Core Glossary
08 Core Glossary — Acts 1–28 (English → Burmese)
Purpose
This glossary consolidates every load-bearing theological term identified in 07_semantic_analysis.md, across the entire book of Acts, into a single reference table for Phase 2 translation memory construction. It is organized into two sections:
- Section A — Terms already established in the baseline Romans
translation_memory.json. These renderings are reused exactly, without modification, per the hard rule that the baseline is the language authority. - Section B — New terms specific to the Acts curriculum, not present in the Romans baseline, proposed here for the first time with full risk justification.
Risk tiers follow the baseline’s doctrine_risk_registry.json definitions: Critical (human theologian review, every occurrence), High (human theologian review), Medium (native speaker review recommended), Low (automated review sufficient).
Section A — Baseline Terms Reused Exactly from Romans
| Term | Burmese Rendering | Transliteration | Risk (baseline) | Doctrine Link in Acts | Acts Occurrences (representative) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| gospel | သတင်းကောင်း | thadin kaung | High | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles; Great Commission Fulfilled | 5:42; 8:4,12,25,35,40; 10:36; 13:32; 14:7,21; 15:7; 16:10; 20:24 | Must retain unique salvation-announcement force throughout Acts’s expanding mission narrative |
| grace | ကျေးဇူးတော် | kyayzu-taw | Critical | Justification apart from the Law; The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | 4:33; 11:23; 13:43; 14:3,26; 15:11,40; 18:27; 20:24,32 | NEVER ကုသိုလ်/ကံကောင်းခြင်း; note the distinct non-technical χάρις sense at Acts 2:47 (see Section B “favor”) |
| faith | ယုံကြည်ခြင်း | yun-kyi-chin | Medium | Conversion of Paul; Repentance and Baptism | 3:16; 6:7; 11:24; 13:8,12; 14:9,22,27; 15:9; 16:5,31; 20:21; 26:18 | Object must be specified as Christ; central to 16:31 salvation confession |
| righteousness | ဖြောင့်မတ်ခြင်း | pyaungmat-chin | Critical | Justification apart from the Law | 13:10; 17:31; 24:25 | NEVER ကုသိုလ်ကံ/သီလ |
| justification | ဖြောင့်မတ်ရာသို့ ရောက်ခြင်း | pyaungmat-ya-tho-yauk-chin | Critical | Justification apart from the Law | 13:39 | Explicit “everyone who believes is justified” statement, direct parallel to Romans |
| salvation | ကယ်တင်ခြင်း | kaetin-chin | Critical | Repentance and Baptism; Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | 2:21,40,47; 4:9,12; 11:14; 13:26,47; 15:1,11; 16:17,30-31; 27:20,31,34; 28:28 | NEVER နိဗ္ဗာန်ရောက်ခြင်း |
| apostle | တမန်တော် | tamantaw | Medium | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | 1:2,25-26; 2:37,42-43; 4:33,35-37; 5:2,12,18,29,40; 6:6; 8:1,14,18; 9:27; 11:1; 14:4,14; 15:2,4,6,22-23; 16:4 | Distinguish from ဆရာတော် (senior-monk connotation) |
| called | ခေါ်တော်မူသော | khaw-taw-mu-thaw | High | Effectual Calling; Conversion of Paul | 2:39 | Sovereign summons, not revocable invitation |
| calling | ခေါ်တော်မူခြင်း | khaw-taw-mu-chin | High | Effectual Calling | (conceptual, e.g. 13:2 “set apart”) | Never conflate with ကံဇာတာ |
| holy | သန့်ရှင်းသော | thangyin-thaw | High | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | throughout, as modifier of Spirit | See Section B “unclean/clean” for the distinct ritual-purity category requiring careful differentiation |
| saints | သန့်ရှင်းသူများ | thangyin thu myar | Medium | The Church as Community | 9:13,32,41; 26:10,18 | Not an ascetic elite (cf. ရဟန္တာ) |
| sanctification | သန့်ရှင်းခြင်း | thangyin-chin | High | The Church as Community | 20:32; 26:18 | The Spirit’s ongoing work, not ritual purification |
| adoption | သားအဖြစ်လက်ခံခြင်း | thar-a-phyit let-khan-chin | Medium | (background; not primary in Acts) | — | Available if needed for sonship-of-believers teaching |
| resurrection | ထမြောက်ခြင်း | hta-myauk-chin | Critical | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost (Peter’s sermon); Conversion of Paul; Great Commission Fulfilled | 1:22; 2:24,31-32; 3:15,26; 4:2,10,33; 5:30; 10:40-41; 13:30-37; 17:18,31-32; 23:6,8; 24:15,21; 26:23 | NEVER ပဋိသန္ဓေတည်ခြင်း — the single most-repeated Critical doctrine across the book |
| lord | သခင် | thakhin | Critical | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost; Conversion of Paul | 2:21,34,36; 9:5; 10:36; 11:20; 16:31; 22:8,10; 26:15 | ”Jesus is Lord” salvation confession recurs in multiple Acts forms (2:21,38; 4:12; 16:31) |
| son_of_god | ဘုရားသခင်၏သားတော် | Phayarthakhin i tharadaw | Critical | Conversion of Paul | 9:20; 13:33 | Full phrase required |
| incarnation | လူ့ဇာတိခံယူခြင်း | lu-zarti khan-yu-chin | Critical | (background Christology) | — | Available if needed |
| peace | ငြိမ်သက်ခြင်း | nyein-thet-chin | Medium | The Church as Community | 9:31; 10:36; 15:33 | Relational peace, not meditative calm |
| spiritual_gifts | ဝိညာဉ်ဆုကျေးဇူး | weinnyin su kyayzu | Medium | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | (background, e.g. gifts implied in 6:3,8:17-20 context) | Not merit-earned or occult power |
| thanksgiving | ကျေးဇူးတင်ခြင်း | kyayzu-tin-chin | Low | The Church as Community | 27:35; 28:15 | Standard term |
| fellowship | မိတ်သဟာယ | meikthahaya | Low | The Church as Community | 2:42 | Shared participation, not mere social bond |
| church | အသင်းတော် | athin-taw | Medium | The Church as Community | 5:11; 8:1,3; 9:31; 11:22,26; 12:1,5; 13:1; 14:23,27; 15:3-4,22,41; 16:5; 18:22; 20:17,28 | Not a building or monastic compound |
| kingdom_of_god | ဘုရားသခင်၏နိုင်ငံတော် | Phayarthakhin i nainggan-taw | Medium | Great Commission Fulfilled | 1:3,6; 8:12; 14:22; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23,31 | Distinguish from political nainggan; bookends Acts’s structure (1:3 and 28:31) |
| law | ပညတ်တရား | pyinnat tayar | High | Justification apart from the Law | 6:13; 7:53; 13:39; 15:5,24; 18:13; 21:20-21,28; 22:3,12; 23:29; 24:14; 25:8; 28:23 | Never ဝိနည်း (Buddhist Vinaya) |
| sin | အပြစ် | a-pyit | High | Repentance and Baptism | 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 10:43; 13:38; 22:16; 26:18 | Not အကုသိုလ် (demerit) |
| gentiles | တစ်ပါးအမျိုးသား | tabar-amyothar | Medium | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | 9:15; 10:45; 11:1,18; 13:46-48; 14:27; 15:3,7,12,14,19; 18:6; 21:19,25; 22:21; 26:17,20,23; 28:28 | Central to Acts’s major structural doctrine |
| glory | ဘုန်းတော် | phon-taw | High | Deity of Christ (background) | 7:55; 12:23 (contrast: Herod’s false glory struck down) | Not ဘုန်းကံ (merit-power) |
| obedience_of_faith | ယုံကြည်ခြင်း၏နာခံမှု | yunkyichin i nakhan-hmu | High | Repentance and Baptism | 6:7 (“obedient to the faith”) | Faith-flowing obedience, not precept-keeping |
| power_of_god | ဘုရားသခင်၏တန်ခိုးတော် | Phayarthakhin i tankhoe-taw | High | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost; Apostolic Authority and Miracles | 1:8; 2:22; 3:12; 4:7,33; 6:8; 8:10,13,19; 10:38; 19:11 | Never အနုဘော်တန်ခိုး (amulet/relic potency) |
| messiah | မေရှိယ | Mei-shi-ya | Critical | Conversion of Paul; Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | 2:31,36,38; 3:18,20; 4:26; 5:42; 8:5; 9:22; 17:3; 18:5,28; 26:23 | Never မိတ္တေယျ |
| prophet | ပရောဖက် | parawpeq | Low | Fulfillment of Prophecy | 2:16,30; 3:18,21-25; 7:37,42,48,52; 8:28,30,34; 10:43; 11:27; 13:1,15,20,27,40; 15:15,32; 21:10; 24:14; 26:22,27; 28:23,25 | Not ဗေဒင်ဆရာ |
| prophecy | ပရောဖက်ပြုချက် | parawpeq-pyu-chet | Low | Fulfillment of Prophecy | 2:17-18; 21:9-11 | Distinct from astrological forecasting |
| covenant | ပဋိညာဉ် | padi-nyin | High | Davidic Covenant (background); Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | 3:25; 7:8 | Relational, God-initiated bond |
| election | ရွေးကောက်ခြင်း | ywaykauk-chin | High | Conversion of Paul | 9:15 (“chosen instrument,” see Section B) | Not ကံဇာတာ/ကံကြမ္မာ |
| intercession | အသနားခံခြင်း | a-thanar-khan-chin | Medium | Repentance and Baptism (background) | (implicit in prayer contexts) | Not nat-propitiation |
| providence | ဘုရားသခင်၏ကြည့်ရှုစောင့်ရှောက်မှု | Phayarthakhin i kyi-shu-saung-shauk-hmu | High | Apostolic Authority and Miracles; Great Commission Fulfilled | 1:26; 12:7-11; 16:26; 18:9-10; 23:11; 27:22-25,34,44 | God’s personal governance, not ကံ |
| mission | သာသနာပြုလုပ်ငန်း | thathana-pyu lokngan | Medium | Great Commission Fulfilled | overarching theme of Acts 13-28 | Requires translator note distinguishing gospel proclamation from Sasana-style institution-building |
| david | ဒါဝိဒ် | Dawid | Medium | Conversion of Paul (background) | 1:16; 2:25,29,34; 4:25; 7:45; 13:22,34,36; 15:16 | Established form |
| israel | ဣသရေလ | Israen | Medium | Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | 1:6; 2:36; 3:12; 4:8,10,27; 5:21,31; 9:15; 10:36; 13:16,17,23-24; 21:28; 28:20 | Established form |
| jesus | ယေရှု | Yayshu | Critical | throughout | throughout | Established form; consistent across all documents |
| god | ဘုရားသခင် | Phayarthakhin | Critical | throughout | throughout | Never ဘုရား alone or နတ်သခင် |
| holy_spirit | သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော် | thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw | Critical | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | 1:5,8,16; 2:4,17-18,33,38; 4:8,31; 5:3,9,32; 6:3,5; 7:51,55; 8:15,17-19,29,39; 9:17,31; 10:19,38,44-47; 11:12,15-16,24,28; 13:2,4,9,52; 15:8,28; 16:6-7; 19:2,6; 20:23,28; 21:4,11; 28:25 | The most doctrinally saturated term in the entire book; NEVER ဝိညာဉ် alone or နတ်ဝိညာဉ် |
| father | အဖ | a-pha | Critical | Conversion of Paul (background) | 1:4,7; 2:33 | Never ဗြဟ္မာ |
| abba | အဗ္ဘ | Abba | High | (not used in Acts) | — | Retained for cross-document consistency reference only |
| exhort | တိုက်တွန်းနှိုးဆော်ခြင်း | taik-tun hnoso-chin | Low | The Church as Community | 2:40; 11:23; 14:22; 15:32; 16:40; 20:1-2 | Context-sensitive per baseline |
| seed_of_david | ဒါဝိဒ်၏အနွယ်ဝင် | Dawid i anwe-win | High | (background, Davidic Covenant) | 13:23 | Established rendering |
| imputed_righteousness | ဖြောင့်မတ်ခြင်းအဖြစ် မှတ်တော်မူခြင်း | pyaungmat-chin a-phyit hmat-taw-mu-chin | Critical | Justification apart from the Law | 13:39 (conceptually) | Credited, not earned |
Section B — New Terms Specific to the Acts Curriculum
| Term | Burmese Rendering | Transliteration | Literal Meaning | Doctrine | Risk | Key Acts References | Grounded Risk Reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pentecost | ပင်တေကုတ္တေနေ့ | Pinteikositay-nay | ”fiftieth [day]“ | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | High | 2:1 | No native Burmese concept of a fixed covenant-calendar pilgrim feast; risks defaulting to a generic Buddhist holy/full-moon day without explicit OT background teaching |
| tongues (other tongues) | အခြားဘာသာစကားများ | a-khyar bharthar sagar myar | ”other languages” | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | Critical | 2:4,6,8,11; 10:46; 19:6 | Direct collision with unintelligible ecstatic/altered-voice speech in Burmese spirit-mediumship (nat-kadaw trance); must be taught as real, intelligible human languages understood by hearers, per 2:6,8,11 |
| filled with the Holy Spirit | သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်နှင့် ပြည့်ဝသော | thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw hnin pyi-wa-thaw | ”filled with the Holy Spirit” | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | Critical | 2:4; 4:8,31; 6:3,5; 7:55; 9:17; 11:24; 13:9,52 | The single greatest syncretism risk in Acts: must never map onto Burmese nat-possession (နတ်ဝင်ခြင်း), which displaces personal agency; biblical Spirit-filling empowers, never displaces, the believer’s own faculties |
