to preserve the sense of an authoritative shout compelling immediate response, and pair with teaching content noting the military-command background. |
3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Satan (Σατανᾶς) | Transliterate — ซาตาน | Established Thai Christian convention; a paraphrase (e.g., “the evil one,” ผู้ชั่วร้าย) would risk merging this specific personal adversary into Thailand’s populous folk-animist category of malevolent spirits (ผี), whereas the transliteration preserves his status as a unique, named personal being. |
| Amen / Hallelujah (not in 1 Thessalonians itself but governs closing benediction register at 5:28) | Transliterate — อาเมน | Per baseline transliteration standards; no change needed for this curriculum. |
| Parousia (παρουσία) | Paraphrase — การเสด็จมาของพระคริสต์ (compound, not a transliterated loanword) | Unlike “Messiah” (a proper title with no native equivalent, hence transliterated in the baseline as พระเมสสิยาห์), Parousia is a common Greek noun (“arrival/presence”) functioning as a technical term through repeated contextual use, not a proper name. Thai already possesses the necessary honorific vocabulary (เสด็จ) to construct a natural, doctrinally load-bearing compound; transliterating “parousia” itself (e.g., ปาร์รูเซีย) would produce an opaque loanword with zero devotional resonance for either Protestant congregations or new believers, and would forfeit the audience-comprehension benefit that เสด็จ provides. |
| Hagiasmos / Hagiosynē (ἁγιασμός / ἁγιωσύνη) | Paraphrase — reuse baseline compound การทรงชำระให้บริสุทธิ์ / ความบริสุทธิ์ | Consistent with established baseline practice; no single Thai word carries the full sense, and the existing baseline compound is already well-tested. |
| Koimaomai (κοιμάομαι) | Paraphrase using an established idiom — ล่วงหลับ | This is not a foreign proper term requiring transliteration but a euphemism requiring a natural-sounding, already-idiomatic Thai equivalent; ล่วงหลับ is that idiom and is retained, with the co-textual anchoring rule of §2.1 attached. |
| Harpazō (ἁρπάζω) | Paraphrase — ถูกรับขึ้นไป (passive compound) | The English theological tradition’s term “rapture” is itself a Latin-derived technical coinage (from rapio); Thai has no comparable single-word theological coinage and does not need one. A transliterated “rapture” (เรฟเจอร์ or similar) would be maximally opaque to Thai readers and would forfeit the doctrinally essential passive-voice, divine-agency construction that ถูกรับขึ้นไป supplies naturally. |
| Apantēsis (ἀπάντησις) | Paraphrase with explanatory expansion — ออกไปรับเสด็จ / การไปรับ | See §2.2; no single Thai word carries the ancient royal-visit protocol sense, and transliteration is not applicable to a common Greek noun of this kind. |
| Archangelos (ἀρχάγγελος) | Paraphrase (compound coinage on an established base) — หัวหน้าทูตสวรรค์ | Built on the already-established ทูตสวรรค์ rather than transliterated (อาร์คแอนเจิล), since the compound is fully transparent to Thai readers and avoids introducing an unnecessary loanword register into an already-well-served semantic field. |
| Messiah-adjacent naming (Χριστός used as a name throughout, not discussed as a title in this letter) | Retain established transliteration — พระคริสต์ | Per baseline; no new decision required, included here only to confirm continuity across curricula. |
| Day of the Lord (ἡμέρα κυρίου) | Paraphrase — วันขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า | A calque built entirely from already-established baseline vocabulary (วัน + the baseline’s own องค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า for “Lord”); no transliteration candidate exists or is needed, since the phrase is fully compositional in the source language itself. |
General principle governing this curriculum: transliteration is reserved for (a) proper names/titles with no native lexical content (Satan, Messiah-class terms, Amen), consistent with baseline practice, while technical theological phrases built from ordinary vocabulary (Parousia, Day of the Lord, rapture/harpazō, apantēsis) are paraphrased using compounds built on already-established baseline terms. This avoids proliferating untranslated loanwords that would carry no devotional resonance for a Thai audience while preserving doctrinal precision through controlled compounding.
4. Ranked List of This Letter’s Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity: doctrinal centrality × strength of competing Thai semantic-neighborhood pull × frequency/pastoral exposure. All items below require human theologian review per the risk tiers already assigned in assets/bible_term_registry.json.
