Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 Translation Requirements (Bodo)

Why it matters

Acts is the New Testament book most likely to be misheard through the Bodo religious lens rather than read on its own terms. Where Romans discussed the Holy Spirit, calling, and spiritual power in largely epistolary abstraction, Acts narrates wind, fire, Spirit-filling, tongues, visions, exorcism of a divining spirit, and apostolic miracle after miracle — as concrete, repeated, public events. Every one of these has a live behavioral counterpart in Bathouism’s Kherai puja (the doudini’s trance-possession, oracular speech, and mediumistic सक्ति) or in Brahma Dharma’s Sanskritized reform ethic (merit, codified conduct, dietary purity). The core passage, Acts 2:1-41 (Pentecost), concentrates the single highest-risk term collision in this entire Language Package: wind (बार) and fire (ओर) are literally the names of two of the five sacred elements of the sijou plant, the aniconic embodiment of Bathoubwrai in every Bodo household courtyard — a collision with no lexical escape route.

Key findings

• 36 doctrines analyzed, spanning all 28 chapters (per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json and analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md): 14 Critical, 18 High, 3 Medium, 1 Low — 32 of 36 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review.
• 103 individual terms tracked in assets/bible_term_registry.json (Acts): 27 Critical, 38 High, 33 Medium, 5 Low — 65 terms (63%) require mandatory theologian review, the highest proportion of any book in this Language Package to date.
• ~55 new theological terms were required beyond the Romans baseline’s 47 relevant inherited terms, now formally seeded into assets/translation_memory.json (Acts) — nearly doubling the baseline’s enforced glossary.
• Three genuinely new comparative-religion collisions not present in Romans: (1) the Acts 2:2-3 wind/fire theophany colliding with the sijou plant’s elemental names; (2) the Acts 16:16-18 spirit of divination as the most direct narrative parallel in the whole New Testament to doudini trance-possession; (3) church “elder” language colliding with बुरहा/बर’ऐ, the honorific reserved for Bathoubwrai and the Kherai-pantheon elder-deities.
• Acts supplies the New Testament’s own narrative resolution of justification apart from the law (Acts 13, 15) and the gospel’s unrestricted expansion to Gentiles (Acts 10-15) — reinforcing, rather than merely repeating, Romans’ Critical-tier doctrines.

Risks

• Highest risk (no lexical escape): बार/ओर at Acts 2:2-3 cannot be resolved by word substitution the way ईश्वर avoids बाथौबुरै; risk must be managed entirely through mandatory, repeated teaching framing.
• Cumulative risk from repetition: Spirit-filling, tongues, and visions recur across nine-plus passages (chs. 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 26), multiplying doudini-possession-adjacent exposure far beyond Romans’ single mention.
• Forbidden-substitution proliferation: the elder/overseer office recurs concretely five times (11:30; 14:23; 15:2-6; 20:17-28; 21:18), multiplying occasions for a translator to reach for the natural but forbidden honorific बुरहा/बर’ऐ.
• Sect/cult echo risk (new to this analysis): Acts 2:38/8:16/10:48/19:5 baptismal-formula language is live ground for Oneness Pentecostal missions active in North-East India; Acts 20:28 is the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation’s own documented divergence point; Acts 8:14-19/19:6 (laying on of hands) parallels Latter-day Saint priesthood-ordinance claims. None of these patterns may be echoed.
• Concrete, present-day pastoral exposure: Acts 15’s ban on food offered to idols has an unusually direct, non-hypothetical parallel to consuming food from Bathoubwrai/Kherai puja offerings — a live question for converts with continuing family ties to Bathou practice.

Opportunities

• Acts 1:6-7 (the disciples’ own mistaken territorial-kingdom question) is a built-in teaching moment for correcting kingdom-of-God/territorial-politics conflation, given the Bodoland Territorial Region’s contemporary politics — this curriculum can use the text’s own self-correction rather than fighting the misreading from outside.
• Acts 16:16-18’s exorcism narrative offers a direct, respectful, non-evasive teaching opportunity to address the doudini parallel explicitly rather than avoiding it — Christ’s authority over a real, subordinate, deceptive spirit, not a dismissal of the phenomenon’s reality.
• Acts 8:18-20 (Simon Magus) provides the New Testament’s own explicit rebuke of treating spiritual power as a purchasable commodity — a ready-made teaching bridge to the grace-versus-transaction doctrine the Romans baseline already established for Romans 4 and 11:5-6.
• Acts’ geographic sweep “to the ends of the earth” (1:8 → 28:31) allows mission (मंगल खबरनि दायो) to be taught as the church’s own ongoing calling, addressing the historical entanglement of American Baptist mission memory with colonial-era administration among the Bodo.

Recommended actions

1. Deploy assets/translation_memory.json (Acts) and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md together before any Phase 2 segment translation begins; neither is sufficient alone.
2. Route all 65 Critical/High-risk terms and 32 Critical/High-risk doctrines to mandatory human theologian review before publication; do not permit automated-only sign-off on any Acts 2, 8, 15, 16, or 20 segment.
3. Confirm the exact orthography of ओर/उ (fire) and the working book title गोदान जायगारिनि खामानि against a current printed Bodo Bible before Phase 2 deployment, per the verification caveats already logged in analysis/05_translation_landscape.md and analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.
4. Verify the YouVersion version_id for the Bible Society of India’s Bodo Bible edition before operationalizing any hyperlink generation; treat it as a placeholder until confirmed.
5. Brief all human reviewers on the five sect/cult echo risks named above (Watchtower, Oneness Pentecostal, Latter-day Saint, prosperity-gospel, Christianized-Bathou syncretism) before Acts review work begins, since these are framing risks that can survive a passing term-level glossary check.

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This summary synthesizes assets/translation_memory.json (Acts), assets/bible_term_registry.json (Acts), assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (Acts), and analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md. It must be read alongside, and does not replace, the full Acts Language Package artifacts and the Romans baseline they extend.