Acts — Hmong Language Package: Executive Summary

Why it matters: Acts is the narrative hinge between the Gospels and the epistles — it dramatizes, rather than merely argues, the doctrines the Hmong Romans package already fenced (grace, election, justification, the Spirit). But Acts’ dense miracle-and-vision narrative (Pentecost, apostolic healings, Paul’s Damascus-road conversion, exorcisms) pushes directly into living Hmong shamanic vocabulary — trance (yog toog), sorcery (khawv koob), spirit libation (nchuav), spirit-possession (nkag), and divination (dab saib yaig / ua nrig xaiv) — at a far higher density and frequency than Romans ever required. Getting this wrong doesn’t just blur a doctrine; it risks presenting the founding events of the Church as a Christian instance of the exact shamanic practices the gospel confronts.

Key findings:

• All 9 assigned doctrines carry Critical or High risk — 5 Critical (Holy Spirit & Pentecost; Gospel to Jews and Gentiles; Apostolic Authority and Miracles; Conversion of Paul; Justification apart from the Law), 4 High (Repentance and Baptism; Church as Community; Persecution and Bold Witness; Great Commission Fulfilled). Zero doctrines qualify for automated-only review — every doctrine requires mandatory human theologian sign-off before publication.
• The term registry documents 98 terms; of these, 13 are Critical-risk and 20 are High-risk (33 total, plus one Medium-High borderline term — “breaking of bread”) requiring mandatory human theologian review. This is a higher proportion of Critical/High terms than the Romans baseline, driven almost entirely by Acts’ miracle-and-vision narrative content.
• Five terms are flagged as the single highest-priority collision risks in this Language Package, each requiring mandatory theologian review at every individual occurrence, not just once per module: vision/trance (yog toog), sorcery/magic (khawv koob), spirit of divination (dab saib yaig), the “Unknown God” (tus Vajtswv uas lawv tsis paub), and the name-of-Jesus invocation formula (hauv lub npe ntawm Yexus Khetos).
• 49 new terms were surfaced in Acts with no prior Romans-baseline entry (filling/pouring-out-the-Spirit formulas, church offices, sorcery/divination vocabulary, institutional comprehension-gaps like synagogue/Sanhedrin/Pharisee-Sadducee, and festival/vow terminology); all have been ratified into the enforced translation_memory.json alongside 59 terms inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41, Pentecost) is itself the single densest concentration of risk in the book: it stacks the Critical Holy Spirit entry, the High-risk pour-out/filled-with-Spirit formulas, the permanently-forbidden hu (ritual soul-calling) substitution, and the Critical repentance/baptism/name-of-Jesus complex into one 41-verse unit.

Risks:

• Assimilation risk (highest): Pentecost’s “filled with the Spirit” and “poured out” language sit one forbidden-verb-substitution away (nkag, nchuav without a subject) from reading as mass shamanic possession or ancestor-libation ritual.
• Endorsement risk (unique to Acts): Unlike most collision terms, which risk being misunderstood as pagan, the “Unknown God” speech (17:23) risks validating a syncretistic reading if decontextualized — the only term in either language package with this specific danger-shape.
• Erosion-of-contrast risk: khawv koob (sorcery) cannot be softened without destroying the text’s own built-in condemnation argument (Simon Magus, Elymas, the Ephesian exorcists); any drift toward neutral or curious framing defeats the doctrine.
• Structural/office-crowding risk: Hmong clan-elder authority (txwj laus) is a real, functioning institution entangled with ancestor-ritual decision-making — the ecclesial “elder” qualifier is not optional stylistic flourish but a load-bearing doctrinal fence.
• Compounding risk: Acts reuses nearly every Romans-baseline Critical/High term (grace, election, Law, righteousness, Holy Spirit, salvation, power) and adds its own — meaning translators must hold both rule-sets simultaneously, raising the cost of any single lapse.

Opportunities:

• Acts’ own narrative repeatedly supplies built-in contrast-teaching material (Simon Magus’s condemned sorcery vs. genuine apostolic power; Paul’s exorcism of the divining spirit; the Sons of Sceva’s failed incantation) — curriculum design should lead with these textual contrasts rather than importing external polemic.
• The agrarian firstfruits/harvest association of Pentecost (2:1) and the ox-yoke metaphor for the Law (15:10) are strong, low-risk cultural bridges into an agrarian Hmong audience.
• Clan-adoption, debt-redemption, and lineage-inheritance concepts (already leveraged in the Romans package) extend naturally into Acts’ church-as-family and elder-office material, provided the ecclesial qualifier discipline is maintained.
• The book’s own geographic/thematic inclusio (1:8 “ends of the earth” → 28:31 “without hindrance”) gives curriculum designers a ready-made capstone structure for the Great Commission doctrine.

Recommended actions:

1. Ratify assets/translation_memory.json (Acts) as the enforced Phase 2 database; treat all 59 inherited and 49 new terms as permanent pending formal TM-revision.
2. Adopt analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Acts) as the binding Phase 2 generation contract, with special operational attention to the five occurrence-level-mandatory-review terms (§8 checklist item).
3. Route 100% of doctrine-touching content through human theologian review before publication — do not build an automated-only fast path anywhere in this curriculum, since no doctrine qualifies for one.
4. Prioritize theologian review bandwidth toward Acts 2 (core passage), Acts 9/22/26 (Paul’s conversion, three retellings), Acts 10-11 (Cornelius), Acts 13/15 (justification apart from the Law), and Acts 16/17/19 (divination, Unknown God, name-of-Jesus incidents) — these clusters carry the highest concentration of Critical-tier terms.
5. Carry the Romans-baseline YouVersion recommendation (HWB, version ID 1663, pending live verification) and citation conventions forward unchanged, substituting only the Acts book code (ACT) and title (Tubtxib Tes Haujlwm).