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Spirit, soul, body tripartite anthropology (5:23) — Highest combined risk in the letter. Sits directly beside Thai Buddhism’s fluent, textbook-level five-aggregates (khandha) analysis under anattā (no permanent self). A careless rendering doesn’t just risk one wrong word; it risks the entire benediction being heard as compatible with a no-self anthropology, precisely inverted from Paul’s point (one continuing person, kept whole by God for Christ’s coming).
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Sowing/craving-adjacent hope vocabulary in the grief-comfort unit (ἐλπίς at 4:13,18; contrast with ตัณหา/ปลงตก) — Second-highest risk because it sits at the pastoral point of maximum audience vulnerability: a grieving reader is most receptive to whatever comfort-framework is culturally closest to hand, and Thai’s closest cultural comfort-framework (acceptance of loss as impermanent, non-attachment) runs in the opposite doctrinal direction from Paul’s command to hold a confident hope.
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Lust/illicit desire, ἐπιθυμία (4:5), vs. ตัณหา — A single forbidden-substitution error here would import Buddhism’s entire diagnosis-and-remedy structure for suffering (craving as root cause; detachment as cure) in place of Paul’s sin-against-a-personal-God frame; already flagged Critical and cross-referenced against the Galatians baseline’s กิเลส prohibition.
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Koimaomai / “fallen asleep” without resurrection anchoring (4:13,14,15) — High risk specifically because the euphemism is doctrinally correct in isolation but underdetermined without its co-text; a Phase 2 segment-boundary error (splitting a sentence so the euphemism is translated separately from its resurrection anchor) would silently open the door to a samsara-compatible reading.
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Parousia and its royal-honorific register (1:10; 2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23) — High risk due to sustained, letter-wide frequency combined with Thailand’s uniquely sensitive lèse-majesté register; a single inconsistent occurrence across the five instances would fracture both doctrinal consistency and cultural safety simultaneously.
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Day of the Lord vs. cyclical cosmology (5:1-11) — High risk concentrated in a single dense unit; the thief-in-the-night and labor-pains images are vivid and memorable, increasing the chance a well-meaning teacher reaches for familiar Thai cosmological vocabulary (กัปป์, ยุค, การสิ้นสุดของศาสนา) to make the passage “land,” inadvertently cyclicalizing a linear, final event.
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Harpazō / “caught up” (4:17) vs. iddhi-power and spirit-seizure folk categories — High risk because Thai popular religion offers two distinct, equally tempting misreadings (self-attained meditative levitation; folk-animist spirit abduction) for the same single clause; passive-voice discipline is the only safeguard and is easy to lose in natural-sounding paraphrase.
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Sanctification ethics vs. ศีล/precept-keeping framework (4:1-8) — Medium-high risk arising less from any single word than from the cumulative ethical-instruction register of the whole unit, which superficially resembles precept-instruction (do not do X, abstain from Y) and can drift toward being taught as merit-building observance rather than Spirit-empowered transformation.
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Idols and the conversion narrative (1:9) — naming risk in application, not translation — Medium-high risk not in the word รูปเคารพ itself (correctly abstract) but in Phase 2/teaching-note temptation to name Thai Buddha images or spirit-house objects explicitly by way of illustration, converting a proclamation text into a confrontational one.
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Quench the Spirit (5:19) and the นิพพาน root-metaphor echo — Lower absolute risk (moral valence is reversed, reducing confusion likelihood) but included because of its proximity, within the same short closing unit, to several Critical-risk items above; a translator fatigued by the preceding high-risk decisions may pass over this one without the brief note it needs.
5. Summary Table: Gap Type by Doctrine
| Doctrine | Primary Gap Type | Governing Section |
|---|---|---|
| The Return of Christ | Crowded neighborhood (royal-honorific register) | §1.1, §2.1, §3, #5 |
| Resurrection of Believers | Crowded neighborhood (rebirth vocabulary) + missing vocabulary (apantēsis, archangel) | §1.2, §2.1, §2.2, #4, #7 |
| Sanctification | Crowded neighborhood (ศีล, กิเลส, ตัณหา) | §1.3, §2.1, #3, #8 |
| Hope in Grief | Crowded neighborhood (ตัณหา, ปลงตก) | §1.4, §2.1, #2 |
| The Day of the Lord | Crowded neighborhood (cyclical cosmology) | §1.5, §2.1, #6 |
This document feeds directly into Step 2’s extension of doctrine_risk_registry.json and the Phase 2 AI translation requirements (12_ai_translation_requirements.md) for this curriculum. No recommendation here contradicts the Romans/Galatians baseline; all baseline forbidden-substitution rules are treated as binding and are cross-referenced, not restated in full, throughout.