Executive Summary: Acts Language Package (Greek)

Why it matters

Acts is the only book in this pipeline written in the same language its destination audience speaks today. That collapses the usual cross-linguistic translation problem and replaces it with a sharper one: two millennia of semantic drift in Modern Greek, running in three directions at once — secular bleaching (κλήση → “phone call,” κοινός → both “shared” and “unclean,” Συνέδριο → “conference”), patristic/liturgical accretion (θέωσις reshaping σωτηρία and δικαίωση, sacramental weight loading μετάνοια and κλάση του άρτου), and, unique to Acts, direct collision with native Greek mythology and civic institutions the text itself narrates (Ἅδης, Δίας, Ἑρμῆς, Ἄρτεμις, the Delphic Πύθων, the κλῆρος-root “clergy,” the ἐπίσκοπος-root “bishop”). Getting this wrong doesn’t produce a foreign-sounding mistranslation — it produces a fluent, native-sounding sentence that teaches the wrong doctrine.

Key findings

• 99 terms now tracked in translation_memory.json: 48 inherited exactly from the Romans/Galatians baseline package, 51 newly introduced by Acts.
• 53 terms (20 Critical + 33 High) require priority enforcement and back-translation checks — over half the glossary.
• 34 doctrines mapped across all 28 chapters in doctrine_risk_registry.json/11_doctrine_analysis.md: 11 Critical + 19 High = 30 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review; 4 Medium requiring native speaker review; zero doctrines cleared for automated-only review.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41) alone concentrates six Critical-risk doctrines in 41 verses: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Tongues as Comprehensible Xenoglossy, Repentance and Baptism, Resurrection of Christ, Lordship and Messiahship of Christ, and Salvation.
• Acts introduces a genuinely new risk class absent from the baseline: words whose modern technical sense develops out of events the book itself narrates — μάρτυς (“witness” → “martyr,” via Stephen’s death) and κλῆρος (“lot cast” → “the clergy,” via Acts 1’s sortition) must be tracked chapter-by-chapter, not fixed to one rendering.
• Zero true missing-vocabulary gaps were found. Every risk in this book is semantic fencing (crowded neighborhoods, sense-collision, mythological-name framing), never word invention — consistent with, and intensifying, the baseline package’s core finding for Greek.

Risks

• Tongues (2:4,6,8,11): conflating Acts’ comprehensible xenoglossy with the modern coinage γλωσσολαλιά (unintelligible ecstatic speech) inverts the miracle itself.
• κοινός (2:44/4:32 vs. 10:14-15,28; 11:8): the identical word carries opposite valences eight chapters apart — the single sharpest lexical collision in the book, sitting at the center of “The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles.”
• μετάνοια (2:38 and throughout): double accretion risk (monastic prostrations; sacrament of Confession) threatens to narrow an immediate, universally available gospel response into a ritual gesture or priest-mediated rite.
• Native mythology (Ἅδης, Δίας, Ἑρμῆς, Ἄρτεμις, Πύθων): uniquely for this Language Package, these are live cultural referents outside any biblical frame (education, tourism); poorly framed lessons risk reading as trivializing or even syncretistically validating native mythology instead of staging its correction.
• Acts 2:36 (“Lord and Christ”): the highest doctrinal-density phrase in the curriculum — “made” (ἐποίησεν) misread as denying Christ’s eternal Sonship would corrupt the core passage’s climax.
• Church polity terms (πρεσβύτεροι/επίσκοποι, διακονία, κλῆρος): all risk anachronistic import of the fully developed Orthodox three-tier clergy hierarchy into Acts’ own more fluid, functionally interchangeable usage.
• Sectarian contamination: the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Greek New World Translation is in active circulation and must be screened against at every occurrence of Κύριος, Άγιο Πνεύμα, and Acts 2:36 (see 05_translation_landscape.md §3.1).

Opportunities

• Zero-gap Scripture access: Greek readers can read Peter’s and Stephen’s Septuagint citations (2:16-21,25-28,34-35; 7; 13:33-35; 15:15-18) in the same language Luke quotes — no other Language Package in this pipeline has this advantage.
• Living liturgical assets: Πεντηκοστή, Ανάσταση, νηστεία, ομοθυμαδόν, κατάνυξη (from κατενύγησαν, 2:37), and the Peter-and-Paul feast (June 29) all give this audience devotional vocabulary already in place, ready to be activated rather than built from scratch.
• A real, visitable setting: the Areopagus (17:19-34) is a named, still-standing site in Athens — a direct cultural-geographic bridge unavailable to almost any other Language Package.
• Etymological payoff: “Christians” (Χριστιανοί, 11:26) is the literal source-word of its own modern descendant in every language — a built-in teaching asset requiring no translation choice at all.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 30 Critical/High doctrines and 53 Critical/High terms to mandatory human theologian review before Phase 2 approval; block auto-approval for any segment matching the forbidden-substitution list in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
2. Enforce bidirectional cross-referencing on κοινός, μάρτυς, μετάνοια, δωρεά, and the πρεσβύτεροι/επίσκοποι pair at every occurrence — never let either sense stand alone without its counter-note.
3. Lock terminological consistency across Paul’s three conversion accounts (chs. 9, 22, 26) and between Acts 13:38-39 and the Romans/Galatians justification baseline before sign-off.
4. Screen every segment against the Jehovah’s Witnesses NWT-Greek known-pattern list (§3.1 of 05_translation_landscape.md) and against folk-Pentecostal, New Age/pluralist, and ethnonationalist misreadings identified in that same document.
5. Adopt TGV (Today’s Greek Version) as the primary register/idiom cross-check translation, with the Patriarchal/Byzantine liturgical text cited in parallel specifically at Acts 2, given Pentecost’s unique liturgical centrality for this audience.
6. Carry every native-mythology occurrence (Ἅδης, Δίας, Ἑρμῆς, Ἄρτεμις, Πύθων) through human theologian review with the mandatory rejection/subordination framing note — no exceptions, given this pipeline-unique risk class.