Executive Summary — Acts (Hindi Destination)

Why it matters

The book of Acts is the New Testament’s most sustained, direct narrative collision with the destination culture’s dominant religious vocabulary. Where Romans and Galatians argued doctrine in propositional form, Acts dramatizes it — a crowd at Lystra mistaking two apostles for descending gods, a vision overturning purity categories that map almost exactly onto caste boundaries, a Pentecost crowd’s Spirit-filling that a Hindu-background reader could default to reading as spirit-possession, and an Areopagus speech quotable (out of context) as scriptural support for pantheism. This curriculum inherits and extends the locked Romans/Galatians Language Package into 28 chapters, 110 enforced terms, and 27 risk-tiered doctrines, anchored at the core passage Acts 2:1-41 (Pentecost) but covering the full book per the PRD’s mandate.

Key findings

• 110 terms are now enforced in assets/translation_memory.json: 53 inherited exactly from the Romans/Galatians baseline, 57 newly introduced by Acts. Of the 110, 16 are Critical-risk and 43 are High-risk — 59 terms (54%) require mandatory human theologian review at every single occurrence.
• 27 doctrines are tracked in assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json: 9 Critical, 11 High, 6 Medium, 1 Low — 20 of 27 doctrines (74%) route to mandatory human theologian review, versus 6 to native speaker review and 1 to automated review only.
• Acts’ translation burden is structurally different from Galatians’: almost no genuine missing-vocabulary gaps exist (only Pentecost, filled-with-the-Spirit phrasing, “the Way,” and “Author of Life” required anything close to coinage). The dominant burden is fencing already-adequate Hindi terms against crowded Hindu-religious semantic neighborhoods — most acutely आत्मा (Spirit vs. Ātman/Paramātman), शुद्ध/अशुद्ध (purity vs. caste-purity), मार्ग (the Way vs. bhakti/karma/jnana मार्ग pluralism), सामर्थ्य (power vs. Shakti/siddhi), and देहधारण (incarnation vs. avatāra — dramatized explicitly within the text itself at Lystra, Acts 14:11-15).
• Two single passages carry outsized risk: Acts 14:11-15 (Lystra) is the only place in the entire Romans/Galatians/Acts curriculum where the exact pagan concept the baseline’s incarnation entry was built to exclude appears inside the narrative itself and must be shown being refuted, not affirmed. Acts 2:36 (“God made him both Lord and Christ”) sits at the climax of the core passage and risks an adoptionist misreading if “made” is not glossed as public vindication of an eternal identity.
• The existing Hindi Bible translation tradition (BSI OV, BSI NV, IRV) already handles Acts’ hardest verses without doctrinal drift — this curriculum’s job is disciplined consistency with that tradition, not invention, except for a documented set of cult/sect renderings (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ NWT-Hindi, Arian-influenced tracts, Islamic-idiom translations, Hindu-syncretistic apologetic excerpting of Acts 17:28) that must never be echoed.

Risks

• Highest-frequency risk: “Filled with the Holy Spirit” and related Spirit-outpouring language occurs 50+ times across Acts; each occurrence carries the āveśa (possession-trance) collision risk documented in the baseline’s Holy Spirit entry, now under sustained repeated pressure rather than the occasional exposure Romans/Galatians presented.
• Highest-stakes single-verse risk: Acts 4:12’s salvation exclusivity (“no other name”) and Acts 2:36’s Lord-and-Christ declaration both sit at Critical tier with zero tolerance for softening, in a cultural context where “many paths, one truth” is the default religious assumption.
• Highest cross-document consistency risk: Acts 1:8 and 28:31 bookend the entire book’s geographic/theological argument and must be rendered identically everywhere they are quoted, with the same discipline the baseline applies to Romans 1:16-17 and 8:28 — inconsistent Phase 2 execution here would obscure the book’s deliberate literary architecture.
• Highest caste-sensitivity risk: Acts 10-11’s शुद्ध/अशुद्ध (clean/unclean) vocabulary maps directly onto Indian caste-purity categories; a merely dietary rendering would blunt the passage’s actual claim that God himself abolishes this boundary — the single most consequential application risk in the whole curriculum for this destination audience.
• Compounding risk: because so few genuine coinages are needed, there is a temptation in Phase 2 to under-resource theologian review on the assumption that “the words already exist.” The opposite is true: existing words that sit close to Hindu-religious neighbors require more translator-note density and more review attention than a coined term would.

Opportunities

• Acts 10-11’s impartiality doctrine, properly rendered, is this curriculum’s strongest culturally resonant point of gospel application for a caste-aware Hindi-speaking audience — a fully-realized rather than softened translation turns a translation risk into the curriculum’s sharpest pastoral opportunity.
• Judaism’s and Islam’s shared rejection of idolatry and sorcery (Acts 14, 17, 19; Acts 8, 13, 19) offer genuine cross-tradition points of contact that Phase 2 study materials can leverage pastorally without compromising doctrinal precision.
• Acts’ three-fold retelling of Paul’s conversion (chs. 9, 22, 26) and its dramatized refutation of avatar-theology at Lystra (ch. 14) give this curriculum built-in, narrative (not merely propositional) tools for teaching the deity-of-Christ/incarnation distinction — the text does the apologetic work Phase 2 materials only need to preserve.

Recommended actions

1. Lock assets/translation_memory.json (Acts, v1) as authoritative before any Phase 2 segment work begins, with explicit worker instruction that all 53 inherited terms are non-negotiable carryovers from the Romans/Galatians package.
2. Provision theologian review capacity proportional to the 59 Critical/High term and 20 Critical/High doctrine load — significantly higher than Galatians’ equivalent load — before Phase 2 scheduling is finalized.
3. Treat Acts 14:11-15 and Acts 2:36 as flagship review cases, worked through first in Phase 2 to establish precedent renderings other segments can be checked against.
4. Confirm the YouVersion version_id placeholder (1980) recorded in analysis/05_translation_landscape.md §6 against the live catalog before any production hyperlink is generated.
5. Instruct Phase 2 workers to weight effort toward translator-note density and fencing language, not new-term coining, per the linguistic gap analysis’s conclusion that Acts’ difficulty is overwhelmingly about bounding existing vocabulary against Hindu-religious neighbors rather than filling genuine lexical gaps.