| baptism / baptize | ဗတ္တိဇံ / ဗတ္တိဇံခံယူသည် | Bataizan | ”immersion” | Repentance and Baptism | High | 2:38,41; 8:12-13,36-38; 9:18; 10:47-48; 16:15,33; 18:8; 19:3-5 | Must be distinguished from merit-dedication water-pouring (ရေသွန်းကုသိုလ်ဝေခြင်း) and ordinary ritual bathing; a once-for-all identification with Christ, not a repeatable merit rite |
| repentance / repent | နောင်တရခြင်း / နောင်တရသည် | naung-ta-ya-chin | ”change of mind, turning” | Repentance and Baptism | High | 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 8:22; 11:18; 17:30; 19:4; 20:21; 26:20 | Must convey Spirit-enabled turning toward God, not mere emotional remorse, and not a demerit-reducing confession ritual |
| the Way | ထိုလမ်းစဉ်တော် | hto lan-zin taw | ”the road/way” | Conversion of Paul; The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Critical | 9:2; 19:9,23; 22:4; 24:14,22 | Direct collision with the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path (မဂ်ဂင်ရှစ်ပါး) as a self-directed liberation discipline; must be taught as allegiance to and following of the living Christ received by grace, not a self-powered ethical path |
| no other name | အခြားနာမတွင် ကယ်တင်ခြင်းမရှိ | a-khyar nan-twin kaetin-chin ma-shi | ”there is no salvation in any other name” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Critical | 4:12 | The sharpest exclusivity claim in Acts; must never be softened against a multi-refuge devotional culture (Triple Gem, nat pantheon) |
| name (of Jesus, salvific/authoritative use) | နာမတော် | nan-daw | ”the Name” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles; Repentance and Baptism | Critical | 2:38; 3:6,16; 4:7,10,12,17-18,30; 8:12,16; 9:14-16,27-28; 10:43,48; 16:18; 19:5,13,17; 22:16 | The most frequently recurring load-bearing phrase in the book; risks being flattened into a generic invocation formula or misused as magical incantation (cf. sons of Sceva, 19:13-16) |
| call upon the name of the Lord | သခင်ဘုရား၏ နာမတော်ကို ခေါ်တောင်းခြင်း | thakhin-phayar i nan-daw ko khaw-taung-chin | ”to call upon the name of the Lord” | Repentance and Baptism | Critical | 2:21 | Salvation-confession formula parallel to Romans 10:9-13; must name Jesus specifically as sole object of appeal against a multi-refuge culture |
| Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved | သခင်ယေရှုကို ယုံကြည်လော့။ သို့ပြုလျှင် ကယ်တင်တော်မူခြင်းသို့ ရောက်လိမ့်မည် | thakhin Yayshu ko yun-kyi-lok, thopyu-lyin kaetin-taw-mu-chin thoh yauk-leimmi | ”believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved” | Repentance and Baptism | Critical | 16:31 | Must be rendered with the same rigor as Romans 10:9-10 per the baseline’s cross-document consistency rule; not merely a this-worldly rescue from prison |
| forgiveness of sins | အပြစ်လွတ်ငြိမ်းခြင်း | apyit lwut-nyain-chin | ”release/remission of sins” | Repentance and Baptism | Critical | 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 10:43; 13:38; 26:18 | Must be distinguished from demerit-offsetting merit transfer; a decisive, complete judicial pardon by a personal God on the basis of Christ’s finished work |
| gift of the Holy Spirit | သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်၏ လက်ဆောင် | thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw i let-hsaung | ”the free gift of the Holy Spirit” | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | Critical | 2:38; 10:45; 11:17 | Parallels the Critical grace doctrine; must never suggest the Spirit is earned through discipline, merit, or ritual purity |
| lie to / test the Holy Spirit | သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်ကို လှည့်စား/စုံစမ်းခြင်း | thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw ko hlyanzar/sonzan-chin | ”to deceive/test the Holy Spirit” | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | Critical | 5:3,9 | Proves the Spirit is a personal divine agent who can be directly sinned against, not an impersonal force |
| evil / unclean spirit, demon | ညစ်ညမ်းသောဝိညာဉ် / နတ်ဆိုး | nyit-nyan-thaw weinnyin / nat-hsoe | ”unclean spirit” / “evil nat” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | Critical | 5:16; 8:7; 16:16-18; 19:12-16 | The most direct collision with the entire Burmese nat-spirit cosmology; biblical evil spirits are subordinate to and overcome by Christ’s authority, never negotiated with or appeased; must be sharply distinguished from the Holy Spirit at every occurrence |
| idols / idolatry | ရုပ်တု | yoke-tu | ”idol, image” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Critical | 7:41; 15:20,29; 17:16; 19:26 | Extremely high cultural sensitivity given Buddha-image veneration; doctrinal point (idols are not divine) must be preserved without gratuitous offense, echoing the baseline’s ဘုရား/ဘုရားသခင် distinction |
| circumcision / uncircumcised | အရေဖျားလှီးခြင်း | are-hpyar-hli-chin | ”cutting around” | Justification apart from the Law | Critical | 10:45; 11:2-3; 15:1,5; 21:21 | The flashpoint test case for Justification apart from the Law; must retain the council’s full rejection of law-observance as a salvation requirement |
| unclean / clean (ritual) | မသန့်ရှင်းသော / သန့်ရှင်းသော | ma-thangyin-thaw / thangyin-thaw | ”unclean” / “clean” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | High | 10:14-15,28; 11:8-9 | Shares a root with the baseline’s Critical “holy” term; requires a translator note distinguishing abolished ritual-purity categories from continuing moral/relational holiness |
| God shows no partiality | ဘုရားသခင်သည် မျက်နှာသာမပေး | Phayarthakhin thi myet-nhar-thar ma-pay | ”God does not show favoritism of face” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | High | 10:34 | Anchors Universal Scope of the Gospel against any notion of ethnic-religious priority (relevant to Bamar-Buddhist majority/minority dynamics) |
| vision / trance | ဗျာဒိတ်ရူပါရုံ / ဝိညာဉ်ထူးဆန်းသောအခြင်းအရာ | byadate-yupayoun / weinnyin-htu-han-thaw a-hkyin-a-yar | ”vision” / “ecstatic state” | Conversion of Paul; Apostolic Authority and Miracles | High | 9:10,12; 10:3,10,17,19; 11:5; 16:9-10; 18:9; 22:17-18; 26:19; 27:23 | Risk of conflation with nat-mediumship trance or meditative absorption; must be taught as God-initiated, content-specific revelation, not self-induced altered states |
| heavenly vision | ကောင်းကင်ဗျာဒိတ်ရူပါရုံ | kaung-gin byadate-yupayoun | ”vision from heaven” | Conversion of Paul | High | 26:19 | Paul’s own term for the Damascus-road encounter; must render consistently across all three tellings (chs. 9, 22, 26) |
| chosen instrument | ရွေးကောက်ထားသော တန်ဆာပလာ | ywaykauk-htarthaw tanzarpalar | ”vessel of election” | Conversion of Paul | High | 9:15 | Ties Paul’s calling directly to the Critical/High election doctrine; sovereign divine selection, not self-selected ministry |
| foreknowledge | ဘုရားသခင်၏ ရှေးကြိုသိတော်မူခြင်း | Phayarthakhin i shay-kyo-thi-taw-mu-chin | ”knowing beforehand” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles; Great Commission Fulfilled | High | 2:23 | Must be distinguished from impersonal karmic determinism (ကံ); personal, purposive divine foreknowledge |
| signs and wonders | နိမိတ်လက္ခဏာများနှင့် အံ့ဖွယ်အမှုများ | neimate-lakhkhanar myar hnin an-hpwe-a-hmu myar | ”signs and wonders” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | High | 2:22,43; 4:30; 5:12; 6:8; 14:3; 15:12 | Direct collision with meditator/arahant supernatural attainments (iddhi/abhiññā) and weizza/amulet potency; must be taught as God’s authenticating acts, not personal spiritual accomplishment |
| sorcery / magic | မှော်အတတ် | hmaw-a-tat | ”magic art” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | High | 8:9-11,18-24; 13:6-11; 19:13-19 | Direct collision with Burmese astrology, weizza-adept practice, and spirit-mediumship; Spirit’s gifts cannot be bought with money or merit |
| Son of Man | လူသား | lu-thar | ”son of man” | Conversion of Paul (Christology, background) | High | 7:56 | Danielic exalted divine-human title; must not be flattened to a generic “a human being” |
| exaltation / right hand of God | ဘုရားသခင်၏လက်ယာတော်ဘက်၌ ချီးမြှောက်ခြင်းခံရသော | Phayarthakhin i let-yar-taw-bet-hti chi-myauk-chin-hkan-yathaw | ”exalted at God’s right hand” | The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | High | 2:33; 5:31; 7:55-56 | Unique enthronement by the Father, not a merit-attained Brahma-realm ascent |
| Holy and Righteous One | သန့်ရှင်း၍ ဖြောင့်မတ်တော်မူသောသူ | thangyin-yi pyaungmat-taw-mu-thaw-thu | ”Holy and Righteous One” | Conversion of Paul (Christology) | Critical | 3:14 | Compounds two baseline Critical terms into a single Christological title; must not be weakened to generic praise |
| servant (of God, pais) | အစေခံတော် | a-say-khan-taw | ”servant, child” | Fulfillment of Prophecy | High | 3:13,26 | Isaianic Suffering Servant title; requires OT background to retain fulfillment force |
| Author of life | အသက်၏အရှင်အကြီးအကဲ | a-thet i a-shin a-kyi a-ke | ”originator/pioneer of life” | Conversion of Paul (Christology) | High | 3:15 | Christ as source of resurrection life, not merely its recipient |
| judgment to come | နောင်ကျမည့် စစ်ကြောစီရင်ခြင်း | naung-kya-mae sit-kyaw si-yin-chin | ”coming judgment” | Persecution and Bold Witness | High | 24:25 | A single, final, personal divine reckoning, not graded karmic accounting across lifetimes |
| the whole counsel of God | ဘုရားသခင်၏ အကြံအစည်တော်အလုံးစုံ | Phayarthakhin i a-kyan-a-si-taw a-loun-zoun | ”the whole purpose of God” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | Medium | 20:27 | Faithful, comprehensive apostolic transmission, not selective teaching |
| it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us | သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်နှင့် ငါတို့သည် လျော်ကန်သည်ဟု စီရင်ကြ၏ | thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw hnin ngadoh thi lyawkan-thi-ho si-yin-kya-yi | ”it seemed fitting to the Holy Spirit and us” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | High | 15:28 | Foundational model of Spirit-guided, apostolically-ratified collective decision-making |
| yoke (of the law) | ဂျို့ကျင်း | jo-kyin | ”a yoke” | Justification apart from the Law | Medium | 15:10 | Metaphor for the law as a burden from which grace liberates; does not demean the law’s original goodness |
| food offered to idols | ရုပ်တုကိုကပ်လှူသော အစားအစာ | yoke-tu ko kat-hlu-thaw a-sar-a-sar | ”food sacrificed to idols” | Justification apart from the Law; Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | High | 15:20,29 | Pastoral accommodation for Jewish-Gentile fellowship, not re-imposition of law |
| sexual immorality (porneia) | ကာမဂုණ်တရားကို မတရားကျူးလွန်ခြင်း | kamaguntayar ko ma-tayar kyu-lun-chin | ”sexual immorality” | Justification apart from the Law | High | 15:20,29 | Moral category retained across the council’s minimal requirements |
| blood / strangled (dietary) | အသွေးပါသောအစား / လည်၍သတ်သောအသား | a-thway-par-thaw a-sar / lae-yi-that-thaw a-thar | ”food with blood” / “strangled meat” | Justification apart from the Law | Low-Medium | 15:20,29 | Background dietary accommodation for table-fellowship unity |
| Nazirite vow | နာဇရိပဋိညာဉ် | Nazari-padi-nyin | ”Nazirite covenant/vow” | (background, Paul’s cultural practice) | Medium | 18:18; 21:23-26 | Distinguish from meritorious Buddhist novitiate ordination vows |
| baptism of John vs. name of Jesus | ယောဟန်၏ဗတ္တိဇံ / သခင်ယေရှု၏နာမတော်ဖြင့် ဗတ္တိဇံ | Yohan i Bataizan / thakhin Yayshu i nan-daw-hpyin Bataizan | ”John’s baptism” / “baptism in Jesus’s name” | Repentance and Baptism | High | 19:1-7 | Not all baptism-language is equivalent; Christian baptism ties to Christ’s completed work and the Spirit’s gift |
