01 Executive Summary — Acts Curriculum, Bengali Language Package

Why It Matters

Acts is the highest-stakes Bengali translation project undertaken on this pipeline to date. It sits directly on top of Bengal’s two dominant religious traditions — Shakta/Vaishnava Hinduism and Sufi-inflected folk Islam — at exactly the points where those traditions most sharply diverge from historic Christian orthodoxy: the deity and sonship of Christ, his bodily resurrection, and the meaning of religious conversion itself. Unlike Romans, which is theological exposition, Acts is a first-person narrative full of conversions, miracles, idol-confrontations, and martyrdoms — every one of which has a live, culturally loaded Bengali-language neighbor-concept ready to be substituted by mistake. Getting this Language Package right protects both doctrinal fidelity and, in at least one case (ধর্মান্তর/“conversion”), the real-world legal and social safety of translators and readers in India and Bangladesh.

Key Findings

• Full-book coverage achieved. All 28 chapters of Acts were analyzed; 5 chapters (18, 22, 23, 25, 27) were explicitly reviewed and confirmed to introduce no new theological vocabulary, reusing established baseline and Acts-specific terms.
• 100 enforced terms now live in the Acts translation_memory.json: 41 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 59 newly coined or derived for Acts-specific vocabulary (repentance, baptism, Pentecost, vision, sorcery, the Way, conversion/turning, pagan gods, Artemis, circumcision, and more).
• 50 Critical- or High-risk terms require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence (17 Critical, 33 High) — a substantially larger Critical/High term surface than the Romans baseline, driven by Acts’ narrative density.
• 28 of 35 doctrines (9 Critical, 19 High) route to mandatory human theologian review; 7 Medium-risk doctrines route to native speaker review; zero doctrines are automated-only, reflecting the unusually high stakes of narrative material compared to Romans’ epistolary exposition.
• Five collision points rank Critical severity, each requiring standing translator notes at every occurrence, not merely first use: (1) Conversion/turning vs. legally-loaded ধর্মান্তর, (2) Great Goddess Artemis vs. live Shakta goddess-devotion vocabulary, (3) Repentance vs. Islamic তওবা, (4) Pagan gods vs. the boundary of ঈশ্বর, (5) “Offspring of God” (creational) vs. the baseline’s soteriological adoption doctrine.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41) is disproportionately dense: nearly every major curriculum doctrine (Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Gospel to Jews and Gentiles, Repentance and Baptism, Church as Community, Lordship/Deity/Resurrection of Christ) receives its first, and often definitive, statement within these 41 verses — the entire passage is flagged for mandatory theologian review regardless of individual segment risk tier.

Risks

• ধর্মান্তর (formal religious conversion) is not merely a theological risk but a live legal-political term under Indian anti-conversion statutes and Bangladeshi communal-tension discourse; any lapse into this term anywhere in the Paul-conversion narrative (chs. 9, 22, 26) creates real-world exposure, not just doctrinal imprecision.
• দর্শন (vision) and দেবী (goddess) sit directly on top of the single most active devotional vocabulary in Bengali Hindu religious life (temple darshan; Durga/Kali devotion, including the standing title মহাদেবী) — six major vision narratives and the entire Ephesus riot (ch. 19) require standing, not one-time, translator notes.
• শহীদ (martyr) has no safe native substitute; the required descriptive-phrase workaround (প্রাণ দিয়ে সাক্ষ্য দেওয়া) must be enforced with zero exceptions across Stephen’s and James’s death narratives (chs. 7, 12).
• জাদুবিদ্যা (sorcery) and গণনার আত্মা (spirit of divination) sit immediately adjacent to widespread Bengali folk tantra-mantra, taweez, and astrology practice; any lexical bleed into the legitimate miracle vocabulary (পরাক্রম, চিহ্ন ও আশ্চর্য কাজ) would recast apostolic authority as one more folk-power claim among many.
• Cult and syncretistic reference materials (Watchtower/Jehovah’s Witness Bengali editions denying Christ’s full deity; Hindu-syncretistic satsang-style materials substituting ভগবান/অবতার/পরমাত্মা) circulate in the same linguistic space and must be excluded entirely from any Phase 2 reference consultation.

Opportunities

• আব্বা (Abba) and “the Way” (পথ) land with unusual warmth and clarity for Bengali Muslim-background readers without requiring any theological compromise — Abba is already the everyday Bengali Muslim word for father, and পথ is a plain, uncontested word onto which the early church’s own exclusive self-designation can be safely anchored.
• ভক্তিপরায়ণ (devout) and the heart-language principle embedded in Acts 2:6-8 (each hearer receiving the gospel in his own dialect) give this curriculum a built-in, theologically resonant argument for the value of vernacular Bengali Scripture translation itself.
• The Jerusalem Council narrative (ch. 15) offers an unusually concrete, story-driven vehicle for teaching grace-apart-from-merit to audiences steeped in either karma-ledger or weighed-deeds frameworks — more accessible than Romans’ abstract exposition of the same doctrine.
• Acts’ consistent mainstream-translation convergence (confirmed in 05_translation_landscape.md: no surveyed mainstream Bengali edition departs from this package’s Critical-tier term choices) means Phase 2 translators can proceed with high confidence that this package’s rulings already match the existing Bengali Christian publishing consensus, minimizing reader unfamiliarity.

Recommended Actions

1. Lock the Acts translation_memory.json (100 terms) and doctrine_risk_registry.json (35 doctrines) as binding inputs to Phase 2 before any segment translation begins, loaded alongside — never in place of — the Romans baseline assets.
2. Prioritize Acts 2 (core passage) and Acts 19 (Artemis narrative) for earliest Phase 2 batch processing, per 12_ai_translation_requirements.md’s performance notes, so theologian feedback on the highest-density chapters is available before the remaining 26 chapters are finalized.
3. Enforce the five standing (recurring, not first-use-only) translator notes — vision, servant-of-God, Artemis, offspring-of-God, and sorcery/divination — as hard validation gates in Step 17, not optional annotations.
4. Confirm the numeric YouVersion version_id for the Bengali O.V. (BENOV) edition before Phase 2 lock-in, and propagate it to all future Bengali curricula on this pipeline per the citation convention established here.
5. Route all 9 Critical and 19 High doctrines (28 total) to human theologian review and all 7 Medium doctrines to native speaker review exactly as specified in doctrine_risk_registry.json; zero doctrines in this curriculum qualify for automated-only review.