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

Why it matters

Acts is the first curriculum in this pipeline to sit on top of the existing hungarian Romans Language Package rather than establish it from scratch. It inherits Romans’ single hardest translation problem — the internal Catholic/Reformed doctrinal divide over grace, justification, and election — and adds a second, independent fault line the baseline never had to address: Hungary’s own indigenous Pentecostal-charismatic movement (notably Hit Gyülekezete) and a historically significant Baptist/free-church tradition, both directly implicated by Acts’ core content (Pentecost, tongues, repeated Spirit-filling, and the mode/timing of baptism). The core passage, Acts 2:1–41, concentrates nearly every high-stakes decision in the whole book into forty-one verses. Getting this Language Package right determines whether the entire Acts curriculum teaches Luke’s own claims or silently imports one Hungarian tradition’s systematic theology at the expense of another’s.

Key findings

• 39 distinct doctrines were catalogued across all 28 chapters (full-book coverage confirmed, no chapter silently skipped): 16 Critical, 11 High, 8 Medium, 4 Low.
• 27 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review; 8 require native speaker review; 4 are automated-only.
• 90 terms are now fixed in assets/translation_memory.json for this curriculum — 46 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline (several with heightened Acts-specific notes) and 44 newly introduced by Acts. Of the term registry’s Acts-specific entries, 24 are Critical and 20 are High risk — 44 terms requiring theologian-level scrutiny, concentrated in chapters 2, 8, 10, 13, 15, 16, and 20.
• Acts 2:38 is the single densest ambiguity cluster in the curriculum: repentance → baptism → forgiveness → gift of the Spirit, each element contested differently across Hungary’s Catholic, Reformed, and Baptist/free-church communities, and now escalated to mandatory whole-verse (not just per-term) theologian review.
• Hungary’s Catholic/Reformed divide (documented extensively in the Romans baseline) recurs and sharpens in Acts around church polity (Acts 20:17/28’s interchangeable “elders”/“overseers”), the Lord’s Supper (“breaking of bread,” 2:42), and justification apart from the law (13:38-39, 15:1-11) — all now Critical or High tier.
• A genuinely new comparative-religious consideration this curriculum introduces beyond Romans: Jewish sensitivity around the Sanhedrin-persecution narratives (chs. 4-8, 21-26), requiring teaching notes that preserve the text’s own intra-Jewish setting and avoid collective ethnic framing, given Hungary’s own Holocaust history.
• The Watchtower Society’s Hungarian Új világ fordítás (NWT-hu) is confirmed in circulation and must be actively excluded from any drafting or comparison use, particularly at Acts 2:21/36 (“Lord”), 7:59-60 (prayer to Christ), and 4:12 (“no other name”).

Risks

• Highest risk: silently resolving Acts 2:38, 13:48, 15:1-11, or 20:17/28 toward one Hungarian confessional tradition’s systematic theology, misrepresenting Luke’s own text to the other tradition’s readers within the same audience.
• Folklorization risk: “pünkösd” (Pentecost) carries deep non-biblical Hungarian folk-festival associations (pünkösdölés, pünkösdi rózsa) that could displace the biblical event’s meaning if left unglossed.
• Charismatic/mainline risk: every Spirit-filling and tongues passage (2:4; 4:8, 31; 8:15-20; 10:44-46; 19:1-6) is a live flashpoint between mainline Catholic/Reformed and Hungary’s Pentecostal-charismatic movement; six Critical-tier terms cluster here.
• Baptism risk: the infant-versus-believer’s-baptism divide, absent from the Romans baseline entirely, now touches five Critical-tier terms (repentance, baptism, household baptism, gift of the Holy Spirit, forgiveness of sins).
• Historical-collectivization risk: “közösen volt mindenük” (Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-37) could be misread against 20th-century Hungarian state collectivization memory without an explicit voluntary-generosity note.

Opportunities

• Acts’ persecution narratives resonate strongly and constructively with both Hungarian Reformed (Habsburg-era resistance) and Catholic (communist-era, e.g., Cardinal Mindszenty) historical memory — a valuable, non-divisive teaching bridge once Acts is taught on its own terms first.
• The Cornelius narrative (ch. 10) and the Jerusalem Council (ch. 15) offer a rare opportunity to teach Jewish-Gentile unity with direct narrative force, reinforcing rather than merely asserting the Romans baseline’s “Unity of Jews and Gentiles” doctrine.
• Acts’ anti-syncretism scenes (Lystra, Athens, Ephesus) provide a natural, non-confessionally-divisive bridge to Hungary’s own pre-Christian religious heritage discussions.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json (Acts) alongside the Romans baseline file for every Phase 2 segment; never substitute one for the other.
2. Route all 27 theologian-review doctrines and all 44 Critical/High registry terms through mandatory human theologian sign-off before any segment is marked approved, per the escalation rules in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
3. Attach the ten mandatory translator notes specified in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Pentecost folk-association, tongues disambiguation, istenfélő disambiguation, general-resurrection distinction, elders/overseers plain statement, breaking-of-bread neutrality, tanúk→vértanú transition, kiválasztás vocational/soteriological split, kézrátétel function-tagging, Hádész/pokol distinction) at first occurrence in every curriculum document.
4. Confirm the YouVersion version_id for Károli (KAR) against the live API before publishing any hyperlink using the fixed book code ACT and Hungarian display name ApCsel.
5. Carry all Acts-specific fixed renderings and risk tiers forward unchanged into any future Hungarian-destination curriculum in this pipeline, per the established cross-document consistency principle.