| examining the Scriptures | ကျမ်းစာတော်ကို စစ်ဆေးလေ့လာခြင်း | kyanzar-daw ko sit-hkay-lay-lar-chin | ”examining the Scriptures” | Fulfillment of Prophecy (background) | Low | 17:11 | Reinforces Scripture as the authoritative standard for testing teaching |
| unknown god | မသိသောဘုရား | ma-thi-thaw phayar | ”unknown god” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | High | 17:23 | A rhetorical bridge Paul immediately corrects, not an endorsement of prior religious frameworks (nats, folk deities) as partial revelation |
| living God | အသက်ရှင်တော်မူသောဘုရားသခင် | a-thet-shin-taw-mu-thaw Phayarthakhin | ”the living God” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Medium | 14:15 | Polemical contrast with lifeless idols; requires cultural sensitivity given Buddha-image veneration |
| mocking of the resurrection | ပြက်ရယ်ပြုကြသည် | pyet-yay-pyu-kya-thi | ”they mocked” | Conversion of Paul (background) | Critical (inherited) | 17:32 | Illustrates cross-cultural offense of bodily resurrection even among Greek philosophers; forbidden-substitution rule still applies absolutely |
| light for the Gentiles | တစ်ပါးအမျိုးသားတို့အဖို့ အလင်းတော် | tabar-amyothar-dokoe a-pho a-lin-taw | ”a light for the Gentiles” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Medium | 13:47 | OT-fulfillment force from Isaiah, ties Fulfillment of Prophecy and Gentile inclusion together |
| God-fearer | ဘုရားသခင်ကို ကြောက်ရွံ့သူ | Phayarthakhin ko kyauk-ywan-thu | ”one fearing God” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Medium | 10:2,22; 13:16,26; 16:14; 17:4,17; 18:7 | Righteous Gentile category prepared by God apart from full proselyte conversion |
| angel | ကောင်းကင်တမန် | kaung-gin-taman | ”heavenly messenger” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | Medium | 5:19; 8:26; 10:3,7,22; 12:7-11,23; 27:23 | Created, subordinate servant of God; never an object of worship or appeasement, unlike the nat pantheon |
| household (salvation of) | အိမ်ထောင်စု | ain-htaung-zu | ”household” | Repentance and Baptism | Low | 10:2; 11:14; 16:15,31,34 | Familial extension of salvation, not diluting individual faith requirement |
| elders (church office) | အသင်းတော်လူကြီးများ | athin-taw lu-kyi myar | ”elder ones” | The Church as Community | Medium | 11:30; 14:23; 15:2,4,6,22-23; 16:4; 20:17; 21:18 | Spirit-recognized pastoral office, distinct from village elder or monastic seniority |
| overseer | သင်းအုပ်ဆရာ | thin-oat-hsayar | ”overseer” | The Church as Community | Medium | 20:28 | Church governance office, overlapping with “elder” in this period |
| deacon / service | သင်းထောက် / အမှုတော်ဆောင်ခြင်း | thin-htaung / a-hmu-taw-hsaung-chin | ”deacon” / “ministry” | The Church as Community | Medium | 6:1-6 | Spirit-qualified practical service, not a merit-generating patron role |
| Hellenists | ဟေလသလူမျိုး | Heylatha-lu-myo | ”Greek-speakers” | The Church as Community; Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Low | 6:1 | Internal ethnic-linguistic diversity within the earliest church |
| widows | မုဆိုးမ | mu-hso-ma | ”widows” | The Church as Community | Low | 6:1 | Vulnerable class receiving structured church care |
| the Twelve | တစ်ကျိပ်နှစ်ပါး | ta-seip-hnit-bar | ”the twelve” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles | Low | 1:26; 6:2 | Reconstituted apostolic foundation |
| casting lots | စာရေးတံချခြင်း | sar-yay-tan-cha-chin | ”casting lots” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles (background) | Low | 1:26 | Supports providence doctrine; distinct from divination practices condemned elsewhere in Acts |
| ascension / taken up | ကောင်းကင်ဘုံသို့ဆောင်ယူခြင်းခံရသည် | kaung-gin-bon-thoh saung-yu-chin-hkan-ya-thi | ”was taken up to heaven” | Great Commission Fulfilled (background Christology) | High | 1:9,11 | Bodily, historical, visible departure; not apotheosis or a stage in a chain of existences |
| witness | သက်သေ / သက်သေခံခြင်း | thet-thay / thet-thay-khan-chin | ”witness” | Persecution and Bold Witness | Medium | 1:8,22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39,41; 13:31; 22:15,20; 26:16 | Firsthand eyewitness testimony, foundational to bold witness doctrine |
| boldness | ရဲရင့်ခြင်း | yaeh-ying-chin | ”boldness” | Persecution and Bold Witness | Medium | 4:13,29,31; 9:27-28; 13:46; 14:3; 18:26; 19:8; 26:26; 28:31 | Spirit-given fearless proclamation; distinguish from confrontational aggression |
| persecute / persecution | ညှဉ်းပန်းနှိပ်စက်ခြင်း | nyin-pan-neik-set-chin | ”persecute” | Persecution and Bold Witness | Medium | 7:52; 8:1,3; 9:1,4-5; 11:19; 12:1; 13:50; 22:4,7-8 | Christ personally identifies with his persecuted people (9:4-5) |
| defense / apology | ခုခံချေပချက် | khu-khan-chay-pa-chet | ”defense speech” | Persecution and Bold Witness | Medium | 22:1; 24:10; 25:8,16; 26:1-2,24 | Reasoned, respectful legal/rhetorical defense, structural to Acts’s second half |
| Roman citizen | ရောမနိုင်ငံသား | Rawma-nainggan-thar | ”Roman citizen” | Persecution and Bold Witness | Low | 16:37-38; 22:25-29; 25:10-11 | Legitimate legal-rights use within bold gospel witness |
| appeal to Caesar | ကဲသာဘုရင်ထံ အယူခံဝင်ခြင်း | Kaithar-bayin-htan a-yu-khan-win-chin | ”appeal to Caesar” | Great Commission Fulfilled | Low | 25:11 | Legal mechanism advancing the narrative to Rome, fulfilling 1:8’s trajectory |
| conscience | သိစိတ် | thi-zate | ”conscience” | Persecution and Bold Witness | Medium | 23:1; 24:16 | God-oriented moral faculty, not karmic self-monitoring |
| self-control | မိမိကိုယ်ကို ချုပ်တည်းခြင်း | mi-mi-koh-koh choat-tee-chin | ”self-control” | Justification apart from the Law (ethics, background) | Medium | 24:25 | Fruit of relationship with God, not merit-earning discipline (sīla) |
| fasting | အစာရှောင်ခြင်း | a-sar-shaung-chin | ”fasting” | Apostolic Authority and Miracles (background) | Medium | 13:2-3; 14:23 | Accompanies prayer for guidance, not merit accumulation |
| cut to the heart | နှလုံးသားထိခိုက်ခြင်း | hna-loun-thar hti-khaik-chin | ”pierced in heart” | Repentance and Baptism | Medium | 2:37 | Spirit-produced conviction driving toward Christ, not mere social shame |
| breaking of bread | ပေါင်မုန့်ဖဲ့ခြင်း | paung-moun-hpeh-chin | ”breaking of bread” | The Church as Community | Medium | 2:42,46; 20:7,11 | Shared fellowship, not merit-generating alms-offering |
| common possessions / sharing | ဥစ္စာပစ္စည်းများကို ဝေမျှခြင်း | oke-sar-pit-si-myar-koh way-mya-chin | ”sharing of possessions” | The Church as Community | Medium | 2:44-45; 4:32-35 | Spirit-motivated love-sharing, not dana-style merit accumulation |
| fear / awe (reverent) | ကြောက်ရွံ့ရိုသေခြင်း | kyauk-ywan-yo-thay-chin | ”reverent fear” | The Church as Community; Apostolic Authority and Miracles | Medium | 2:43; 5:5,11; 19:17 | Awe at God’s power, distinct from propitiatory fear of a nat’s wrath |
| favor (non-technical χάρις) | လူအများ၏ ကျေးဇူးရှိသည် | lu-a-myar i kyayzu-shi-thi | ”having favor with people” | The Church as Community | Medium | 2:47 | Must NOT use the Critical grace term (ကျေးဇူးတော်) here; this is ordinary social goodwill, not saving grace |
| added (to their number) | အသင်းတော်တွင် တိုးပွားလာသည် | athin-taw-twin toe-pwar-lar-thi | ”added to the number” | The Church as Community | Low | 2:41,47; 5:14; 11:24 | Early numerical church growth marker |
| word of God grew | ဘုရားသခင်၏နှုတ်ကပတ်တော် တိုးပွားလာသည် | Phayarthakhin i hnoat-ka-pat-taw toe-pwar-lar-thi | ”the word of God grew” | Great Commission Fulfilled | Medium | 6:7; 12:24; 19:20 | Structural growth-refrain marking gospel advance amid opposition |
| Sanhedrin | လွှတ်တော်ကြီး | hlwutdaw-kyi | ”council” | Persecution and Bold Witness (background) | Low | 4:15; 5:21,27,34,41; 6:12,15; 22:30; 23:1,6,15,20,28; 24:20 | Jewish judicial-religious body; distinct from modern political parliament sense |
| Sadducees | ဆဒ္ဒုကဲ | Sadduka | proper name | (background, resurrection controversy) | Medium | 4:1; 5:17; 23:6-8 | Denied resurrection; useful contrast for resurrection doctrine’s controversy |
| Pharisees | ဖာရိရှဲ | Pharisheh | proper name | (background) | Low | 5:34; 15:5; 23:6-9; 26:5 | Established transliteration |
| Samaria / Samaritans | ရှမာရိ | Shamari | proper name | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Medium | 1:8; 8:1,5,9,14,25; 9:31; 15:3 | Ethnic-religious boundary crossed by the gospel; parallel sensitivity to Myanmar’s own majority-minority dynamics |
| evangelist | ဧဝံဂေလိဆရာ | Aywan-gayli-hsayar | ”one who proclaims good news” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Low-Medium | 21:8 | Built on the High-risk baseline gospel term |
| eunuch | ဂျုနုခ် | Junuq | ”eunuch” | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | Low | 8:27,34,36,38-39 | Marginalized, temple-excluded foreign official reached by the gospel |
| Diana / Artemis | အာတမစ် | Artamit | proper name | The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles (background) | Medium-High | 19:24,27-28,34-35 | Reinforces idols risk; gospel advance threatening religious-economic systems |
| Zeus / Hermes | ဇုသ်၊ ဟေရမေ | Zut, Herame | proper names | (background) | Low | 14:12 | Apostles’ refusal of worship parallels angel-veneration concern |
| shepherd / flock | သိုးထိန်း / သိုးအုပ် | thoe-htein / thoe-oat | ”shepherd” / “flock” | The Church as Community | Medium | 20:28-29 | Established pastoral metaphor |
| wolves | ဝံပုလွေများ | wunpalway-myar | ”wolves” | The Church as Community | Low | 20:29 | Metaphor for predatory false teachers |
| more blessed to give than receive | ပေးခြင်းသည် ခံယူခြင်းထက် မင်္ဂလာရှိသည် | pay-chin-thi khan-yu-chin-htet min-gala-shi-thi | ”more blessed to give” | The Church as Community | Low-Medium | 20:35 | Distinguish from dana-style meritorious giving |
| restoration of all things | ခပ်သိမ်းသောအရာတို့ကို ပြန်လည်ထားရှိခြင်း | khat-thein-thaw a-yar-doh-koh pyan-lay-htar-shi-chin | ”restoration of all things” | Great Commission Fulfilled | Medium | 3:20-21 | Final, linear consummation, not a cyclical world-age turn |
| preaching the kingdom with all boldness, unhindered | ဘုရားသခင်၏နိုင်ငံတော်ကို အပြည့်အဝ ရဲရင့်စွာ၊ အဆီးအတားမရှိ ဟောပြောခြင်း | Phayarthakhin i nainggan-taw koh a-pyi-a-wa yeh-ying-zwar, a-si-a-tar-ma-shi haw-pyaw-chin | ”preaching the kingdom of God with all boldness, without hindrance” | Great Commission Fulfilled | Medium-High | 28:31 | Book’s deliberately open-ended climactic summary; must preserve the intentional non-closure |
Cross-Reference Notes for Phase 2
- All Section A terms load from the existing baseline
translation_memory.json— no new version increment is required for these entries; they are reused, not redefined. - All Section B terms are new proposed entries. Per the baseline’s Translation Memory Load and Enforcement Instructions, each must be: (a) reviewed by a human theologian if Critical or High risk before being written into
translation_memory.json, (b) assigned a version increment upon acceptance, and (c) flagged for theologian review at every Critical-risk occurrence in Phase 2 segment translation. - The following terms require the highest-priority theologian review before Phase 2 translation begins, due to direct, high-consequence collision with Burmese religious cosmology: filled with the Holy Spirit, tongues, the Way, evil/unclean spirit, idols, circumcision, no other name, name (of Jesus), call upon the name of the Lord, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, forgiveness of sins, gift of the Holy Spirit, lie to/test the Holy Spirit, and Holy and Righteous One.
