Executive Summary — Titus (English → Bodo)

Why it matters

Titus packs the New Testament’s densest concentration of “salvation apart from works” language into three short chapters — and hands the Bodo translation team its single hardest term of the entire two-book Language Package (Romans + Titus) in the process: regeneration (Titus 3:5). Because Bodo’s two live comparative-religion currents — Bathouism’s reciprocal ritual-offering logic and Brahma Dharma’s Hindu-influenced merit and rebirth vocabulary — sit directly athwart Titus’s core argument, this is not a routine extension of the Romans package. It is the point in the curriculum where the destination culture’s own available religious vocabulary points, in at least one critical case, in the theologically opposite direction from the text. Getting this book right protects the doctrinal integrity of everything built on it in Phase 2 and 3.

Key findings

• The core passage (2:11-3:8) carries the heaviest doctrinal load in the book. It contains the letter’s three-part “epiphany” structure, its clearest single-verse affirmation of Christ’s deity (2:13’s “our great God and Savior”), its categorical denial of works as a ground of salvation (3:5), and the single highest-risk term in the entire curriculum: regeneration (3:5), whose Greek etymology (“again-birth”) points a naive translator directly at फिन जोनोम, the forbidden reincarnation/rebirth vocabulary Brahma Dharma absorbed from Hindu teaching.
• 86 terms are now fixed in the Titus translation memory — 27 reused exactly from the Romans baseline (copied verbatim, never re-derived) and 59 new terms this book introduces, following the baseline’s descriptive-compound methodology.
• 8 new terms carry the highest “coined-from-scratch” risk profile (no attested Bodo lexical item exists at all): regeneration, the threefold epiphany verb, heirship, self-control-as-unifying-virtue, the church-office terms (elder/overseer), and the marital-fidelity qualification phrase.
• A specific, named cult/sect risk applies to Titus 2:13: Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation-style restructuring of the Granville Sharp “God and Savior” construction into two referents is a documented Watchtower translation pattern for this exact verse, and must be explicitly guarded against — not merely avoided by accident.
• Submission-to-authority material (3:1-2) carries a real-world political sensitivity, not just a comparative-religion one, given the Bodoland Territorial Region’s recent history of armed conflict over governing authority; this routes to theologian/senior-reviewer oversight distinct in kind from the doctrinal-syncretism risks elsewhere in the book.

Risk counts requiring theologian oversight

Metric	Count	Source
Doctrines rated Critical	8	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
Doctrines rated High	12	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
Doctrines rated Medium	5	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
Doctrines rated Low	1	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
Total doctrines requiring human theologian review	20	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
Total doctrines requiring native-speaker review	5	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
Total doctrines eligible for automated-only review	1	doctrine_risk_registry.json (Titus)
New terms rated Critical	11	08_core_glossary.md §Summary Risk Counts
New terms rated High	16	08_core_glossary.md §Summary Risk Counts
New terms rated Medium	27	08_core_glossary.md §Summary Risk Counts
New terms rated Low	3	08_core_glossary.md §Summary Risk Counts
New terms requiring mandatory theologian review (Critical + High)	27	derived
Inherited baseline terms carried into Titus at Critical or High risk	20 (11 Critical + 9 High)	translation_memory.json (Titus) §inherited terms

Single highest-priority item across every count above: Titus 3:5’s regeneration/washing-of-regeneration term pair. It requires mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence with zero exceptions, plus an automated back-translation scan that rejects any output containing फिन जोनोम or a जोनोम-rooted compound before a human reviewer ever sees it.

