01 Executive Summary — Luke 1–24 (English → Bengali)

Why it matters

The Luke curriculum extends the Bengali Romans Language Package into eight new doctrines (Savior for All Nations, the Spirit’s Work in Salvation History, Good News to the Poor, Repentance and Forgiveness, Prayer and Dependence, the Kingdom Present and Future, the Cost and Joy of Discipleship, and Compassion/Table Fellowship) across all 24 chapters, anchored theologically in Luke 4:16-21. This passage alone concentrates nearly every highest-risk decision in the whole book — Spirit-anointing, the messianic self-declaration, the ἄφεσις (aphesis) wordplay, Jubilee background, and inaugurated “today” fulfillment — making it the load-bearing center of gravity for Phase 2 execution, not merely a topical illustration.

Key findings

• 119 total glossary terms are now locked in translation_memory.json: 36 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline and 83 new terms this book introduces.
• 35 Critical-risk terms and 39 High-risk terms (74 of 119, 62%) require mandatory human theologian sign-off on every occurrence — a materially heavier load than Romans, driven by Luke’s narrative density (parables, healings, table scenes) compared to Romans’ more discursive argument.
• 36 doctrines are tracked in doctrine_risk_registry.json: 16 Critical + 16 High = 32 doctrines (89%) requiring human theologian review; 3 Medium doctrines route to native-speaker review; 1 Low doctrine (Thanksgiving and Praise) is automated-review-only.
• A genuinely new risk category — absent from the Romans baseline entirely — is the ἄφεσις (aphesis) dual-sense crux: Luke deliberately reuses one Greek word for both “release to captives” (4:18) and “forgiveness of sins” (1:77; 3:3; 24:47), and Bengali cannot preserve the wordplay because মুক্তি (the natural rendering of “release”) is the exact term the baseline forbids for salvation-adjacent doctrine (Hindu mokṣa/rebirth-cycle collision). The resolution — splitting into মুক্তি (narrow, 4:18 only) vs. পাপের ক্ষমা (everywhere else) — must be flagged occurrence-by-occurrence for the whole book.
• শিষ্য (“disciple”) carries the single highest cumulative collision risk: it is the everyday Bengali term for a Hindu guru’s pupil and a Buddhist monk’s pupil, recurring 20+ times across nine chapters, with no safer lexical alternative available.
• One item remains an open, unresolved gap requiring a dedicated ruling before Phase 2: afterlife/intermediate-state vocabulary at Luke 16:22-23 (Hades / Abraham’s bosom), for which the baseline package has no precedent at all.

Risks

• Doctrinal collapse risk in the core passage: অভিষেক করা (“anoint,” Luke 4:18) is simultaneously the required Bengali verb and the standard term for Hindu idol-bathing and royal coronation ritual — the single densest collision point in the curriculum, sitting inside the theological anchor text itself.
• Syncretism risk at Luke 17:21: rendering “kingdom within you” instead of the required “kingdom among you” would import Advaita Vedanta’s ātman-within-every-soul doctrine directly into a Christological kingdom claim.
• Cult-drift risk: Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation renderings (impersonal Holy Spirit “force,” deferred-entry Paradise via comma-shift at 23:43, যিহোবা for God, “torture stake” for cross) circulate in Bengali and must be actively checked against, not merely avoided by default.
• Social/legal risk: mission and evangelism tone (9:1-6; 10:1-16; 24:46-49) carries real sensitivity in Muslim-majority Bangladesh and social friction in Hindu-majority West Bengal, requiring native-speaker judgment beyond lexical correctness.
• Pastoral risk: Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (12:10) and the Jesus-eats-with-sinners table-fellowship material both carry risk of miscommunicating either false despair or false permissiveness if handled without mandatory framing notes.

Opportunities

• Bengali’s family-warmth vocabulary (আব্বা already familiar to Muslim-background readers as an everyday word for “father”) gives Luke’s prayer material (ch. 11, Gethsemane in ch. 22) an unusually strong relational landing point.
• Luke’s own deliberate use of a despised outsider (the Samaritan) as moral hero offers a built-in, textually-grounded tool for confronting residual caste and communal-identity hierarchy in both West Bengal and Bangladesh, if translated with full force rather than softened into generic tolerance language.
• The established YouVersion reference version (BENGALIOV, ID 331) is now fixed for this and all future Bengali curricula, removing a recurring decision point from subsequent Phase 1 cycles.

Recommended actions

1. Route every occurrence of ἄφεσις, without exception, through mandatory theologian sign-off recording the active sense before any segment is finalized.
2. Require explicit contrastive framing (biblical discipleship vs. guru-shishya/pir-murid) at the first occurrence of শিষ্য in every Phase 2 document.
3. Obtain a dedicated theologian ruling on Hades/Abraham’s-bosom vocabulary (Luke 16:22-23) before that chapter enters Phase 2 processing.
4. Run every draft segment touching Luke 4:18-19, 17:21, and 23:43 against the cult-rendering comparison table in 05_translation_landscape.md §3 before human review, not only at final QA.
5. Commission a native-speaker pass on disability terminology (Luke 14:13,21 banquet list) and on Sabbath/mission-tone segments ahead of full-book Phase 2 scheduling.

Full supporting detail: 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, 05_translation_landscape.md, 04_comparative_theology.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json.