- Per the baseline’s cross-document consistency rule, the following Acts confession/summary texts must be rendered identically wherever they recur across curriculum documents: Acts 2:21, 2:38, 4:12, 16:31, and 28:31.
Critical Risk Terms
Believe In The Lord Jesus And Be Saved
Approved rendering: သခင်ယေရှုကို ယုံကြည်လော့။ သို့ပြုလျှင် ကယ်တင်တော်မူခြင်းသို့ ရောက်လိမ့်မည်
Transliteration: thakhin Yayshu ko yun-kyi-lok, thopyu-lyin kaetin-taw-mu-chin thoh yauk-leimmi
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Original: πίστευσον ἐπὶ τὸν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν, καὶ σωθήσῃ
Category: Salvation
New Acts term (Acts 16:31, Philippian jailer). Must be rendered with the same rigor as Romans 10:9-10 per the baseline’s cross-document consistency rule. ‘Believe’ must not be softened to mere intellectual assent, nor ‘saved’ narrowed to a this-worldly rescue from prison alone (the immediate narrative context); the household application (‘you and your household’) extends but does not dilute the individual faith requirement.
Call Upon The Name Of The Lord
Approved rendering: သခင်ဘုရား၏ နာမတော်ကို ခေါ်တောင်းခြင်း
Transliteration: thakhin-phayar i nan-daw ko khaw-taung-chin
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Original: ἐπικαλέσηται τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου
Category: Salvation
New Acts term. Acts 2:21’s salvation-defining confession, echoed at 2:38; 3:16; 4:12; 16:31; 22:16; must name Jesus specifically as the sole object of appeal, against a devotional culture accustomed to invoking multiple refuges or propitiating multiple nats. Direct parallel category to Romans 10:9-13.
Circumcision
Approved rendering: အရေဖျားလှီးခြင်း
Transliteration: are-hpyar-hli-chin
Doctrine: Justification apart from the Law
Original: περιτομή
Category: Covenant
New Acts term. The flashpoint test case for the whole book’s Justification apart from the Law doctrine; must retain the full force of the Jerusalem Council’s rejection of adding law-observance to faith as a salvation requirement. Appears at Acts 10:45; 11:2-3; 15:1,5; 21:21.
Evil Unclean Spirit
Approved rendering: ညစ်ညမ်းသောဝိညာဉ် / နတ်ဆိုး
Transliteration: nyit-nyan-thaw weinnyin / nat-hsoe
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: πνεῦμα πονηρόν / πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον
Category: Apostolic Ministry
New Acts term. The single most direct collision with the entire Burmese nat-spirit cosmology, in which spirits are numerous, ranked, and must typically be propitiated. Biblical evil spirits are always subordinate, hostile-to-God beings that Christ’s authority overcomes, never entities to be appeased, bargained with, or worshiped, and must be sharply distinguished from the Holy Spirit at every occurrence. Appears at Acts 5:16; 8:7; 16:16-18; 19:12-16.
Father
Approved rendering: အဖ
Transliteration: a-pha
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Rejected alternatives: ဗြဟ္မာ
Original: πατήρ
Category: God
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ဗြဟ္မာ. Appears at Acts 1:4,7; 2:33.
Filled With The Holy Spirit
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်နှင့် ပြည့်ဝသော
Transliteration: thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw hnin pyi-wa-thaw
Doctrine: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost
Rejected alternatives: နတ်ဝင်ခြင်း (nat-spirit possession terminology), ဝိညာဉ်ဝင်ခြင်း
Original: ἐπλήσθησαν πνεύματος ἁγίου
Category: Holy Spirit
New Acts term; the single greatest syncretism risk in the entire curriculum. Burmese folk religion has a well-established, culturally vivid category of spirit-possession (နတ်ဝင်ခြင်း) in which a nat-kadaw medium’s own consciousness is displaced by a spirit during trance. This phrase MUST be taught as personal indwelling by the one true divine Spirit that increases the believer’s own faculties (courage, clarity, intelligible speech), never displacing personal agency — the opposite direction from nat possession. Recurs at Acts 2:4; 4:8,31; 6:3,5; 7:55; 9:17; 11:24; 13:9,52. Flagged for highest-priority theologian review at every occurrence.
Forgiveness Of Sins
Approved rendering: အပြစ်လွတ်ငြိမ်းခြင်း
Transliteration: apyit lwut-nyain-chin
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Rejected alternatives: ကုသိုလ်ဖြင့် အပြစ်ချေခြင်း (merit-offsetting)
Original: ἄφεσις τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν
Category: Salvation
New Acts term. Must be sharply distinguished from the Buddhist practice of offsetting demerit (အကုသိုလ်) through merit-transfer or ritual dedication; a decisive, complete judicial pardon by a personal God on the basis of Christ’s finished work, not a partial adjustment of a moral ledger awaiting future karmic reckoning. Appears at Acts 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 10:43; 13:38; 26:18.
Gift Of The Holy Spirit
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်၏ လက်ဆောင်
Transliteration: thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw i let-hsaung
Doctrine: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost
Original: δωρεὰ τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ ἁγίου
Category: Holy Spirit
New Acts term. Directly parallels the Critical grace doctrine; must never be rendered in a way suggesting the Spirit is earned through discipline, merit, or ritual purity. Appears at Acts 2:38; 10:45; 11:17.
God
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Rejected alternatives: ဘုရား, နတ်သခင်
Original: θεός
Category: God
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ဘုရား alone or နတ်သခင်.
Grace
Approved rendering: ကျေးဇူးတော်
Transliteration: kyayzu-taw
Doctrine: Grace
Rejected alternatives: ကုသိုလ်, ကံကောင်းခြင်း, ဝါသနာတော်
Original: χάρις
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ကုသိုလ်/ကံကောင်းခြင်း. IMPORTANT ACTS-SPECIFIC NOTE: the same Greek word χάρις occurs at Acts 2:47 in a non-technical secular sense (‘favor with the people’); that occurrence must use the distinct entry ‘favor_non_technical’ below, NOT this Critical term, to avoid implying the early church earned merit with outsiders. Key Acts occurrences: 4:33; 11:23; 13:43; 14:3,26; 15:11,40; 18:27; 20:24,32.
Holy And Righteous One
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်း၍ ဖြောင့်မတ်တော်မူသောသူ
Transliteration: thangyin-yi pyaungmat-taw-mu-thaw-thu
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Original: τὸν ἅγιον καὶ δίκαιον
Category: Christology
New Acts term (Acts 3:14). Compounds two baseline Critical-risk terms (holy, righteousness) into a single Christological title; must be rendered as a fixed compound title, not two separate free-standing praise adjectives, and never weakened into generic praise language.
Holy Spirit
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်
Transliteration: thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw
Doctrine: Sanctification
Rejected alternatives: နတ်ဝိညာဉ်, ဝိညာဉ်
Original: πνεῦμα ἅγιον
Category: Holy Spirit
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ဝိညာဉ် alone or နတ်ဝိညာဉ်. The most doctrinally saturated term in Acts (over 50 occurrences, including 1:5,8,16; 2:4,17-18,33,38; 4:8,31; 5:3,9,32; 6:3,5; 7:51,55; 8:15,17-19,29,39; 9:17,31; 10:19,38,44-47; 11:12,15-16,24,28; 13:2,4,9,52; 15:8,28; 16:6-7; 19:2,6; 20:23,28; 21:4,11; 28:25). Every derived verb-collocation (filled, poured out, fell upon) is tracked as its own entry below, not treated as a free paraphrase of this noun.
Idols
Approved rendering: ရုပ်တု
Transliteration: yoke-tu
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: εἴδωλα
Category: Church
New Acts term. Extremely high cultural sensitivity given Buddha-image veneration (ဘုရားပုံ၊ ဘုရားရုပ်တု), a beloved, near-universal cultural-religious practice; the doctrinal point (idols are lifeless, not divine) must be preserved with full force but without gratuitous cultural offense, echoing the baseline’s own ဘုရား/ဘုရားသခင် distinction. Appears at Acts 7:41; 15:20,29; 17:16; 19:26.
Imputed Righteousness
Approved rendering: ဖြောင့်မတ်ခြင်းအဖြစ် မှတ်တော်မူခြင်း
Transliteration: pyaungmat-chin a-phyit hmat-taw-mu-chin
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: ကုသိုလ်စုဆောင်းခြင်း
Original: ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Underlies the logic of Acts 13:39 (‘everyone who believes is justified’); never rendered as earned righteousness.
Incarnation
Approved rendering: လူ့ဇာတိခံယူခြင်း
Transliteration: lu-zarti khan-yu-chin
Doctrine: Incarnation
Rejected alternatives: ဘုရားလောင်းအဖြစ်မွေးဖွားခြင်း, နတ်ဆင်းသက်ခြင်း
Original: ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο (background category)
Category: Christology
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Background Christology term underlying Acts’s resurrection preaching; not a distinct Acts vocabulary item but available if needed.
Jesus
Approved rendering: ယေရှု
Transliteration: Yayshu
Doctrine: Lordship of Christ
Rejected alternatives: ရှင်ယေရှု
Original: Ἰησοῦς
Category: Christology
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Established Myanmar Bible form throughout Acts; keep consistent across all documents.
Justification
Approved rendering: ဖြောင့်မတ်ရာသို့ ရောက်ခြင်း
Transliteration: pyaungmat-ya-tho-yauk-chin
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: ကုသိုလ်ရခြင်း, အပြစ်ပြေခြင်း
Original: δικαίωσις / δικαιοῦται
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Acts 13:38-39 (‘everyone who believes is justified’) is one of the clearest explicit statements of this doctrine outside Romans; must be rendered with identical rigor and cross-checked against the Romans rendering per the baseline’s cross-document consistency rule.
Lie To Test The Holy Spirit
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်ကို လှည့်စား/စုံစမ်းခြင်း
Transliteration: thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw ko hlyanzar/sonzan-chin
Doctrine: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost
Original: ψεύσασθαι/πειράσαι τὸ πνεῦμα (τὸ ἅγιον/Κυρίου)
Category: Holy Spirit
New Acts term (Ananias and Sapphira, Acts 5:3,9). Decisive proof that the Holy Spirit is a personal divine agent who can be sinned against directly, not an impersonal force or life-principle; must not be framed as breaking a nat-taboo (which would imply an appeasable, negotiable spirit).