Risks

1. Regeneration bleeding into reincarnation vocabulary (Titus 3:5). The Greek word’s own etymology points a naive translator at the forbidden term. This is a category error risk, not a degree-of-accuracy risk — the closest-sounding native words are the most dangerous ones.
2. “Good works” (मोजाङ खामानि) serving both the condemned and the commended sense within a few verses of each other (3:5 vs. 2:14/3:1/3:8). Parallel Phase 2 processing across chapters could produce internally consistent but doctrinally contradictory output if the fruit/ground distinction isn’t enforced as a cross-file rule.
3. Grace personified as an active trainer/teacher (2:11-12), doubling the Romans baseline’s existing Critical grace risk by giving grace a grammatical role (subject of a disciplining verb) with no established precedent.
4. “Savior” applied to both Father and Son six times across the letter (1:3-4; 2:10/2:13; 3:4/3:6), creating six separate opportunities to imply two rescuer-figures rather than one shared divine identity — a risk sharpened by the Bathou/Kherai pantheon’s habit of naming multiple protector-deities together.
5. “Divisive person” (3:10) sitting in apparent tension with Titus’s own commanded doctrinal firmness (1:9-16) — an internal-to-the-letter ambiguity that could be misused to forbid legitimate apologetic engagement with Bathou or Brahma Dharma teaching.
6. Civil-authority submission (3:1-2) landing on a live regional political sensitivity that requires pastoral framing distinct from ordinary doctrinal-syncretism review.

Opportunities

1. The Romans baseline’s methodology transfers cleanly. Every fencing technique the baseline developed (native negation-compounds over Sanskrit loans, morphological reuse of safe roots, explicit “not this, but that” contrastive teaching notes) has a direct, already-drafted application in Titus — this book did not require inventing a new translation philosophy, only extending an existing one.
2. Titus’s compact “trustworthy saying” (3:4-7) is an ideal memorization anchor. Once locked to a single fixed Bodo rendering, it can function across the whole curriculum as the shortest, most teachable summary of the gospel’s grace-not-works logic — valuable well beyond this one lesson.
3. The elder-qualification material (1:5-9), while high-risk, is also a strong discipleship/leadership-development asset once the प्राचीन/देखा-रैखा लाग्रा synonymy and the बुरहा/बर’ऐ exclusion are taught explicitly — it gives Bodo church leaders a vocabulary for church office clearly fenced off from both traditional ritual-specialist roles and Brahma Dharma’s own reform-clergy structures.
4. The household-code and civic-submission material (2:1-10; 3:1-2), handled with the required pastoral framing, offers a natural bridge for evangelistic conversations with families who have passed through Brahma Dharma’s reform tradition, since it demonstrates gospel ethics operating within, rather than against, ordinary social structures.

Recommended actions

1. Route Titus 3:4-7 as a single indivisible review unit to human theologian review before any other Phase 2 work on this book proceeds. Every clause in this sentence independently meets the Critical threshold; reviewing it piecemeal risks losing the grammatical link between justification and grace alone (3:7).
2. Implement the automated जोनोम-rooted back-translation rejection filter first, before general Phase 2 batch translation begins, given that this is the single highest-consequence single-term risk in either book of the Language Package to date.
3. Confirm all 8 PROVISIONAL terms (गुरगुरै सिखायनाय, गोसो थुलुंनाय, मानोन खालामनाय, मानसिखौ मोसोंनाय, मोसोंनाय, मण्डलिनि प्राचीन, देखा-रैखा लाग्रा, मोनसे सिबि सायथावनि सामलायग्रा) with a Bodo-speaking theologian before wide Phase 2 deployment; none should be treated as settled with the same confidence as the Romans baseline’s fixed terms.
4. Verify the current printed Bodo Bible’s actual rendering of Titus (not yet done for this book) before finalizing any term, exactly as the Romans baseline required for Romans.
5. Brief whoever reviews Titus 3:1-2 specifically on the Bodoland Territorial Region’s political history, distinct from the doctrinal/comparative-religion briefing given to reviewers of the salvation and regeneration material.
6. Confirm and record the Bodo YouVersion numeric version ID before hard-coding any citation hyperlinks; use the [BODO_YOUVERSION_VERSION_ID] placeholder with book code TIT until confirmed.

See 11_doctrine_analysis.md for the full chapter-by-chapter doctrine matrix, 04_comparative_theology.md for the eight-tradition comparative survey, and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md for the complete Phase 2 enforcement instruction set.