Cross-Reference Analysis

Several Romans doctrines only make full sense read against specific Old Testament passages, which a Kurdish-speaking audience with limited OT narrative literacy will not supply on their own - and some also benefit from being explicitly distinguished from adjacent Sufi or Yazidi categories that have no OT counterpart at all.

Key cross-references this curriculum must surface explicitly

• Romans 1:3-4 (Davidic Covenant, Messianic Promise) ↔ 2 Samuel 7:12-16. The “seed of David” argument depends on a covenant promise the Quran’s own portrayal of Dawid does not supply.
• Romans 1:17 (“the righteous will live by faith”) ↔ Habakkuk 2:4. The thesis-statement quotation for the whole letter; unfamiliar OT prophetic material for most readers.
• Romans 4 (Abraham, faith credited as righteousness) ↔ Genesis 15:6. Îbrahîm is a major shared Quranic figure, but as the first monotheist rather than the paradigm case of credited righteousness apart from works - this argument needs explicit grounding.
• Romans 6:1-11 (union with Christ, dead to sin) ↔ contrasted explicitly, in teaching material, with Sufi “wahdat al-wujud” and Yazidi divine-manifestation categories that have no OT or NT counterpart at all, so readers do not default to those frameworks when encountering “union with Christ” language.

Implication for this Language Package

For a Kurdish-speaking audience, cross-references need to do double duty: supplying unfamiliar OT background (as in most Language Packages) and explicitly distinguishing NT doctrine from adjacent Sufi and Yazidi categories that could otherwise absorb it. The bible-reference auto-linker (scripts/inject-bible-links.js) should be applied generously to every OT citation in translated Romans lessons.