Lord
Approved rendering: သခင်
Transliteration: thakhin
Doctrine: Lordship of Christ
Rejected alternatives: ဘုရင်, ဆရာသခင်
Original: κύριος
Category: Christology
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. ‘Jesus is Lord’ salvation confession recurs in multiple Acts forms (2:21,34,36; 9:5; 10:36; 11:20; 16:31; 22:8,10; 26:15); the double referent at Acts 2:34-35 (Ps 110:1, Father addressing Son) requires a translator note distinguishing the two persons without implying two gods.
Messiah
Approved rendering: မေရှိယ
Transliteration: Mei-shi-ya
Doctrine: Messianic Promise
Rejected alternatives: အရေးတော်ပုံလာမည့်သူ, မိတ္တေယျ
Original: Χριστός / מָשִׁיחַ
Category: Christology
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never မိတ္တေယျ (Metteyya, the future Buddha). Appears at Acts 2:31,36,38; 3:18,20; 4:26; 5:42; 8:5; 9:22; 17:3; 18:5,28; 26:23, often rendered contextually as ခရစ်တော် (Christ).
Mocking Of The Resurrection
Approved rendering: ပြက်ရယ်ပြုကြသည်
Transliteration: pyet-yay-pyu-kya-thi
Doctrine: Resurrection of Christ
New Acts term (Acts 17:32). Illustrates cross-cultural offense of bodily resurrection even among Greek philosophers; the forbidden-substitution rule (never rebirth/reincarnation language) still applies absolutely without softening for cultural comfort.
Name Of Jesus
Approved rendering: နာမတော်
Transliteration: nan-daw
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: τὸ ὄνομα (τοῦ Ἰησοῦ) / ὄνομα Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
Category: Salvation
New Acts term. The most frequently recurring load-bearing phrase in the entire book (2:38; 3:6,16; 4:7,10,12,17-18,30; 8:12,16; 9:14-16,27-28; 10:43,48; 16:18; 19:5,13,17; 21:13; 22:16; 26:9). Risks being flattened into a generic invocation formula or misused as a magical incantation, as the sons-of-Sceva episode (19:13-16) itself warns against; must retain exclusive, personal, authoritative force at every occurrence.
No Other Name
Approved rendering: အခြားနာမတွင် ကယ်တင်ခြင်းမရှိ
Transliteration: a-khyar nan-twin kaetin-chin ma-shi
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἄλλῳ οὐδενὶ ἡ σωτηρία
Category: Salvation
New Acts term. The sharpest exclusivity statement in Acts (4:12) and in the entire curriculum; must never be softened into a relativizing paraphrase (e.g., ‘Jesus’s name has great power’) against a multi-refuge devotional culture (Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, the 37 nats).
Resurrection
Approved rendering: ထမြောက်ခြင်း
Transliteration: hta-myauk-chin
Doctrine: Resurrection of Christ
Rejected alternatives: ပဋိသန္ဓေတည်ခြင်း, ပြန်လည်မွေးဖွားခြင်း
Original: ἀνάστασις
Category: Eschatology
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. NEVER ပဋိသန္ဓေတည်ခြင်း (rebirth into samsara). The single most-repeated Critical doctrine across Acts (1:22; 2:24,31-32; 3:15,26; 4:2,10,33; 5:30; 10:40-41; 13:30-37; 17:18,31-32; 23:6,8; 24:15,21; 26:23). Acts 17:32 records even Greek philosophical mockery of this doctrine — apply the forbidden-substitution rule without exception regardless of audience discomfort.
Righteousness
Approved rendering: ဖြောင့်မတ်ခြင်း
Transliteration: pyaungmat-chin
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: ကုသိုလ်ကံ, သီလ
Original: δικαιοσύνη
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ကုသိုလ်ကံ/သီလ. Appears at Acts 13:10; 17:31; 24:25, and forms half of the compound Christological title ‘Holy and Righteous One’ at Acts 3:14 (see holy_and_righteous_one).
Salvation
Approved rendering: ကယ်တင်ခြင်း
Transliteration: kaetin-chin
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: နိဗ္ဗာန်ရောက်ခြင်း, လွတ်မြောက်ခြင်း
Original: σωτηρία
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. NEVER နိဗ္ဗာန်ရောက်ခြင်း. Appears at Acts 2:21,40,47; 4:9,12; 11:14; 13:26,47; 15:1,11; 16:17,30-31; 27:20,31,34; 28:28. At Acts 2:40 (‘save yourselves’) a mandatory translator note is required clarifying this is an appeal to receive/respond to the rescue offered, not self-generated deliverance, which would collide with the Critical grace doctrine.
Son Of God
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏သားတော်
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i tharadaw
Doctrine: Sonship of Christ
Rejected alternatives: ဗြဟ္မာ့သား, နတ်သား
Original: υἱὸς θεοῦ
Category: Christology
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Full phrase required at Acts 9:20; 13:33.
The Way
Approved rendering: ထိုလမ်းစဉ်တော်
Transliteration: hto lan-zin taw
Doctrine: Conversion of Paul
Rejected alternatives: မဂ်ဂင်ရှစ်ပါး (Noble Eightfold Path vocabulary, forbidden)
Original: ἡ ὁδός
Category: Church
New Acts term. Direct collision with the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path (မဂ်ဂင်ရှစ်ပါး) as a self-directed liberation discipline. Must be taught explicitly as personal allegiance to and following of a living person (Jesus), received through grace, not a self-powered ethical-meditative discipline pursued to attain one’s own liberation. Appears at Acts 9:2; 19:9,23; 22:4; 24:14,22.
Tongues
Approved rendering: အခြားဘာသာစကားများ
Transliteration: a-khyar bharthar sagar myar
Doctrine: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost
Rejected alternatives: ဝိညာဉ်ဆန်းသောစကား (ecstatic/mystical speech phrasing)
Original: γλῶσσαι ἑτέραι / γλῶσσα
Category: Holy Spirit
New Acts term. Unintelligible ecstatic or altered-voice speech is a recognizable feature of Burmese spirit-mediumship and folk-Buddhist trance practices. A mandatory translator note must state plainly that Acts 2’s tongues were real, known human languages understood by hearers of those languages (v.6,8,11), distinguishing this Pentecost sign from both spirit-trance speech and from other, later NT phenomena. Recurs at Acts 2:4,6,8,11; 10:46; 19:6.
High Risk Terms
Abba
Approved rendering: အဗ္ဘ
Transliteration: Abba
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Original: אַבָּא
Category: God
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not used directly in Acts; retained for cross-document terminology consistency only.
Ascension
Approved rendering: ကောင်းကင်ဘုံသို့ဆောင်ယူခြင်းခံရသည်
Transliteration: kaung-gin-bon-thoh saung-yu-chin-hkan-ya-thi
Doctrine: The Great Commission Fulfilled
Original: ἀνελήμφθη
Category: Christology
New Acts term (Acts 1:9,11). Must not be rendered as a generic apotheosis, a spirit’s release from the body, or one stage within a chain of successive existences; the same unique, incarnate body being taken up bodily and visibly, once — not a merit-earned Brahma-realm ascent.
Author Of Life
Approved rendering: အသက်၏အရှင်အကြီးအကဲ
Transliteration: a-thet i a-shin a-kyi a-ke
Doctrine: Resurrection of Christ
Original: ἀρχηγὸν τῆς ζωῆς
Category: Christology
New Acts term (Acts 3:15). Must convey that Christ is life’s source and originator, not merely one who was fortunate enough to be raised; tied to the Critical resurrection doctrine.
Baptism Of John Vs Name Of Jesus
Approved rendering: ယောဟန်၏ဗတ္တိဇံ / သခင်ယေရှု၏နာမတော်ဖြင့် ဗတ္တိဇံ
Transliteration: Yohan i Bataizan / thakhin Yayshu i nan-daw-hpyin Bataizan
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Original: βάπτισμα Ἰωάννου vs. εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ
Category: Salvation
New Acts term (Acts 19:1-7). Not all baptism-language is equivalent; Christian baptism is specifically tied to the completed work of Christ and the gift of the Spirit. Always retain the full possessive/prepositional distinguishing phrase; never abbreviate to bare ဗတ္တိဇံ in this pericope.
Baptism
Approved rendering: ဗတ္တိဇံခံယူသည်
Transliteration: Bataizan
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Rejected alternatives: ရေသွန်းကုသိုလ်ဝေခြင်း (merit-dedication water-pouring), ရေချိုးခြင်း (ordinary ritual bathing)
Original: βάπτισμα / βαπτίζω
Category: Salvation
New Acts term. Established Myanmar Christian transliteration, retained specifically because a native coinage would inevitably echo merit-dedication water-pouring or ordinary ceremonial bathing. Must be taught as a once-for-all identification with Christ’s death and resurrection, not a repeatable merit-generating rite. Recurs at Acts 2:38,41; 8:12-13,36-38; 9:18; 10:47-48; 16:15,33; 18:8; 19:3-5.
Called
Approved rendering: ခေါ်တော်မူသော
Transliteration: khaw-taw-mu-thaw
Doctrine: Divine Calling
Rejected alternatives: ဖိတ်ခေါ်ခြင်း
Original: κλητός (theological category)
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears conceptually at Acts 2:39; distinguish from a revocable invitation.
Calling
Approved rendering: ခေါ်တော်မူခြင်း
Transliteration: khaw-taw-mu-chin
Doctrine: Divine Calling
Rejected alternatives: ကံဇာတာ
Original: κλῆσις (theological category)
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never conflate with ကံဇာတာ (astrologically fixed destiny).
Chosen Instrument
Approved rendering: ရွေးကောက်ထားသော တန်ဆာပလာ
Transliteration: ywaykauk-htarthaw tanzarpalar
Doctrine: Conversion of Paul
Rejected alternatives: ကံဇာတာအရ ရွေးချယ်ခံရခြင်း (astrological-destiny framing)
Original: σκεῦος ἐκλογῆς
Category: Salvation
New Acts term (Acts 9:15). Directly ties Paul’s conversion to the High-risk election doctrine; must retain sovereign divine initiative and purposive selection, never a person’s own religious achievement, and must not collapse into ကံဇာတာ (fixed astrological destiny).
Covenant
Approved rendering: ပဋိညာဉ်
Transliteration: padi-nyin
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Rejected alternatives: သဘောတူညီချက်
Original: διαθήκη
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 3:25; 7:8.
Day Of The Lord
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏နေ့တော်ကြီး
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i nay-taw-kyi
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Original: ἡμέρα Κυρίου
Category: Eschatology
New Acts term (Acts 2:20). Must be kept distinct from the Buddhist cosmological pattern of a kappa (world-age) ending in destruction and beginning anew; a singular, linear, morally decisive day tied to the person of the returning Lord.
Election
Approved rendering: ရွေးကောက်ခြင်း
Transliteration: ywaykauk-chin
Doctrine: Effectual Calling
Rejected alternatives: ကံဇာတာ, ကံကြမ္မာ
Original: ἐκλογή (theological category)
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not ကံဇာတာ/ကံကြမ္မာ. Underlies Paul’s designation as a ‘chosen instrument’ (Acts 9:15; see chosen_instrument below) and 13:48.
Exaltation Right Hand Of God
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏လက်ယာတော်ဘက်၌ ချီးမြှောက်ခြင်းခံရသော
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i let-yar-taw-bet-hti chi-myauk-chin-hkan-yathaw
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Original: τῇ δεξιᾷ τοῦ θεοῦ ὑψωθείς
Category: Christology
New Acts term. Must not be softened into a merely honorary or metaphorical elevation, nor confused with a Brahma-realm ascent attained through accumulated merit; uniquely conferred by the Father on the incarnate Son. Appears at Acts 2:33; 5:31; 7:55-56.
Food Offered To Idols
Approved rendering: ရုပ်တုကိုကပ်လှူသော အစားအစာ
Transliteration: yoke-tu ko kat-hlu-thaw a-sar-a-sar
Doctrine: Justification apart from the Law
Original: εἰδωλόθυτα
Category: Covenant
New Acts term (Jerusalem Council minimal requirements, Acts 15:20,29). Requires careful framing as a pastoral accommodation for Jewish-Gentile table-fellowship unity, not a re-imposition of the law or a new universal salvation requirement.
