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

Why it matters

Acts is the most linguistically and theologically demanding curriculum this pipeline has processed for Hebrew to date — not because Hebrew lacks vocabulary, but because it has too much of the right kind. Acts narrates the birth of the Messianic movement almost entirely inside the Jewish and Diaspora-synagogue world its Hebrew-speaking readers already inhabit: Shavuot, tevilah, brit milah, teshuvah, the Sanhedrin, HaShem, kashrut categories. Every one of these words is correct. Every one is also already claimed by a rival Rabbinic, halakhic, liturgical, or Modern-Israeli-civic meaning. Getting this curriculum right for a Messianic Jewish and Hebrew-speaking Christian audience means winning a battle of scope and framing, not vocabulary selection — and the cost of losing that battle is high: this is the book where the earliest church defines its relationship to Israel, Torah, and the nations for all time.

Key findings

• 11 Critical-risk and 14 High-risk doctrines (25 of 27 total doctrine entries) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — a higher concentration than the Romans baseline, driven by Acts’ narrative setting inside first-century Jewish life itself.
• 25 Critical-risk and 24 High-risk terms (49 of 101 total terms in the Acts translation memory) demand absolute or near-absolute enforcement — nearly half of the entire glossary.
• Hebrew’s dominant risk pattern is semantic crowding, not absence: existing correct terms (טהור/טמא, טבילה, תשובה, עלייה, תיקון עולם-adjacent phrasing, נוצרים) each already do a live job in Modern Hebrew or Rabbinic usage that Acts is asking them to do differently, simultaneously.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41) is the single densest concentration of Critical doctrine in the book: the Pentecost/Sinai typology, the Joel 2:32→Acts 2:21→2:36 YHWH-to-Jesus argument, and the repentance/baptism/forgiveness/Spirit-gift cluster of verse 38 all converge in forty-one verses.
• Three passages carry outsized structural risk precisely because of where they sit in the book: Acts 1:6 (opening question, Israel’s national restoration), Acts 15 (the Jerusalem Council, the book’s covenantal hinge), and Acts 28:26-28 (the book’s final words, the Isaiah 6 hardening quotation).

Risks

• Highest risk: the Jerusalem Council’s circumcision ruling (Acts 15) and Peter’s clean/unclean vision (Acts 10-11) — a scoping failure here reads as either abolishing Jewish covenant practice or as reintroducing circumcision as a Gentile requirement. Both readings defeat the text.
• Second-highest risk: the crucifixion-responsibility clause (Acts 2:23; 7:52) — this exact language has a documented history of weaponization as a collective “deicide” charge against the Jewish people; it must be re-anchored as prophetic indictment of a specific generation, never timeless collective guilt.
• Structural risk: the “Christians” label decision (משיחיים vs. נוצרים, Acts 11:26) governs identity-continuity framing across the entire remaining curriculum; a single inconsistent occurrence is immediately visible to the target audience.
• Civic-collision risk unique to Hebrew: עלייה (ascension vs. Jewish immigration), אור לגויים (Isaiah’s missionary title vs. Israel’s Zionist self-description), and תיקון עולם (forbidden substitute for cosmic restoration vs. contemporary social-justice activism) are all live, well-known Israeli phrases that can silently substitute their familiar meaning for the text’s intended one without the reader noticing an error occurred.

Opportunities

• Acts contains more genuine positive-asset vocabulary for a Hebrew-speaking audience than any other curriculum in this pipeline: Shavuot’s own Sinai typology, semichah’s ordination resonance, kiddush HaShem’s martyrological tradition, Gamaliel’s own miracle-discernment caution, and Isaiah 56’s eunuch-inclusion promise all hand the translator built-in, already-cherished teaching bridges rather than foreign impositions.
• The historical self-designation הדרך (“the Way”) is a genuine reclaimable asset — some living Messianic Jewish congregations already use it — offering continuity language rarely available in other target languages.
• Acts 23:6-9’s Pharisee-Sadducee resurrection dispute is a built-in, textually-native teaching asset proving resurrection itself is common ground with the reader’s own tradition, sharpening rather than manufacturing the point of actual disagreement (the specific death-and-return pattern).

Recommended actions

1. Lock the משיחיים decision for “Christians” now, before Phase 2 begins, and apply it with zero exceptions across every subsequent document.
2. Route all 25 Critical/High doctrine entries and all 49 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md; do not allow native-speaker-only review to substitute for any of these.
3. Confirm and lock the YouVersion version ID (HaBrit HaChadashah) and ACT book-code hyperlink pattern before any Phase 2 batch hyperlink generation.
4. Brief every human reviewer explicitly on the scoping-not-selection nature of Hebrew’s risk profile for this book — the correct word is almost never in doubt; the correct boundary around it is.
5. Treat Acts 2 (the core passage), Acts 15 (Jerusalem Council), and Acts 28 (closing hardening motif) as the three mandatory theologian checkpoints before any full-book release.

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See analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md for the full doctrine matrix, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md for cross-tradition detail, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md for the linguistic-gap methodology behind these findings, and assets/translation_memory.json for the enforced term database.