Executive Summary: Acts Language Package (Kannada)

Why it matters

Acts is the connective-tissue book of the New Testament for a Kannada-speaking audience: it dramatizes the Holy Spirit’s arrival, the gospel’s move from Jew to Gentile, and the church’s birth under persecution — all themes that land directly on top of Karnataka’s most theologically distinctive religious terrain. This curriculum inherits the Romans Language Package’s hard-won Lingayat/Haridasa-bhakti/Shakta fencing work and extends it into narrative territory the Romans epistolary material never touched: ecstatic-sounding phenomena (tongues, visions), a named “Way” that collides with mārga theology, magic and divination, a philosophical quotation vulnerable to Aikya-style monism (Acts 17:28), and direct encounters with named pagan deities (Zeus, Hermes, Artemis) whose devotional structure parallels living Karnataka goddess worship. Getting Acts wrong is not a hypothetical risk — the book’s own content sits closer to Karnataka’s religious “false familiarity” zone than Romans did.

Key findings

• 92 total glossary terms now govern the Acts curriculum: 47 inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline (no changes permitted) and 45 newly introduced for Acts-specific vocabulary.
• 54 of those 92 terms (16 Critical + 38 High) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence per the escalation rules — roughly 59% of the entire glossary.
• 29 doctrines are tracked in the Acts doctrine risk registry; 22 of them (9 Critical + 13 High) require human theologian review, 5 require native speaker review, and only 1 (Thanksgiving) is automated-review-only.
• The single highest-risk item in the entire curriculum is Acts 17:28 (“in him we live and move and have our being”) — a quoted philosophical formula that reads as agreement with monistic/Aikya categories unless actively corrected, a risk level the Romans baseline reserved for its most sensitive salvation/God-language.
• “The Way” (ἡ ὁδός) is a wholly new Critical-tier risk not present in Romans: unqualified ಮಾರ್ಗ collides with bhakti-mārga, jñāna-mārga, karma-mārga, and the Lingayat shatsthala path, and recurs eight times across the second half of the book.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41, Pentecost) alone carries three Critical-tier doctrines (Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Resurrection of Christ, Deity/Lordship of Christ) and the fixed salvation-confession formula that must match Romans 10:9-13 and Acts 4:12/16:30-31 verbatim.

Risks

• Trajectory risk, not single-word risk: as the comparative theology analysis notes, Lingayat and Haridasa vocabulary can sound doctrinally correct term-by-term while the whole passage still drifts toward Aikya-merger by its end — Acts 17:28 is the sharpest example, but ascension (1:9-11), resurrection, and “the Way” all carry the same structural risk.
• Crowded vocabulary with no better alternative: ದರ್ಶನ (visions), ಮಾರ್ಗ (the Way), ಹೆಸರು (invoked name of Jesus), and ಹರಕೆ (vow) are all cases where the best available Kannada word is already the load-bearing term of a different, well-established devotional or ritual system; there is no substitute word, only a mandatory fencing/gloss discipline.
• Caste-purity sensitivity: Peter’s vision (Acts 10:14-15, 28) and the Jerusalem Council’s resolution (15:1-11) directly confront ritual purity/caste-hierarchy categories; softening these for comfort would blunt doctrine the Romans baseline already commits this pipeline to teaching without qualification.
• Under-translation risk for μάρτυς: unlike the syncretism risks above, the witness→martyr semantic arc (1:8 → 2:32 → 7:54-60 → 22:20) can be lost not through a wrong word but through failing to track its developing weight, undercutting the “Persecution and Bold Witness” doctrine unit.
• Cross-document consistency risk: five passages (Acts 2:21/2:38, 4:12, 13:38-39, 16:30-31, 17:28) are now locked for verbatim rendering across every future lesson; any drift in a later Phase 2 batch silently breaks doctrinal consistency the whole pipeline depends on.

Opportunities

• Genuine positive bridges exist and should be used deliberately: the universal human accountability doctrine (all equally guilty, all equally invited) and the church’s communal sharing (2:44; 4:32) both have real, teachable partial resonance with the historic Lingayat rejection of caste hierarchy and the kayaka-dasoha ethic of sacred work and sharing — teachable as common ground before pivoting to the doctrinal distinctions (grace vs. earned merit, personal relationship vs. Aikya-dissolution).
• Paul’s own apologetic models are reusable teaching assets: his refusal of deification at Lystra (14:15) and his Areopagus method (17:22-31, correction-and-fulfillment rather than confrontation) give this curriculum built-in, textually-grounded templates for engaging Karnataka’s “godman” phenomenon and goddess-devotion economy respectfully rather than dismissively.
• Established Kannada Bible tradition already supplies strong renderings for the highest-stakes terms (ದೀಕ್ಷಾಸ್ನಾನ, ಪಶ್ಚಾತ್ತಾಪ, ಪುನರುತ್ಥಾನ, ರಕ್ಷಣೆ) — this package’s job is disciplined fencing and consistency enforcement, not term invention from scratch.

Recommended actions

1. Lock Acts 2:21/2:38, 4:12, 13:38-39, 15:1-11, 16:30-31, and 17:28 as verbatim-fixed renderings in the Phase 2 segment cache before any parallel batch processing begins.
2. Apply the ಕ್ರಿಸ್ತನ ಮಾರ್ಗ gloss automatically (not editor-discretionary) at every occurrence of ἡ ὁδός via a Phase 2 pre-processing rule, given the Critical tier and eight-occurrence frequency.
3. Route all 54 Critical/High term occurrences and all 22 Critical/High doctrine-unit passages to mandatory human theologian review per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md; do not allow automated approval to override this routing.
4. Maintain the μάρτυς semantic-arc tracking note across every chapter batch from Acts 1 through Acts 26 so Stephen’s martyrdom (ch. 7) and Paul’s retelling (22:20) land with their full accumulated weight.
5. Brief all reviewers on the “trajectory, not just vocabulary” principle established in the comparative theology analysis before Phase 2 begins, with Acts 17:28 as the standing training example.