Foreknowledge
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏ ရှေးကြိုသိတော်မူခြင်း
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i shay-kyo-thi-taw-mu-chin
Doctrine: Providence
Original: πρόγνωσις
Category: God
New Acts term (Acts 2:23). Must be distinguished from impersonal karmic determinism (ကံ); Christ’s death is framed as the deliberate outworking of God’s sovereign plan, not tragedy or accident overtaking God’s purpose.
Glory
Approved rendering: ဘုန်းတော်
Transliteration: phon-taw
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Rejected alternatives: ဘုန်းကံ
Original: δόξα
Category: God
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not ဘုန်းကံ (merit-power). Acts 7:55 (Stephen’s vision) and 12:23 (Herod’s false glory struck down) form a deliberate positive/negative contrast pair; God’s own inherent radiant honor is never a ruler’s or a monk’s earned merit-power.
God Shows No Partiality
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်သည် မျက်နှာသာမပေး
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin thi myet-nhar-thar ma-pay
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: οὐκ ἔστιν προσωπολήμπτης ὁ θεός
Category: Church
New Acts term (Acts 10:34). Anchors Universal Scope of the Gospel and Unity of Jews and Gentiles; must not be softened to suggest any residual ethnic-religious priority, directly confronting notions of Bamar-Buddhist religious priority over minority groups.
Gospel
Approved rendering: သတင်းကောင်း
Transliteration: thadin kaung
Doctrine: Gospel
Rejected alternatives: ဓမ္မသတင်း, ကောင်းသောအကြောင်းအရာ
Original: εὐαγγέλιον
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. In Acts this term spreads narratively across ethnic and geographic boundaries (5:42; 8:4,12,25,35,40; 10:36; 13:32; 14:7,21; 15:7; 20:24); its unique salvation-announcement force must be reinforced at every occurrence, not softened into generic good news.
Heavenly Vision
Approved rendering: ကောင်းကင်ဗျာဒိတ်ရူပါရုံ
Transliteration: kaung-gin byadate-yupayoun
Doctrine: Conversion of Paul
Original: οὐρανίῳ ὀπτασίᾳ
Category: Apostolic Ministry
New Acts term. Paul’s own term for his Damascus-road encounter (Acts 26:19). The threefold repetition of this conversion narrative (chs. 9, 22, 26) signals structural and doctrinal centrality; must be rendered identically across all three tellings.
Holy
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသော
Transliteration: thangyin-thaw
Doctrine: Sanctification
Rejected alternatives: စင်ကြယ်သော
Original: ἅγιος
Category: Sanctification
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. See ‘unclean_clean_ritual’ below for the distinct ritual-purity category (also built on this same root) that must not be confused with this moral/relational holiness.
It Seemed Good To The Holy Spirit And To Us
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသောဝိညာဉ်တော်နှင့် ငါတို့သည် လျော်ကန်သည်ဟု စီရင်ကြ၏
Transliteration: thangyinthaw weinnyin-taw hnin ngadoh thi lyawkan-thi-ho si-yin-kya-yi
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: ἔδοξεν τῷ πνεύματι τῷ ἁγίῳ καὶ ἡμῖν
Category: Holy Spirit
New Acts term (Jerusalem Council decree, Acts 15:28). Foundational model of Spirit-guided, apostolically-ratified collective decision-making; must not collapse into either extreme (pure human decision-making with religious veneer, or unmediated new revelation bypassing apostolic deliberation).
Judgment To Come
Approved rendering: နောင်ကျမည့် စစ်ကြောစီရင်ခြင်း
Transliteration: naung-kya-mae sit-kyaw si-yin-chin
Doctrine: Universal Human Accountability
Original: κρίσις
Category: Eschatology
New Acts term (Acts 24:25). Ties to Universal Human Accountability; must retain a single, final, personal divine reckoning, not a graded karmic accounting across multiple lifetimes.
Last Days
Approved rendering: နောက်ဆုံးသောနေ့ရက်များ
Transliteration: naung-hson-thaw nay-yet-myar
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Original: ἐσχάταις ἡμέραις
Category: Eschatology
New Acts term (Acts 2:17). Burmese Buddhist cosmology frames time as a vast cycle of world-ages (ကမ္ဘာ); this must be taught as the one, final, linear era inaugurated by Christ’s first coming and running to his return, not one more turn of a cosmic wheel.
Law
Approved rendering: ပညတ်တရား
Transliteration: pyinnat tayar
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Rejected alternatives: ဝိနည်း
Original: νόμος
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ဝိနည်း (Buddhist Vinaya). Appears at Acts 6:13; 7:53; 13:39; 15:5,24; 18:13; 21:20-21,28; 22:3,12; 23:29; 24:14; 25:8; 28:23.
Obedience Of Faith
Approved rendering: ယုံကြည်ခြင်း၏နာခံမှု
Transliteration: yunkyichin i nakhan-hmu
Doctrine: Obedience of Faith
Rejected alternatives: သီလလိုက်နာခြင်း
Original: τῇ πίστει ὑπήκουον
Category: Faith
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 6:7 (‘a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith’); obedience flowing from faith, not precept-observance for merit standing.
Pentecost
Approved rendering: ပင်တေကုတ္တေနေ့
Transliteration: Pinteikositay-nay
Doctrine: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost
Rejected alternatives: ဥပုသ်နေ့ကြီး (generic Buddhist holy-day framing), ပွဲတော် (generic festival term)
Original: πεντηκοστή
Category: Holy Spirit
New Acts term. NO native Burmese concept exists for a fixed, calendar-anchored, salvation-historical pilgrim feast; Burmese festival vocabulary is either lunar/merit-cycle-coded or generic, risking Pentecost being read as one more recurring observance rather than a singular historical inauguration (Acts 2:1). Transliterate and gloss with OT background (Lev 23:15-21); do not attempt dynamic-equivalence localization.
Power Of God
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏တန်ခိုးတော်
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i tankhoe-taw
Doctrine: Power of God for Salvation
Rejected alternatives: အနုဘော်တန်ခိုး
Original: δύναμις θεοῦ
Category: God
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never အနုဘော်တန်ခိုး (relic/amulet potency). Appears throughout Acts (1:8; 2:22; 3:12; 4:7,33; 6:8; 8:10,13,19; 10:38; 19:11); anchors Apostolic Authority and Miracles alongside ‘signs_and_wonders’ below.
Providence
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏ကြည့်ရှုစောင့်ရှောက်မှု
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i kyi-shu-saung-shauk-hmu
Doctrine: Providence
Rejected alternatives: ကံ
Original: πρόνοια (theological category)
Category: God
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ကံ. Anchors Acts 1:26 (lots), 2:23 (foreknowledge), 12:7-11 (prison release), 16:26 (earthquake), 18:9-10, 23:11, 27:22-25,34,44 (shipwreck).
Repentance
Approved rendering: နောင်တရခြင်း
Transliteration: naung-ta-ya-chin
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Rejected alternatives: ဝန်ခံစိတ်ပူပန်ခြင်း (mere emotional remorse)
Original: μετάνοια / μετανοέω
Category: Salvation
New Acts term. Must be taught as a Spirit-enabled turning of the whole person toward God in trust, always paired with the positive turning (ဘုရားသခင်ဘက်သို့ လှည့်ခြင်း), not merely emotional remorse, and not a Buddhist confession-of-fault ritual performed to reduce demerit (အကုသိုလ်). Central to Acts 2:38; also 3:19; 5:31; 8:22; 11:18; 17:30; 19:4; 20:21; 26:20.
Sanctification
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းခြင်း
Transliteration: thangyin-chin
Doctrine: Sanctification
Rejected alternatives: ရေချိုးသန့်စင်ခြင်း
Original: ἁγιασμός
Category: Sanctification
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Distinguish from self-directed moral self-improvement or ritual purification. Appears at Acts 20:32; 26:18.
Seed Of David
Approved rendering: ဒါဝိဒ်၏အနွယ်ဝင်
Transliteration: Dawid i anwe-win
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Original: σπέρμα Δαυίδ
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 13:23.
Servant Pais
Approved rendering: အစေခံတော်
Transliteration: a-say-khan-taw
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Original: παῖς
Category: Christology
New Acts term. Isaianic Suffering Servant title applied to Jesus (Acts 3:13,26); carries OT-fulfillment weight and must not be flattened to an ordinary ‘servant’ without messianic overtones — requires OT background teaching.
Sexual Immorality
Approved rendering: ကာမဂုဏ်တရားကို မတရားကျူးလွန်ခြင်း
Transliteration: kamaguntayar ko ma-tayar kyu-lun-chin
Doctrine: Justification apart from the Law
Original: πορνεία
Category: Covenant
New Acts term (Acts 15:20,29). Retained across the Council’s minimal requirements as continuing moral instruction, distinct from the ceremonial dietary items in the same list.
Signs And Wonders
Approved rendering: နိမိတ်လက္ခဏာများနှင့် အံ့ဖွယ်အမှုများ
Transliteration: neimate-lakhkhanar myar hnin an-hpwe-a-hmu myar
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: δυνάμεσι καὶ τέρασι καὶ σημείοις
Category: Apostolic Ministry
New Acts term. Direct collision risk with the supernatural powers (iddhi/abhiññā) attributed to advanced meditators and arahants in Burmese Buddhist teaching, and with weizza (esoteric adept) and amulet/relic potency (အနုဘော်တန်ခိုး). These signs authenticate God’s message and messenger by divine initiative, never self-generated spiritual attainment. Appears at Acts 2:22,43; 4:30; 5:12; 6:8; 14:3; 15:12.
Sin
Approved rendering: အပြစ်
Transliteration: a-pyit
Doctrine: Universal Human Accountability
Rejected alternatives: အကုသိုလ်
Original: ἁμαρτία
Category: Sin
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not အကုသိုလ် (demerit). Appears at Acts 2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 10:43; 13:38; 22:16; 26:18.
Son Of Man
Approved rendering: လူသား
Transliteration: lu-thar
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Original: ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου
Category: Christology
New Acts term (Stephen’s dying vision, Acts 7:56). Danielic apocalyptic title (Dan 7:13-14) for the exalted, divine-human figure; a superficial rendering (‘a human being’) would strip the title of its deity-adjacent theological weight.
Sorcery Magic
Approved rendering: မှော်အတတ်
Transliteration: hmaw-a-tat
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: μαγεία
Category: Apostolic Ministry
New Acts term. Direct collision with Myanmar’s widespread astrology (ဗေဒင်), esoteric weizza-adept practice, and spirit-mediumship — categories that are broadly respected, not stigmatized, in Burmese society, unlike the automatically negative default valence of the English ‘sorcery.’ Must explicitly teach that spiritual power cannot be bought, whether with money or with merit. Appears at Acts 8:9-11,18-24; 13:6-11; 19:13-19.
Unclean Clean Ritual
Approved rendering: မသန့်ရှင်းသော / သန့်ရှင်းသော
Transliteration: ma-thangyin-thaw / thangyin-thaw
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: κοινός/ἀκάθαρτος vs. καθαρός
Category: Sanctification
New Acts term. Shares its root with the baseline’s Critical ‘holy’ term (သန့်ရှင်း); a mandatory translator note is required distinguishing this abolished OT ritual/ceremonial-purity category from the continuing moral/relational holiness category, so learners do not conclude holiness itself has been abolished. Appears at Acts 10:14-15,28; 11:8-9.
Unknown God
Approved rendering: မသိသောဘုရား
Transliteration: ma-thi-thaw phayar
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ
Category: Church
New Acts term (Acts 17:23, Areopagus). Must be taught as a rhetorical bridge Paul immediately corrects (17:24-31), NOT as an endorsement that Burmese folk deities, nats, or an impersonal Buddhist ultimate reality are partial, valid revelations of the true God awaiting only a name.
Vision Trance
Approved rendering: ဗျာဒိတ်ရူပါရုံ / ဝိညာဉ်ထူးဆန်းသောအခြင်းအရာ
Transliteration: byadate-yupayoun / weinnyin-htu-han-thaw a-hkyin-a-yar
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: ὅραμα / ἔκστασις
Category: Apostolic Ministry
New Acts term. The Greek ἔκστασις especially risks conflation with the altered/trance states of Burmese spirit-mediumship (nat-kadaw possession) or Buddhist meditative absorption (jhāna); must be taught as a God-initiated, content-specific revelatory experience given for a particular redemptive purpose, not a self-induced or self-cultivated altered state. Appears at Acts 9:10,12; 10:3,10,17,19; 11:5; 16:9-10; 18:9; 22:17-18; 26:19; 27:23.
