Executive Summary

01 Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 → Burmese Translation Requirements

The bottom line: Acts is theologically ready for Burmese translation, but it carries the highest syncretism exposure of any curriculum built on this Language Package to date — driven by direct collisions with nat-spirit possession, the Noble Eightfold Path, and Buddhist merit culture. Phase 1 is complete; every artifact required to gate Phase 2 is now in place.

Why it matters

Acts is a narrative book, not an epistolary argument like Romans. Its doctrines are carried by episodes — Pentecost, Cornelius, Simon Magus, the Ephesian exorcists, the Jerusalem Council, the Areopagus speech — with far less surrounding argumentative scaffolding to catch a single bad word choice. A mistranslation inside a story can quietly collapse a doctrine with no nearby corrective context. This curriculum’s core passage, Acts 2:1–41 (Pentecost and Peter’s sermon), concentrates an unusually dense cluster of Critical-risk doctrines — Holy Spirit personhood, tongues, resurrection, Lordship, grace, salvation, the exclusivity of Jesus’s name — into a single sermon, making it both the theological anchor and the highest-stakes passage in the entire pipeline.

Key findings

This curriculum extends, and never contradicts, the Romans baseline. All 47 Romans-baseline terms relevant to Acts are reused byte-for-byte, with notes documenting where Acts intensifies or extends their doctrinal use (e.g., “grace” recurs 9+ times in Acts, plus one non-technical exception at Acts 2:47 that must NOT use the Critical grace term).
Acts introduces roughly 84 new load-bearing terms beyond the Romans baseline, now fully seeded in assets/translation_memory.json — the largest single expansion this Language Package has undergone.
The doctrine registry assigns 43 total doctrines across the book: 18 Critical, 15 High, 7 Medium, 3 Low (per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json), yielding 33 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review and 7 requiring native-speaker review.
At the term level, 28 Critical-risk and roughly 39 High-risk terms (≈67 combined) require theologian-level enforcement in Phase 2 — nearly double the term-level exposure of the Romans baseline, concentrated disproportionately in Acts 2, 4, 9–10, 15, 17, and 19.
Five terms carry the single highest syncretism risk in the entire pipeline to date (ranked in analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md Part 4): “filled with the Holy Spirit” (vs. nat-possession), “tongues” (vs. trance speech), “the Way” (vs. the Noble Eightfold Path), “evil/unclean spirits” (vs. the nat pantheon), and “idols” (vs. Buddha-image veneration).

Risks

Filled with the Holy Spirit / tongues (Acts 2:4, and 9+ recurrences): Burmese folk religion’s well-established nat-kadaw spirit-possession trance is the closest lived analogue — and it runs in the opposite theological direction (displacing agency vs. empowering it). Critical, theologian review mandatory at every occurrence.
The Way (Acts 9:2; 19:9,23; 22:4; 24:14,22): Direct collision with the Noble Eightfold Path, a self-directed liberation discipline. Must be taught as grace-received allegiance to a person, never a parallel ethical path. Critical.
Grace, salvation, justification, resurrection (throughout, intensified in Acts 4, 13, 15): The book’s narrative form multiplies exposure to Myanmar’s pervasive merit-making (ကုသိုလ်), karma, and rebirth frameworks well beyond Romans’s epistolary treatment. Critical, forbidden-substitution rules apply without exception.
No other name / exclusivity (Acts 4:12) and idols (Acts 7:41; 15:20,29; 17:16; 19:26): The sharpest exclusivity claim and the most culturally sensitive single term in the curriculum, given Buddha-image veneration’s near-universal cultural standing. Critical, requiring doctrinal fidelity without gratuitous cultural offense.
Signs and wonders / sorcery (Acts 2:22,43; 8:9-24; 13:6-11; 19:11-19): Collides with respected, non-stigmatized Burmese categories (meditative attainment, weizza adepthood, amulet potency) — the text’s default negative valence does not automatically transfer. High.
Cumulative mission/kingdom exposure (1:8 through 28:31): သာသနာပြု carries Buddhist-Sasana institutional coloring at far higher frequency than in Romans, since it structures the entire book’s narrative arc. Medium, but highest cumulative volume in the curriculum.

Opportunities

The text’s own internal correctives can be leveraged, not just guarded against. Acts 2:6,8,11 itself proves tongues were intelligible; Acts 2:13-15 itself distinguishes Spirit-filling from intoxication; Acts 17:24-31 itself corrects the “unknown god” bridge. Teaching notes should point learners to these built-in textual safeguards rather than relying solely on external translator commentary.
Acts’s narrative form is pedagogically powerful once fenced correctly. Because doctrine is carried by story, well-fenced key terms (Spirit-filling, the Way, evil spirits) can make Acts one of the most vivid and memorable curricula in the pipeline for Buddhist-background learners — turning today’s highest risk into tomorrow’s clearest teaching moments.
The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) offers a uniquely concrete case study for the grace-vs-merit doctrine that Romans treats more abstractly — a real historical decision with real stakes, useful for grounding the Critical justification-apart-from-law doctrine in narrative rather than argument alone.
Full cross-document consistency is now locked in for the five salvation-confession/closing anchor verses (Acts 2:21, 2:38, 4:12, 16:31, 28:31) and the threefold Paul-conversion retelling (chs. 9, 22, 26), reducing Phase 2 review burden through upfront standardization.

Recommended actions

Route all 33 Critical/High doctrines and their ~67 corresponding Critical/High terms to mandatory human theologian review in Phase 2 Step 17, with the five highest-ranked syncretism risks (Spirit-filling, tongues, the Way, evil spirits, idols) prioritized ahead of all other queue items, including Critical terms inherited unchanged from the already-settled Romans baseline.
Load assets/translation_memory.json (Acts edition) and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Acts edition) as the mandatory Phase 2 pre-flight pair, on top of — never in place of — the original Romans-baseline artifacts.
Apply the mandatory translator-note requirement without exception at every occurrence of “filled with the Holy Spirit,” “tongues,” “the Way,” “evil/unclean spirit,” and “idols,” regardless of how many times each has already appeared in a given document — repetition does not reduce the requirement given the narrative-episode risk structure described above.
Screen all Phase 2 output against the cult/sect and folk-syncretism watch-list documented in analysis/05_translation_landscape.md Section 4 (NWT, LDS materials, folk syncretistic gospel tracts, prosperity-gospel-adjacent teaching), since several of their vocabulary patterns superficially overlap with legitimate Burmese Christian usage.
Proceed to Phase 2 with this Language Package; no outstanding Phase 1 gaps block translation start.

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