Executive Summary — Acts Language Package (English → Japanese)

Why it matters

Acts is the Bible’s most doctrinally dense missionary narrative — the Holy Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost, the gospel’s leap from Jews to Gentiles, Paul’s conversion, and the Jerusalem Council’s ruling on law-free justification all happen here first, before Paul later systematizes them in Romans. For a Japanese destination audience already carrying real risk on Romans’ baseline Critical terms (神, 聖霊, 恵み, 義, 救い), Acts intensifies rather than resets that risk: it repeats 聖霊 and 復活 more densely than Romans, stages the gospel’s first head-on collision with a polytheistic culture at the Areopagus (Acts 17) — a scene structurally close to Japan’s own yaoyorozu no kami worldview — and puts several LIVE, still-practiced Japanese religious categories (Shinto kegare/purification, omikuji fortune-slips, Buddhist esoteric kaji rites) into direct proximity with core narrative content for the first time in this curriculum. Getting this Language Package right determines whether Acts reads as Christianity’s founding history or gets silently absorbed into Japan’s existing religious categories.

Key findings

• 20 doctrines tracked, extending the Romans baseline’s structure exactly: 9 Critical, 10 High, 1 Medium, 0 Low — nearly all (19 of 20) require mandatory human theologian review; only 1 (Church as Community) routes to native speaker review, and none are automated-only.
• 72 terms cataloged in the Acts-specific term registry (34 inherited from Romans exactly, 38 new): 44 are Critical or High risk requiring theologian review, 23 Medium (native speaker review), and only 5 Low (automated).
• The core passage (Acts 2:1–41) is the single highest doctrinal-density chapter in the whole book — nearly every Critical-tier doctrine (Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Gospel to Jews and Gentiles, Repentance and Baptism, Lordship of Christ, Deity and Sonship of Christ, Justification-adjacent forgiveness language) surfaces there simultaneously.
• Acts’ collision risks skew toward currently-practiced Japanese religious categories (Shinto purification rites, shrine fortune-slips, esoteric hand-laying) rather than the mostly historical/discontinued collisions flagged in the Romans baseline (State Shinto emperor-worship) — raising real-world misreading likelihood above the Romans baseline average.
• Three doctrines are entirely new to this curriculum relative to Romans and require full new vocabulary builds: Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Repentance and Baptism, and Conversion of Paul — all three rated Critical.

Risks

• 知られていない神 (Acts 17:23, “unknown god”) is the single most delicate term in the package: a genuinely apt bridge to Japan’s eight-million-kami tradition that, mishandled, reduces the one true God to “one more identified kami.”
• 汚れたもの (Acts 10, “common/unclean”) risks conflation with the live, still-practiced Shinto kegare/harae purification system — not a historical artifact but an active cultural practice many readers personally participate in.
• 悔い改め (repentance) and バプテスマ (baptism) both sit in crowded semantic neighborhoods (反省/懺悔; 清め/禊) that offer readily-available but doctrinally wrong substitutes.
• 回心 (conversion), narrated three times (chs. 9, 22, 26), risks cumulative dilution into secular “changed my mind” usage across all three retellings, not just one.
• 神の国 bookends the entire book (1:6, 28:31), doubling the Romans baseline’s State-Shinto-resonance risk exposure at the curriculum’s two most structurally prominent points.
• The Greek word family behind “tongues” (γλῶσσαι) forces a permanent split into two non-interchangeable Japanese terms (他国の言葉 / 異言); confusing them corrupts the Pentecost narrative’s specific claim.

Opportunities

• Acts’ own text frequently self-corrects the very risks this audience faces: Acts 1:6–8 corrects a nationalistic kingdom-misreading before 神の国 recurs; Acts 17:22–31 models exactly how to address a religiously plural, “unknown god” culture with respect and clarity — both are built-in teaching moments requiring no external framing device.
• Simon Magus (Acts 8) supplies the clearest possible narrative proof, anywhere in the two-curriculum package, that grace and spiritual gifting are never purchasable — directly defusing Japan’s on-giri reciprocity risk with a concrete story rather than an abstract rule.
• Paul’s conversion (chosen despite persecuting the church, Acts 9:15) is the strongest available illustration against Japan’s competitive-selection (受験/選抜) misreading of divine election in the entire curriculum.
• Japan’s own Kirishitan martyrdom history (26 Martyrs of Nagasaki) gives the Persecution and Bold Witness doctrine unusually concrete, respected historical resonance largely absent from other doctrine clusters.

Recommended actions

1. Route all Acts 2:1–41 segments, all three Paul-conversion narrations, the Cornelius/Jerusalem Council sequence (chs. 10–11, 15), the Areopagus address (ch. 17), and the Simon Magus narrative (ch. 8) to mandatory theologian review before Phase 2 release — these concentrate the majority of Critical-tier risk.
2. Enforce the 他国の言葉/異言 split and the バプテスマ/清め fencing note as hard validation gates in Phase 2, not optional style guidance.
3. Require the 唯一のまことの神 qualifier as a non-skippable adjacent phrase everywhere 知られていない神 appears.
4. Carry the Romans baseline’s Critical/High terms forward unchanged (per assets/translation_memory.json Section A) — do not re-derive or soften any inherited rendering.
5. Prioritize reviewer training on Japan’s live ritual-practice collisions (purification, fortune-slips, esoteric rites) ahead of the historical-only collisions, since these carry materially higher real-world misreading probability for this specific book.