Medium Risk Terms
Adoption
Approved rendering: သားအဖြစ်လက်ခံခြင်း
Transliteration: thar-a-phyit let-khan-chin
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Rejected alternatives: ဝမ်းစုတင်ခြင်း
Original: υἱοθεσία (background category)
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Background term in Acts, not primary, but available for sonship-of-believers teaching.
Angel
Approved rendering: ကောင်းကင်တမန်
Transliteration: kaung-gin-taman
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: ἄγγελος
Category: God
New Acts term. Must be clearly distinguished from the nat (spirit) pantheon, which are objects of worship and propitiation; biblical angels are created, subordinate servants of God, never objects of worship themselves. Appears at Acts 5:19; 8:26; 10:3,7,22; 12:7-11,23; 27:23.
Apostle
Approved rendering: တမန်တော်
Transliteration: tamantaw
Doctrine: Apostleship
Rejected alternatives: ဆရာတော်, ဆရာကြီး
Original: ἀπόστολος
Category: Church
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Distinguish from ဆရာတော် (senior-monk connotation). Appears throughout Acts (1:2,25-26; 2:37,42-43; 4:33,35-37; 5:2,12,18,29,40; 6:6; 8:1,14,18; 9:27; 11:1; 14:4,14; 15:2,4,6,22-23; 16:4).
Boldness
Approved rendering: ရဲရင့်ခြင်း
Transliteration: yaeh-ying-chin
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: παρρησία
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Distinguish from mere aggressive confrontation, given the real social and family cost of conversion in Myanmar; always pair with respectful witness/testimony framing, not confrontation. Appears at Acts 4:13,29,31; 9:27-28; 13:46; 14:3; 18:26; 19:8; 26:26; 28:31.
Breaking Of Bread
Approved rendering: ပေါင်မုန့်ဖဲ့ခြင်း
Transliteration: paung-moun-hpeh-chin
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: κλάσις τοῦ ἄρτου
Category: Church
New Acts term. Distinguish from Buddhist ritual almsgiving of food to monks (ဆွမ်းကျွေးခြင်း) as a merit-earning act; shared fellowship among equal members of Christ’s body, not an offering upward to a spiritually superior recipient. Appears at Acts 2:42,46; 20:7,11.
Church Offices Elders
Approved rendering: အသင်းတော်လူကြီးများ
Transliteration: athin-taw lu-kyi myar
Doctrine: The Church as Community
New Acts term. Distinguish from a village traditional elder or from Buddhist monastic seniority (thera, based on years since ordination); a Spirit-recognized pastoral-governance office tied to character and gifting. Appears at Acts 11:30; 14:23; 15:2,4,6,22-23; 16:4; 20:17; 21:18.
Church
Approved rendering: အသင်းတော်
Transliteration: athin-taw
Doctrine: Church as God’s People
Rejected alternatives: ဘုရားကျောင်း, ဘုရားရိပ်သာ
Original: ἐκκλησία
Category: Church
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Never ဘုရားကျောင်း/ဘုရားရိပ်သာ. Appears throughout Acts (5:11; 8:1,3; 9:31; 11:22,26; 12:1,5; 13:1; 14:23,27; 15:3-4,22,41; 16:5; 18:22; 20:17,28).
Common Possessions Sharing
Approved rendering: ဥစ္စာပစ္စည်းများကို ဝေမျှခြင်း
Transliteration: oke-sar-pit-si-myar-koh way-mya-chin
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: κοινά
Category: Church
New Acts term. Must be distinguished from dana (ဒါန), the Buddhist practice of giving to accumulate personal merit toward a better rebirth; this sharing flows from Spirit-given love and unity, generating no personal merit-credit. Appears at Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-35.
Conscience
Approved rendering: သိစိတ်
Transliteration: thi-zate
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: συνείδησις
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Must be taught as a God-oriented moral faculty testifying to a personal God’s standard, not a self-generated ethical monitoring system analogous to tracking one’s own karmic ledger. Appears at Acts 23:1; 24:16.
Cut To The Heart
Approved rendering: နှလုံးသားထိခိုက်ခြင်း
Transliteration: hna-loun-thar hti-khaik-chin
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Original: κατενύγησαν τὴν καρδίαν
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term (Acts 2:37). Should be distinguished from ordinary regret or social shame; conviction that drives a person specifically toward the Lord Jesus for the remedy.
David
Approved rendering: ဒါဝိဒ်
Transliteration: Dawid
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Original: Δαβίδ
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 1:16; 2:25,29,34; 4:25; 7:45; 13:22,34,36; 15:16.
Deacon Service
Approved rendering: သင်းထောက် / အမှုတော်ဆောင်ခြင်း
Transliteration: thin-htaung / a-hmu-taw-hsaung-chin
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: διακονία / διάκονος
Category: Church
New Acts term (Acts 6:1-6). Distinguish from the Buddhist lay-supporter (kappiya) role that provisions monks for merit; Spirit-qualified practical service within the one body of Christ, not a merit-generating patron-client relationship.
Defense Apology
Approved rendering: ခုခံချေပချက်
Transliteration: khu-khan-chay-pa-chet
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: ἀπολογία
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Denotes reasoned, respectful legal/rhetorical defense, not confrontational argument; structures Acts’s second half. Appears at Acts 22:1; 24:10; 25:8,16; 26:1-2,24.
Diana Artemis
Approved rendering: အာတမစ်
Transliteration: Artamit
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: Ἄρτεμις
Category: Church
New Acts term. Reinforces the Critical ‘idols’ term; illustrates gospel advance threatening entrenched religious-economic systems, with care needed in any parallel drawn to pagoda-centered economies. Appears at Acts 19:24,27-28,34-35.
Faith
Approved rendering: ယုံကြည်ခြင်း
Transliteration: yun-kyi-chin
Doctrine: Faith
Rejected alternatives: သဒ္ဓါတရား
Original: πίστις
Category: Faith
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Object of faith must always be specified as Christ. Central to the Acts 16:31 salvation confession and Acts 3:16; 6:7; 11:24; 13:8,12; 14:9,22,27; 15:9; 16:5; 20:21; 26:18.
Fasting
Approved rendering: အစာရှောင်ခြင်း
Transliteration: a-sar-shaung-chin
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: νηστεία
Category: Ethics
New Acts term. Must be distinguished from Buddhist meritorious fasting practices undertaken to accumulate merit; here fasting accompanies prayer for divine guidance, not merit accumulation. Appears at Acts 13:2-3; 14:23.
Favor Non Technical
Approved rendering: လူအများ၏ ကျေးဇူးရှိသည်
Transliteration: lu-a-myar i kyayzu-shi-thi
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Rejected alternatives: ကျေးဇူးတော် (reserved for the Critical saving-grace term — forbidden here)
Original: χάριν (accusative of χάρις, secular sense)
Category: Church
New Acts term. This occurrence of χάρις (Acts 2:47) must NOT be rendered with the theologically loaded ကျေးဇူးတော် reserved for saving grace, to avoid implying the early church earned merit with outsiders; ordinary social goodwill/approval only.
Gentiles
Approved rendering: တစ်ပါးအမျိုးသား
Transliteration: tabar-amyothar
Doctrine: Unity of Jews and Gentiles
Rejected alternatives: လူမျိုးခြား
Original: ἔθνη
Category: Church
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Central to Acts’s major structural doctrine (9:15; 10:45; 11:1,18; 13:46-48; 14:27; 15:3,7,12,14,19; 18:6; 21:19,25; 22:21; 26:17,20,23; 28:28).
God Fearer
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်ကို ကြောက်ရွံ့သူ
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin ko kyauk-ywan-thu
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: φοβούμενος τὸν θεόν
Category: Church
New Acts term. A righteous-Gentile-apart-from-full-proselyte-conversion category with no exact Burmese social parallel; God’s grace reaches Cornelius and others apart from ritual requirements later debated at the Jerusalem Council. Appears at Acts 10:2,22; 13:16,26; 16:14; 17:4,17; 18:7.
Intercession
Approved rendering: အသနားခံခြင်း
Transliteration: a-thanar-khan-chin
Doctrine: Prayer and Intercession
Rejected alternatives: နတ်ကိုးကွယ်ခြင်း
Original: ἔντευξις (background category)
Category: Faith
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not petitioning the 37 nats as in Burmese folk practice; background category in Acts’s prayer scenes.
Israel
Approved rendering: ဣသရေလ
Transliteration: Israen
Doctrine: Unity of Jews and Gentiles
Original: Ἰσραήλ
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 1:6; 2:36; 3:12; 4:8,10,27; 5:21,31; 9:15; 10:36; 13:16,17,23-24; 21:28; 28:20.
Kingdom Of God
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏နိုင်ငံတော်
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i nainggan-taw
Doctrine: Kingdom Mission
Rejected alternatives: ဘုန်းတော်နိုင်ငံ
Original: βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ
Category: Kingdom
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Bookends Acts’s structure (1:3,6 and 28:23,31); never pair uncritically with political vocabulary surrounding it (Caesar, Roman citizenship) without a clarifying frame.
Light For The Gentiles
Approved rendering: တစ်ပါးအမျိုးသားတို့အဖို့ အလင်းတော်
Transliteration: tabar-amyothar-dokoe a-pho a-lin-taw
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: φῶς ἐθνῶν
Category: Church
New Acts term (Isaiah 49:6 quoted at Acts 13:47). Ties Fulfillment of Prophecy and Gentile inclusion together; must retain specific OT-fulfillment force, not read as generic goodwill toward foreigners.
Living God
Approved rendering: အသက်ရှင်တော်မူသောဘုရားသခင်
Transliteration: a-thet-shin-taw-mu-thaw Phayarthakhin
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: θεὸς ζῶν
Category: God
New Acts term (Acts 14:15, Lystra). Key polemical contrast term against idol veneration; requires cultural sensitivity given the deep reverence for Buddha images in Myanmar.
Mission
Approved rendering: သာသနာပြုလုပ်ငန်း
Transliteration: thathana-pyu lokngan
Doctrine: Mission to the Nations
Original: ἀποστολή / πέμπω
Category: Church
Inherited from Romans package unchanged, with substantially increased exposure in Acts since this concept structures the entire 28-chapter narrative arc (1:8 to 28:31). Require the translator note distinguishing gospel proclamation from Sasana-style institution-building at significantly higher frequency than in Romans; consider supplementing with proclamation-focused paraphrase (ဟောပြောခြင်း) in narrative summary lines to reduce over-reliance on this Sasana-adjacent compound.
Nazirite Vow
Approved rendering: နာဇရိပဋိညာဉ်
Transliteration: Nazari-padi-nyin
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Original: κειράμενος τὴν κεφαλήν (implied; cf. Num 6)
Category: Covenant
New Acts term. Requires OT background (Num 6:1-21); distinguish from Buddhist temporary monastic ordination vows (shin-pyu), which are meritorious self-discipline practices — Paul’s vow is personal, culturally-rooted devotion, not a requirement imposed on Gentile believers. Appears at Acts 18:18; 21:23-26.
Overseer
Approved rendering: သင်းအုပ်ဆရာ
Transliteration: thin-oat-hsayar
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: ἐπίσκοπος
Category: Church
New Acts term (Acts 20:28). Church governance office overlapping with ‘elder’ in this passage; note the terminological overlap for church-governance teaching.
Peace
Approved rendering: ငြိမ်သက်ခြင်း
Transliteration: nyein-thet-chin
Doctrine: Peace with God
Rejected alternatives: ကိလေသာငြိမ်းခြင်း
Original: εἰρήνη
Category: Salvation
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 9:31; 10:36; 15:33.
Persecute
Approved rendering: ညှဉ်းပန်းနှိပ်စက်ခြင်း
Transliteration: nyin-pan-neik-set-chin
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: διώκω
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Christ personally identifies with his persecuted people (‘why do you persecute ME’, Acts 9:4-5); this theological significance must be retained via context, not the word alone. Appears at Acts 7:52; 8:1,3; 9:1,4-5; 11:19; 12:1; 13:50; 22:4,7-8.
