01 Executive Summary — Acts — English → Arabic Translation Requirements

Why it matters

Acts is Luke’s narrated history of the church’s birth and expansion — Pentecost, apostolic preaching, persecution, Paul’s conversion, and the gospel’s advance from Jerusalem to Rome. Unlike Romans’s epistolary argument, Acts confronts an Arabic-speaking, largely Muslim-background audience with narrated events and public confrontations that collide directly with specific, named Islamic doctrines: the Spirit’s identity (Jibril vs. co-equal Person), the crucifixion’s historicity (denied at Qur’an 4:157), repentance’s mechanism (self-sufficient tawbah vs. Christ-grounded forgiveness), and the very titles Muhammad and the Qur’an already claim (رسول, شهيد, آية, الطريق). This is the highest-density doctrinal-collision curriculum yet built on this Language Package, concentrated most heavily in the core passage, Acts 2:1–41.

Key findings

• 78 enforced terms now govern Phase 2 translation: 42 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline, 36 newly introduced by Acts (repentance, baptism, the Name, signs and wonders, the Way, witness, boldness, and 29 others).
• 46 of 78 terms (59%) are Critical or High risk, requiring mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence: 18 Critical, 28 High, 25 Medium, 7 Low.
• At the doctrine level, 27 of 36 doctrines (75%) require human theologian review: 11 Critical, 16 High, 7 Medium (native speaker review), 2 Low (automated review) — per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json.
• The core passage alone (Acts 2:1–41) touches 9 of the 11 Critical doctrines: Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Gift of the Holy Spirit, Repentance and Baptism, Name of Jesus as Exclusive Saving Authority, Messianic Promise, Deity/Sonship/Lordship of Christ, and Resurrection of Christ — making it the single highest-stakes stretch of text in the entire curriculum.
• Two genuinely new collision classes appear in Acts with no Romans precedent: (1) التوبة (repentance) as a direct competitor to Islam’s central self-sufficient tawbah doctrine, and (2) الطريق (the Way) sitting inside a uniquely crowded neighborhood (shari’a’s root, Sufi tariqa, and the Qur’an’s daily-recited “straight path”).
• No term in the curriculum requires a novel coinage — every gap resolves to an existing compound phrase or established transliteration, per 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.

Risks

• Highest risk: التوبة (repentance) taught as free-standing. If Acts 2:38’s repentance is quoted apart from its clause-partner (“and be baptized… in the name of Jesus Christ”), it reads as an endorsement of Islam’s sincerity-sufficient tawbah — the single most likely silent doctrinal drift in this curriculum.
• Cult-rendering risk at the core passage’s climax. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation restores “Jehovah” at Acts 2:21 while keeping a lesser title for Jesus at 2:36, severing the deliberate Psalm-110/Joel identification the sermon’s entire argument depends on. Phase 2 must actively guard against echoing this pattern.
• آيات وعجائب (signs and wonders) recurs 11+ times inside the single most religiously loaded common noun in Arabic (آية = a Qur’anic verse) — an unavoidable, correct, but high-exposure rendering.
• شاهد/شهود (witness) invites the shahada/shahid association at the exact point (Acts 7, Stephen’s death) where the narrative itself moves toward martyrdom — a collision the text invites rather than one avoidable by word choice.
• Real-world safety exposure, not just translation risk: الجرأة (boldness) and الاضطهاد (persecution) carry live apostasy-law consequences for readers and translators in many Arabic-speaking contexts — this is a pastoral/security concern layered on top of the linguistic one.
• Circumcision and dietary-purity passages (ch. 10, 11, 15) risk being misheard as an attack on practices (khitan, halal/haram) that carry independent, unrelated positive value for Muslim-background and Jewish-background readers alike.

Opportunities

• Acts 5:3-4 (lying to the Spirit is lying to God) supplies a direct, in-narrative proof of the Holy Spirit’s personal deity — stronger textual leverage against the Jibril-identification than anything available in Romans alone.
• Acts 9:5 and 17:26-28 offer unusually concrete, geographically situated bridge points (Damascus, “in him we live and move and have our being”) for teaching Christ’s Lordship and God’s providence respectively.
• السحر (sorcery) and روح تنجيم (divination) are genuinely bridge-friendly terms — Islamic tradition also condemns both, offering rare common moral ground.
• مشتركة (economic sharing, Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-35) parallels zakat/sadaqah’s voluntary-generosity ethic, a positive point of contact if carefully bounded as historically specific, not a universal institutional rule.
• Acts 20:27’s “whole counsel of God” offers a text-internal counter-argument to the tahrif claim that the Christian Scriptures are a corrupted or partial record.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 46 Critical/High terms and all 27 Critical/High doctrines through mandatory human theologian review in Phase 2 Step 17, with zero exceptions, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json.
2. Fix five thesis-level verses (Acts 2:36, 2:38, 4:12, 16:31, 1:8) to a single verbatim Arabic rendering, recorded in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md, and reuse it identically across every lesson.
3. Enforce the Acts-specific forbidden-substitution list (never الرجوع alone for repentance; never سيدنا for Lord; never a severed Jehovah/Lord identification at 2:21/2:36; never soften “ولدتك” at 13:33) at every Phase 2 validation pass.
4. Require a first-use translator gloss wherever آيات وعجائب, العنصرة, or الطريق first appear in any lesson, per the mandatory-gloss list in 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.
5. Flag every persecution/boldness/evangelism segment for safety-aware review, not only theological review, carrying forward the baseline’s evangelism caution at Acts-scale frequency.
6. Confirm YouVersion version ID 411 (SVD) against the live API before Phase 2 batch hyperlink generation, per 05_translation_landscape.md.

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This summary is derived from and must be read alongside assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, and analysis/05_translation_landscape.md.