Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 Translation Requirements (English → Gujarati)

Why it matters

Acts is narrative testimony to unrepeatable, physically observable events — tongues of fire, an ascension, a conversion on a road, apostles lying to a Person and being struck dead for it. That genre puts unusual pressure on Gujarati’s richest devotional vocabulary: possession, vision, vow, service, path, austerity. Every one of those Gujarati words already belongs to a living Hindu or Jain devotional system in this state. Get the fence wrong once — render “filled with the Spirit” with possession-trance language, or “the Way” with a bare path-word — and the curriculum’s core passage (Acts 2:1-41, Pentecost) risks being silently absorbed into Navratri devi-possession, bhakti-mārga theology, or Jain ascetic self-effort, rather than read as it was written.

Key findings

• 60 Critical/High-risk terms now govern this curriculum: 16 Critical (14 inherited from the Romans baseline + 2 new: “the Way,” “gods in human form”) and 44 High (15 inherited + 29 new), out of 99 total terms in the Acts-extended translation_memory.json.
• 41 discrete doctrines are tracked in doctrine_risk_registry.json: 9 Critical, 20 High, 9 Medium, 3 Low. 29 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review; 9 require native speaker review; only 3 are automated-review-sufficient.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41) is the single highest term-density chapter in the entire book and contains the curriculum’s two highest-stakes single clauses: 2:34-35’s double-κύριος quotation (must use one identical Gujarati word for both “Lord” references, or the sermon’s argument for Christ’s deity collapses) and 2:36’s installation formula (“God made him Lord and Christ” — a verb choice away from either adoptionism or a change-of-essence error).
• Acts introduces five syncretism-risk categories with no Romans-baseline precedent: (1) Spirit-filling/tongues vs. Gujarat’s widespread āveś (Navratri/garba possession-trance) practice; (2) “the Way” vs. bhakti-mārga/Jain mokṣa-mārga path-plurality theology; (3) “conversion” vs. India’s legally-loaded ધર્માંતરણ register; (4) witness-to-martyr language (Stephen, ch.7) vs. Islamic/nationalist શહીદ; (5) “vision” vs. Hindu/Jain darshan and the six schools of philosophy.
• Gujarati has a thin translation ecosystem (essentially one formal-equivalence reference edition in wide use) — fewer independent translations exist to naturally self-correct an error than in larger Indian languages, raising the cost of any single mistranslation.

Risks

• Highest risk: Acts 2’s “filled with the Holy Spirit” and tongues-speech collapsing into āveś possession-trance categories — this is the curriculum’s theological anchor passage and its single largest exposure.
• Second highest: bare માર્ગ for “the Way,” which would directly concede Christianity is one path among bhakti’s and Jainism’s several recognized paths to liberation — the opposite of the text’s claim.
• Recurring, cumulative risk: grace/justification-apart-from-works language (Acts 13:38-39; 15:11) being absorbed into either bhakti’s cultivated-favor kripa or Jain nirjara/tapa self-effort, exactly the collision the Romans baseline already flags as this language pair’s sharpest doctrinal fault line — now recurring across nine baptism narratives and two justification set-pieces rather than one epistle’s argument.
• Compounding risk: several Acts-specific terms (સુન્નત/circumcision, શહીદ-adjacent witness language, ધર્માંતરણ-adjacent conversion language) carry contemporary Indian interfaith and legal sensitivities that did not arise anywhere in the Romans baseline and require explicit framing every time, not just correct word choice.

Opportunities

• Acts itself stages several of its own polemics against exactly the misreadings this pipeline is guarding against — the Lystra and Malta “gods in human form” scenes (14:8-18; 28:1-6) are the New Testament’s own in-text rebuttal of avatar theology, and the Simon Magus/Elymas episodes (ch. 8, 13) are the text’s own contrast between Spirit-given signs and purchasable occult power. These can be taught as the Bible’s own answer to Gujarat’s dominant categories, not merely defended against them.
• The core passage’s Joel quotation (2:17-21) and the Jerusalem Council’s grace formula (15:11) give this curriculum two teaching set-pieces that parallel Romans’s thesis statement (1:16-17) and its grace-versus-works argument (ch. 4, 11:5-6) almost exactly — enabling strong cross-curriculum reinforcement for learners who study both books.
• Gujarat’s joint-family (સંયુક્ત કુટુંબ) culture gives household-baptism narratives (16:15,31-34) a ready, low-risk cultural analogue requiring no new coinage — a rare case where existing culture aids rather than complicates the translation task.

Recommended actions

1. Lock the five new syncretism fences (āveś, bare માર્ગ, ધર્માંતરણ, શહીદ, bare દર્શન) into Phase 2 tooling as hard validation failures, not soft warnings, before any segment translation begins.
2. Route all 29 theologian-review doctrines and all 60 Critical/High terms through mandatory human review with zero exceptions, per doctrine_risk_registry.json and assets/translation_memory.json; do not allow automated approval to short-circuit this for any Acts 2 segment.
3. Process Acts 2:1-41 with a single sequential worker, not parallel workers, in Phase 2 Step 16, given its term density and the risk of race conditions on the 2:34-35 double-Lord consistency requirement.
4. Confirm the numeric YouVersion version ID for the Gujarati Old Version before Step 16 batch processing, since all footnote/cross-reference hyperlinks depend on it (see 05_translation_landscape.md §5).
5. Brief all Phase 2 reviewers on the five Acts-specific fences explicitly before review begins, since none of them have a Romans-baseline precedent to draw on — reviewers trained only on the Romans package will not know to watch for them.

---

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, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, and assets/translation_memory.json. All term and doctrine counts are drawn directly from those artifacts as of this document’s date.