Preaching Kingdom With Boldness Unhindered
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏နိုင်ငံတော်ကို အပြည့်အဝ ရဲရင့်စွာ၊ အဆီးအတားမရှိ ဟောပြောခြင်း
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i nainggan-taw koh a-pyi-a-wa yeh-ying-zwar, a-si-a-tar-ma-shi haw-pyaw-chin
Doctrine: The Great Commission Fulfilled
New Acts term (Acts 28:31, the book’s closing verse). The deliberately open-ended climax must preserve the intentional non-closure — the gospel’s advance continues past the narrative, not merely ‘the story stops here’; do not add resolution language not present in the source.
Restoration Of All Things
Approved rendering: ခပ်သိမ်းသောအရာတို့ကို ပြန်လည်ထားရှိခြင်း
Transliteration: khat-thein-thaw a-yar-doh-koh pyan-lay-htar-shi-chin
Doctrine: The Great Commission Fulfilled
Original: ἀποκατάστασις πάντων
Category: Eschatology
New Acts term (Acts 3:20-21). Must not be confused with the cyclical arising-and-passing of world-ages (ကမ္ဘာ) in Buddhist cosmology; a single, final, Christ-centered consummation of history.
Sadducees
Approved rendering: ဆဒ္ဒုကဲ
Transliteration: Sadduka
Doctrine: Resurrection of Christ
Original: Σαδδουκαῖοι
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Useful teaching point that even within Judaism, resurrection was contested; frames why the apostles’ resurrection preaching was doctrinally, not merely culturally, controversial. Appears at Acts 4:1; 5:17; 23:6-8.
Saints
Approved rendering: သန့်ရှင်းသူများ
Transliteration: thangyin thu myar
Doctrine: Sainthood
Rejected alternatives: ရဟန္တာ, ရှင်ရဟန်း
Original: ἅγιοι
Category: Church
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not an ascetic elite (ရဟန္တာ/arahant). Appears at Acts 9:13,32,41; 26:10,18.
Samaria Samaritans
Approved rendering: ရှမာရိ
Transliteration: Shamari
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: Σαμάρεια / Σαμαρῖται
Category: Church
New Acts term. The gospel deliberately crosses a bitter ethnic-religious boundary; parallel sensitivity to Myanmar’s own Bamar-Buddhist-majority/ethnic-minority religious dynamics. Appears at Acts 1:8; 8:1,5,9,14,25; 9:31; 15:3.
Self Control
Approved rendering: မိမိကိုယ်ကို ချုပ်တည်းခြင်း
Transliteration: mi-mi-koh-koh choat-tee-chin
Doctrine: Justification apart from the Law
Original: ἐγκράτεια
Category: Ethics
New Acts term (Acts 24:25). Must be distinguished from Buddhist sīla (precept-keeping self-restraint practiced to build merit toward a better rebirth); here self-control flows from right relationship with God, part of a gospel appeal, not a means of merit or salvation.
Shepherd Flock
Approved rendering: သိုးထိန်း / သိုးအုပ်
Transliteration: thoe-htein / thoe-oat
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: ποιμήν / ποίμνιον
Category: Church
New Acts term. Established pastoral metaphor with OT roots (God/David as shepherd); low collision risk but doctrinally significant for church-leadership teaching. Appears at Acts 20:28-29.
Spiritual Gifts
Approved rendering: ဝိညာဉ်ဆုကျေးဇူး
Transliteration: weinnyin su kyayzu
Doctrine: Spiritual Gifts
Rejected alternatives: တန်ခိုးဗလ
Original: χαρίσματα (background category)
Category: Holy Spirit
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not merit-earned or occult power such as attributed to weizza (esoteric adept) practice.
Witness
Approved rendering: သက်သေ / သက်သေခံခြင်း
Transliteration: thet-thay / thet-thay-khan-chin
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: μάρτυς / μάρτυρες
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Must retain the specific sense of firsthand eyewitness legal testimony, not vague ‘believer’ or storyteller. Appears at Acts 1:8,22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39,41; 13:31; 22:15,20; 26:16.
Word Of God Grew
Approved rendering: ဘုရားသခင်၏နှုတ်ကပတ်တော် တိုးပွားလာသည်
Transliteration: Phayarthakhin i hnoat-ka-pat-taw toe-pwar-lar-thi
Doctrine: The Great Commission Fulfilled
Original: ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ ηὔξανεν
Category: Great Commission
New Acts term. Recurring narrative refrain marking gospel advance amid persecution; ‘word of God’ must retain God’s own authoritative, living speech, not a generic religious message. Appears at Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20.
Yoke Of Law
Approved rendering: ဂျို့ကျင်း
Transliteration: jo-kyin
Doctrine: Justification apart from the Law
Original: ζυγός
Category: Covenant
New Acts term (Acts 15:10). Must not be read as demeaning the law’s original goodness as God’s covenant gift to Israel, but as rejecting law-observance specifically as a requirement for salvation.
Low Risk Terms
Added To Number
Approved rendering: အသင်းတော်တွင် တိုးပွားလာသည်
Transliteration: athin-taw-twin toe-pwar-lar-thi
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: προσετέθησαν
Category: Church
New Acts term. Early numerical church growth marker with little independent doctrinal risk. Appears at Acts 2:41,47; 5:14; 11:24.
Appeal To Caesar
Approved rendering: ကဲသာဘုရင်ထံ အယူခံဝင်ခြင်း
Transliteration: Kaithar-bayin-htan a-yu-khan-win-chin
Doctrine: The Great Commission Fulfilled
Original: Καίσαρα ἐπικαλοῦμαι
Category: Great Commission
New Acts term (Acts 25:11). Legal mechanism structurally significant for the Great Commission Fulfilled doctrine, advancing the narrative to Rome.
Blood Strangled
Approved rendering: အသွေးပါသောအစား / လည်၍သတ်သောအသား
Transliteration: a-thway-par-thaw a-sar / lae-yi-that-thaw a-thar
Doctrine: Justification apart from the Law
Original: αἷμα / πνικτόν
Category: Covenant
New Acts term. Background dietary accommodation preserved for table-fellowship unity between Jewish and Gentile believers (Acts 15:20,29); lower independent doctrinal weight than idol-food or sexual immorality items.
Casting Lots
Approved rendering: စာရေးတံချခြင်း
Transliteration: sar-yay-tan-cha-chin
Doctrine: Providence
Original: κλῆρος
Category: God
New Acts term (Acts 1:26). Supports the providence doctrine; distinct from divination or fortune-telling practices condemned elsewhere in Acts (8:9-24; 13:6-11; 16:16-18).
Eunuch
Approved rendering: ဂျုနုခ်
Transliteration: Junuq
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: εὐνοῦχος
Category: Church
New Acts term. The gospel deliberately reaches a socially marginalized, temple-excluded foreign official, foreshadowing full Gentile inclusion. Appears at Acts 8:27,34,36,38-39.
Evangelist
Approved rendering: ဧဝံဂေလိဆရာ
Transliteration: Aywan-gayli-hsayar
Doctrine: The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles
Original: εὐαγγελιστής
Category: Church
New Acts term. Role/office term built on the High-risk baseline gospel term; low independent doctrinal risk beyond that inheritance. Appears at Acts 21:8.
Examining The Scriptures
Approved rendering: ကျမ်းစာတော်ကို စစ်ဆေးလေ့လာခြင်း
Transliteration: kyanzar-daw ko sit-hkay-lay-lar-chin
Doctrine: Inspiration of Scripture
Original: ἀνακρίνοντες τὰς γραφάς
Category: Apostolic Ministry
New Acts term (Acts 17:11, the Bereans). Reinforces Scripture as the authoritative standard for testing teaching, distinct from Tipitaka authority resting on the Buddha’s own insight.
Exhort
Approved rendering: တိုက်တွန်းနှိုးဆော်ခြင်း
Transliteration: taik-tun hnoso-chin
Doctrine: Mutual Edification
Original: παρακαλέω
Category: Faith
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Context-sensitive per baseline; appears at Acts 2:40; 11:23; 14:22; 15:32; 16:40; 20:1-2.
Fellowship
Approved rendering: မိတ်သဟာယ
Transliteration: meikthahaya
Doctrine: Christian Fellowship
Rejected alternatives: သူငယ်ချင်းဖွဲ့ခြင်း
Original: κοινωνία
Category: Church
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 2:42.
Hellenists
Approved rendering: ဟေလသလူမျိုး
Transliteration: Heylatha-lu-myo
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: Ἑλληνισταί
Category: Church
New Acts term. An early instance of the church navigating internal ethnic-linguistic diversity (Acts 6:1).
Household
Approved rendering: အိမ်ထောင်စု
Transliteration: ain-htaung-zu
Doctrine: Repentance and Baptism
Original: οἶκος
Category: Church
New Acts term. Familial extension of salvation to households, without diluting the individual faith requirement. Appears at Acts 10:2; 11:14; 16:15,31,34.
More Blessed To Give
Approved rendering: ပေးခြင်းသည် ခံယူခြင်းထက် မင်္ဂလာရှိသည်
Transliteration: pay-chin-thi khan-yu-chin-htet min-gala-shi-thi
Doctrine: The Church as Community
New Acts term (Acts 20:35). Must be distinguished from dana-style meritorious giving that accumulates personal spiritual credit.
Pharisees
Approved rendering: ဖာရိရှဲ
Transliteration: Pharisheh
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
New Acts term. Established transliteration; background party name. Appears at Acts 5:34; 15:5; 23:6-9; 26:5.
Prophecy
Approved rendering: ပရောဖက်ပြုချက်
Transliteration: parawpeq-pyu-chet
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Rejected alternatives: ဗေဒင်စာတမ်း
Original: προφητεία
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 2:17-18; 21:9-11 (Agabus’s enacted sign-prophecy).
Prophet
Approved rendering: ပရောဖက်
Transliteration: parawpeq
Doctrine: Inspiration of Scripture
Rejected alternatives: ဗေဒင်ဆရာ
Original: προφήτης
Category: Covenant
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Not ဗေဒင်ဆရာ (astrologer). Appears throughout Acts (2:16,30; 3:18,21-25; 7:37,42,48,52; 8:28,30,34; 10:43; 11:27; 13:1,15,20,27,40; 15:15,32; 21:10; 24:14; 26:22,27; 28:23,25).
Roman Citizen
Approved rendering: ရောမနိုင်ငံသား
Transliteration: Rawma-nainggan-thar
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: πολίτης Ῥωμαῖος / Ῥωμαῖος
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Background legal-status term relevant to the legitimate use of legal rights in the course of bold gospel witness. Appears at Acts 16:37-38; 22:25-29; 25:10-11.
Sanhedrin
Approved rendering: လွှတ်တော်ကြီး
Transliteration: hlwutdaw-kyi
Doctrine: Persecution and Bold Witness
Original: συνέδριον
Category: Persecution and Witness
New Acts term. Background institutional term, distinct from the modern political sense of ‘parliament’ (လွှတ်တော်); the central Jewish judicial-religious body repeatedly opposing the apostles.
Thanksgiving
Approved rendering: ကျေးဇူးတင်ခြင်း
Transliteration: kyayzu-tin-chin
Doctrine: Thanksgiving
Original: εὐχαριστία
Category: Faith
Inherited from Romans package unchanged. Appears at Acts 27:35; 28:15.
The Twelve
Approved rendering: တစ်ကျိပ်နှစ်ပါး
Transliteration: ta-seip-hnit-bar
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
Original: οἱ δώδεκα
Category: Church
New Acts term. Reconstituted apostolic foundation of the church; numeric completeness signals continuity with the twelve tribes of Israel. Appears at Acts 1:26; 6:2.
Widows
Approved rendering: မုဆိုးမ
Transliteration: mu-hso-ma
Doctrine: The Church as Community
Original: χῆραι
Category: Church
New Acts term. The specific vulnerable group whose care sparked the deacon appointment (Acts 6:1).
Wolves
Approved rendering: ဝံပုလွေများ
Transliteration: wunpalway-myar
Doctrine: The Church as Community
New Acts term. Metaphor for predatory false teachers (Acts 20:29); low independent doctrinal risk.
Zeus Hermes
Approved rendering: ဇုသ်၊ ဟေရမေ
Transliteration: Zut, Herame
Doctrine: Apostolic Authority and Miracles
New Acts term. Background proper names (Acts 14:12); the theological point (apostles refuse worship) is more significant than the names, paralleling the angel-veneration concern of Acts 10.
Referenced passages