Executive Summary: Acts 1–28 (English → Assamese) — Phase 1 Requirements Complete

The bottom line: Phase 1 requirements for translating the Acts curriculum into Assamese are complete, extending the existing Romans Language Package. Acts introduces significantly more doctrinal-collision surface area than Romans — driven by its narrative genre, its Pentecost/pneumatology core passage, and its direct confrontations with occult practice and idolatry — and requires a substantially larger human theologian review footprint in Phase 2.

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Why it matters

• Acts is the narrative record of the doctrines Romans argues propositionally — the Spirit poured out, the gospel crossing the Jew-Gentile boundary, apostles working miracles, believers baptized and martyred. Narrated events are more likely than abstract argument to be mapped by Assamese readers onto an existing ritual template (deodhani trance, ritual bathing, avatar-descent, siddhi-power), so every Critical/High doctrine in this book carries a live syncretism risk at the point it is depicted happening, not just asserted.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1–41, Pentecost) concentrates the single highest-risk phenomenon in the entire two-book Language Package: Spirit-filling and tongues, occurring in a public, dramatic, group setting that closely mirrors the shape of Assamese Shakta spirit-possession trance (deodhani) at Kamakhya and related shrines — the most probable single point of doctrinal drift in Phase 2.
• Downstream lesson quality, learner trust, and doctrinal fidelity all depend on locking these terms now, before any Phase 2 segment translation begins.

Key findings

• 125 terms are now locked in the updated translation_memory.json (v2): 47 terms inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, plus 78 new terms (74 new theological/narrative terms and 4 new proper names) introduced by Acts.
• Of these 125 terms, 16 are Critical risk and 45 are High risk — 61 terms (49% of the glossary) require human-theologian-level scrutiny in Phase 2, versus roughly 32 of 47 (68%) in the Romans-only baseline; the proportion is lower but the absolute number requiring escalation nearly doubles.
• The companion doctrine_risk_registry.json records 39 doctrines for Acts: 12 Critical, 20 High, 4 Medium, 3 Low, with 31 doctrines requiring human theologian review and 5 requiring native-speaker review — an increase from Romans’ 30 theologian-review doctrines, despite Acts being roughly the same length.
• Five documented patterns of cult/syncretistic Assamese-language rendering already circulate and must be actively guarded against: Jehovah’s Witness divine-name/impersonal-Spirit substitution, Unitarian/adoptionist readings of Acts 2:36, Ekasarana-syncretistic “insider movement” vocabulary, Muslim-contextualized “Isa” substitution, and prosperity-gospel transactional-gift framing.
• A YouVersion version ID and Acts book-name/citation convention (পাঁচনি কাৰ্য্য, code ACT) have been fixed for the first time in this Language Package (the Romans baseline never recorded one) and are pending final live-API verification before Phase 2 production use.

Risks

• Critical-tier collision risk is concentrated in six places: (1) Spirit-filling vs. deodhani trance-possession at the core passage itself; (2) দেহধাৰণ/অৱতাৰ collision now extended into ascension, Son of Man, and Living God narrative events; (3) মূৰ্তি (idols) precision at Athens and Ephesus; (4) পুনৰুত্থান vs. পুনৰ্জন্ম, repeated at higher density than in Romans across nearly every apostolic sermon; (5) শয়তান as a real, active adversary vs. an already-defeated mythic asura (Durga/Kamakhya Mahishasura-mardini pattern); (6) পথ (“the Way”) and সম্প্ৰদায় (“sect”) risking a “one path/sampradaya among many” misreading of the movement’s own exclusivist self-understanding.
• Acts narrates baptism and repentance at far higher frequency than Romans discusses them abstractly (10+ baptism narratives; 8+ repentance calls), multiplying exposure to the ritual-bathing and karmic-expiation collision risks already flagged in the baseline.
• Three religious-vocabulary collision zones are unique to Acts and absent from Romans: occult confrontation (sorcery, divination spirits, Satan) colliding with Assam’s ওজা/tantra-mantra/deodhani practice; idol polemic colliding with the identical word used for venerated Hindu temple images (মূৰ্তি); and Assam’s substantial Muslim population’s own vocabulary for circumcision (সুন্নত) and martyrdom (শহীদ), both now explicitly forbidden substitutions.
• Institutional labeling risk is elevated: Acts narrates synagogue and church as two distinct, ongoing institutions within the same storyline (unlike Romans), requiring translators to hold সমাজ-গৃহ, মণ্ডলী, and the forbidden নামঘৰ/মন্দিৰ consistently apart across rapid narrative transitions.

Opportunities

• Acts’ Jerusalem Council resolution (15:11, “saved through grace”) gives the curriculum a second, narrative-form articulation of the grace-versus-merit doctrine already central to Romans — an opportunity to reinforce, not just repeat, the baseline’s most important soteriological distinction through story rather than argument.
• The book’s Jew-Gentile inclusion narrative (Acts 10–11, 15) offers a uniquely powerful, story-driven vehicle for confronting caste-linked spiritual hierarchy in a way Romans’ more abstract “no distinction” language cannot match — properly fenced, this is a high-value teaching asset rather than only a risk.
• Because Acts is the most narrative-dense book yet processed in this Language Package, the transliteration/paraphrase/retain-with-note decision framework fixed in 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md §3 is now validated across a much larger and more varied term set and can be reused as binding precedent for any future narrative-genre curriculum (e.g., the Gospels).

Recommended actions

1. Lock translation_memory.json v2 and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md v2.0 immediately as the enforced Phase 2 baseline for Acts; no segment translation should begin against an earlier version.
2. Prioritize human theologian review capacity for Phase 2 scheduling: budget for the 31 theologian-review doctrines and 61 Critical/High terms, concentrated in Acts 2 (Pentecost), 8–10 (Gentile inclusion, occult confrontation), 15 (Jerusalem Council), and 17/19 (idolatry).
3. Verify the pending YouVersion version ID (05_translation_landscape.md §5.1) against the live API before any learner-facing hyperlink is published.
4. Brief all Phase 2 translators explicitly on the five documented cult/syncretistic rendering patterns (§4 of 05_translation_landscape.md) as a mandatory pre-flight step, since these are documented as actively circulating in Assamese-language materials today, not merely theoretical risks.
5. Treat narrated events with the same escalation weight as doctrinal assertions throughout Phase 2 — the single most important procedural adaptation this book requires relative to the Romans baseline.