Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 (English → French)

Why it matters: Acts is the theological hinge between Christ’s earthly ministry and the church’s global mission — and, uniquely among this pipeline’s curricula so far, its core passage (Actes 2:1–41, Pentecost) puts the Holy Spirit’s personhood, the church’s founding rite of repentance-and-baptism, and Christ’s climactic “Seigneur et Christ” confession all in the very first chapter under study. The French destination language carries real, documented collision risk at exactly these three points — Catholic sacramental categories (Penance, baptismal ex opere operato regeneration, the “sept dons du Saint-Esprit”), a feudal-resonant “Seigneur,” and a Jehovah’s Witness translation tradition that alters the Lord-confession and the Spirit’s personhood outright. This is not a low-stakes extension of the Romans package; it is, if anything, a higher-stakes one.

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Key findings

• 29 doctrines identified, spanning all 28 chapters with zero silent omissions (full chapter-coverage checklist completed in 11_doctrine_analysis.md): 8 Critical, 15 High, 4 Medium, 2 Low.
• 113 terms now locked in assets/translation_memory.json v2 (47 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline + 66 new to Acts): 8 Critical-risk terms, 22 High-risk terms, 56 Medium-risk terms, 27 Low-risk terms.
• 23 of 29 doctrines (79%) require mandatory human theologian review — nearly double the proportion in the Romans baseline package, driven by Acts’ narrative staging of rite-and-sacrament questions (baptism, repentance) that Romans discusses more abstractly.
• The Holy Spirit’s doctrinal weight is elevated from Medium (Romans baseline) to Critical for this curriculum, and Providence from Medium to High — both changes are narrative-driven, not arbitrary: Acts dramatizes Pentecost and the cross’s sovereign plan rather than treating them as background theology.
• Acts 13:38–39 and Acts 15:10–11 give this curriculum its own exact narrative dramatization of the Trent-versus-Reformation justification controversy already flagged as Critical in the Romans baseline — now acted out at the Jerusalem Council rather than argued propositionally.

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Risks

• Repentance and baptism (Critical, mandatory theologian review, every occurrence): French Catholic catechesis’s “faire pénitence” is the instinctive but forbidden rendering for repentance; baptism sits on the same sacramental-efficacy fault line at seven-plus recurrences (2:38, 8:36-38, 9:18, 10:47-48, 16:15/33, 19:1-6, 22:16), with household baptisms additionally engaging the live French ecumenical paedobaptism debate.
• Holy Spirit personhood (Critical): the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Traduction du Monde Nouveau documented in 05_translation_landscape.md non-capitalizes and impersonalizes “esprit saint” and inserts “Jéhovah” into Lord-confession contexts (Acts 2:21, 2:36) — both practices are explicitly and permanently forbidden in this Language Package.
• Church-office anachronism (High): “évêque,” “diacre,” and “prêtre” are all live temptations for Acts 6, 14:23, and 20:17,28 and would import institutional development centuries ahead of the text; French Catholic ecclesiology’s episcopal/sacerdotal categories are the specific collision source.
• Signs and wonders vs. “miracle” (High): France’s Lourdes/canonization-saturated popular use of “miracle” risks a devotional miracle-cult reading; “signes et prodiges” must be enforced at all 8+ occurrences.
• Tongues at Pentecost (High): conflation risk with unrelated, later ecstatic-glossolalia debates live in French Renouveau charismatique and Pentecostal-evangelical circles could inadvertently settle a contested pastoral-practice question the base text does not address.
• “Élection”/“instrument choisi” (High): French’s everyday political-election vocabulary risks a competitive/merit-based misreading of both the apostles’ lot-casting (1:24-26) and Saul’s divine commissioning (9:15).

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Opportunities

• French “témoin”/“martyre” cognate: a genuine linguistic asset — Acts’ witness-and-persecution theme (chs. 4-8, 12) can leverage the etymological link between “témoin” and “martyre” to restore costliness that the courtroom-flattened “témoin” alone would lose.
• TOB as fixed reference version: already the baseline’s own lexical anchor (its “Esprit Saint” convention over Segond’s “Saint-Esprit”); Acts confirms and extends this choice rather than requiring a new one.
• France’s Huguenot/Camisard memory: an internal French cultural resource for teaching costly, nonviolent, bold gospel witness under persecution (Acts 4-8, 12), distinct from combative martyrdom concepts in other traditions.
• “Alliance” evoking the wedding ring: already identified in the Romans baseline as a relational asset for “covenant,” and reused productively for the Davidic oath (2:30) and Abrahamic background (ch.7).

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Recommended actions

1. Route all Critical-tier terms and doctrines to mandatory human theologian review with zero exceptions — this affects repentance, baptism, call-on-the-name-of-the-Lord, justification, son_of_god, son_of_man, holy_spirit, and imputed_righteousness, and the 8 Critical doctrines built on them.
2. Lock the 10 forbidden-substitution rules (5 inherited from Romans, 5 new to Acts — see 12_ai_translation_requirements.md) into automated pre-submission validation, not just human review, given their high recurrence frequency (baptism/repentance alone recur 13+ times across the book).
3. Brief all reviewers on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ TMN-specific deviations (Lord-confession divine-name insertion; impersonalized Spirit; Acts 20:28 softened deity-of-Christ reading) as the single most important negative-example set for back-translation QA, per 05_translation_landscape.md Part 3.
4. Pre-clear the church-office vocabulary decision (“surveillant/ancien,” never “évêque/diacre/prêtre”) with theologian reviewers once, in writing, before Phase 2 begins, since it recurs across four separate chapters (6, 11, 14, 20) and is easy to get wrong under time pressure.
5. Carry the TOB-primary/NBS-secondary/S21-tertiary reference-version hierarchy into all Phase 2 tooling and learner-facing hyperlinks, confirming the live YouVersion numeric version_id before any public deployment (currently an unconfirmed placeholder per 05_translation_landscape.md Part 4).

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This summary synthesizes 04_comparative_theology.md, 05_translation_landscape.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, assets/bible_term_registry.json, and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json. It supersedes no prior Phase 1 deliverable; all counts here are drawn directly from those documents.