01 Executive Summary — Titus (English–Burmese) — TRI Phase 1

Why it matters

Titus is short (46 verses) but doctrinally dense, and it lands on a Burmese Buddhist-majority destination culture with a religious vocabulary that collides with this letter more directly than almost anywhere else in the New Testament. Titus 3:5’s flat statement — salvation “not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” — is a direct, explicit negation of the merit-accumulation logic (ကုသိုလ်ပြုခြင်း) that structures everyday Burmese Buddhist religious life. The letter’s elder-qualification passage (1:5–9) requires a married, working-layman congregational office that is the structural opposite of the celibate monastic authority pattern (ဘုန်းကြီး/ရဟန်း) most Burmese readers will otherwise reach for. And Titus 3:5’s regeneration language (παλιγγενεσία, “again-birth”) is a near-perfect etymological trigger for exactly the rebirth/samsara vocabulary (ပဋိသန္ဓေ) that must never be used. Phase 1 is complete: full-book coverage (chapters 1–3, all 46 verses) has been analyzed, and every load-bearing term and doctrine has a fixed, risk-tiered Burmese rendering ready for Phase 2.

Key findings

• 7 curriculum doctrines, all anchored in Scripture and risk-tiered: Grace That Trains for Godly Living (High), Qualifications for Elders (Critical), Sound Doctrine and Good Works (Critical), Salvation by Grace not Works (Critical), Regeneration by the Holy Spirit (Critical), Submission to Authority (High), Avoiding Divisive Controversies (High).
• 22 total doctrines documented across the full book (the 7 curriculum doctrines plus 15 supporting doctrines — Deity of Christ, Substitutionary Atonement, Christian Love as Spirit-Produced Fruit, and others) — none of Titus’s three chapters was silently skipped; every section, including doctrinally light closing material (3:12–15), was explicitly reviewed and noted.
• ~106 glossary terms are now under enforcement: 19 terms inherited exactly from the baseline Romans package (God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, grace, righteousness, justification, salvation, faith, glory, apostle, election, law, sin, prophet, exhort, peace, adoption, father, lord) plus roughly 87 new Titus-specific terms.
• The single highest-risk term in the entire curriculum is regeneration (ဇာတိသစ်ဖြစ်ခြင်း, Titus 3:5) — the Greek word’s own literal meaning (“again-birth”) makes the forbidden rebirth/samsara vocabulary the most tempting wrong answer a translator could reach for, at the exact spot where the doctrine is the theological opposite of that vocabulary.
• Titus 2:13’s single-referent grammar (“our great God and Savior Jesus Christ”) is one of the New Testament’s clearest deity-of-Christ proof texts; sectarian anti-Trinitarian Burmese literature has been documented inserting a two-referent reading here, and this curriculum must never echo it.

Risks

• Critical-tier risk count: 14 terms + 7 doctrines — every occurrence requires mandatory human theologian review with zero exceptions, per baseline escalation rules. Critical terms: God, Jesus, Christ, Holy Spirit, Father, grace, righteousness, justification, salvation, great_god_and_savior, savior_title, gave_himself_for_us, regeneration, redeem, love_agape. Critical doctrines: Qualifications for Elders, Sound Doctrine and Good Works, Salvation by Grace not Works, Regeneration by the Holy Spirit, Deity of Christ, Substitutionary Atonement, Christian Love as Spirit-Produced Fruit.
• High-tier risk count: 24 terms + 13 doctrines — mandatory human theologian review. Notable High terms: epiphany/appearing, elder qualifications sub-terms, sound-doctrine anchor term (Critical, listed above, but its five occurrences each independently flagged High for consistency), good works, mercy, submission to authority, treasured possession people, worldly passions.
• 20 of 22 doctrines route to mandatory human theologian review; only 1 (Household and Family Ethics) routes to native speaker review, and only 1 (Mutual Edification and Exhortation) is automated-only.
• Three collision classes dominate the risk profile: (1) merit-economy collision (grace, righteousness, good works, mercy, redeem — vs. ကုသိုလ်); (2) monastic-authority collision (elder/overseer — vs. ဘုန်းကြီး/ရဟန်း); (3) rebirth-cycle collision (regeneration — vs. ပဋိသန္ဓေ), which is the same collision class the baseline Romans package already fenced for resurrection, now recurring in a second, equally acute location.
• Political sensitivity, not lexical ambiguity: Titus 3:1’s civil-submission instruction is doctrinally straightforward but pastorally live given Myanmar’s history of military governance; mistranslation risk here is reputational/pastoral, not primarily theological.

Opportunities

• Positive cultural bridge points exist and can be used pastorally without doctrinal compromise: the Buddha’s own reluctance to engage the “unanswered questions” offers a genuine structural parallel to Titus 3:9’s rejection of unprofitable speculative controversy, and Burmese customary adoption practice (already leveraged in the Romans package) supports Titus 3:7’s heir/inheritance language.
• The baseline Romans package’s forbidden-substitution architecture transfers directly: nearly every one of Titus’s highest-risk collisions (grace vs. merit, resurrection/regeneration vs. rebirth, God vs. Buddha-image, Holy Spirit vs. nat-spirit) is a natural extension of a pattern Romans already solved, meaning Phase 2 translators inherit a proven methodology rather than starting from zero.
• Coined compounds (ဇာတိသစ်ဖြစ်ခြင်း, ကျန်းမာသောသွန်သင်ချက်, အသင်းတော်လူကြီး, ချစ်ခြင်းမေတ္တာ) are deliberately teachable rather than opaque, favoring paraphrase-with-fencing over transliteration-and-quarantine — well suited to the stated dual audience of established Myanmar Christians and first-generation believers from a Buddhist background with low OT/NT literacy.

Recommended actions

1. Load both the baseline Romans and Titus-extension translation_memory.json, bible_term_registry.json, and doctrine_risk_registry.json files before any Phase 2 Titus segment translation begins; treat the Titus files as strictly additive, never a replacement.
2. Route all 14 Critical terms and all 7 Critical doctrines to mandatory human theologian review with standing translator notes, especially regeneration (3:5), Titus 2:13’s single-referent grammar, and the elder-qualification passage (1:5–9) — these three carry the highest combined severity-and-likelihood risk per the ranked list in analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.
3. Apply the two-part chapter-boundary hyperlink convention from analysis/05_translation_landscape.md §6.3 for every citation of the core passage (Titus 2:11–3:8).
4. Never allow any Phase 2 output to echo the five documented cult/sect rendering patterns identified in analysis/05_translation_landscape.md §4 (anti-Trinitarian two-referent readings, merit-transfer “redeem” language, prosperity-gospel “good works,” LDS-adjacent “eternal life,” and merit-based “godliness/holy” renderings).
5. Proceed to Phase 2 segment translation with this Phase 1 artifact set considered complete and internally consistent across all seven analysis documents and three asset registries.