Executive Summary

Why it matters

Romans is the theological backbone of the New Testament, and Marathi carries a doctrinal-translation risk profile split across two genuinely distinct religious currents: the Warkari bhakti tradition (Vitthal-devotion centered on Pandharpur, with its own sant-poet canon of Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, Namdev, and Eknath) and the 20th-century Navayana Buddhist conversion movement founded by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, whose adherents explicitly rejected caste Hinduism’s karma-birth framework. Seven Critical-risk terms (salvation, resurrection, incarnation, sonship, deity of Christ, lordship, and imputed righteousness) each carry a Warkari-Hindu false friend AND a separate Buddhist false friend.

Key findings

• The registry tracks 40 doctrines across Romans 1-16; 30 require mandatory human theologian review before any translated segment ships (7 Critical, 23 High).
• Salvation and resurrection sit at the intersection of two non-overlapping wrong answers: मोक्ष/मुक्ती (Warkari-Hindu bhakti liberation) on one side, and निर्वाण/पुनर्भव (Buddhist cessation and rebirth-without-a-continuous-self) on the other — neither maps onto a personal God reconciling and bodily raising a specific person.
• Universal human accountability and providence carry a politically live sensitivity unique to Marathi among the Indian languages in this pipeline: both doctrines must avoid any phrasing that echoes the caste-Hindu birth-karma explanation of social status that Ambedkarite Buddhist communities explicitly and painfully rejected by converting in 1956.
• Only 3 of 40 doctrines (Thanksgiving, Mutual Edification, Christian Fellowship) are Low-risk and clear for automated review alone.

Risks

• Dual-tradition syncretism risk: Critical terms must be checked against both a Warkari-Hindu substitution and a Buddhist substitution, which do not share vocabulary or logic (one is theistic-devotional, the other non-theistic and self-effort-based).
• Caste-karma sensitivity: passages on universal sinfulness, election, and providence (especially Romans 8:28) risk sounding like the karma-birth explanation of low social status that this specific audience has rejected, unless phrased with deliberate care.
• Anatta (no-self) friction: Buddhist teaching on the absence of a permanent self creates a distinct philosophical friction point for resurrection, adoption, and assurance of salvation that has no parallel in Hindu-only contexts.

Opportunities

• Romans’ argument that salvation is a gift from a personal God, not a state attained by self-effort, speaks directly and pointedly into the Navayana Buddhist ethical framework, offering a genuinely different answer rather than a variation on a shared theme.
• Established Marathi Christian vocabulary already exists for the highest-risk terms (परमेश्वर, येशू, प्रभू, ख्रिस्त, पवित्र आत्मा, शुभवर्तमान), giving translators and reviewers a stable foundation.

Recommended actions

• Route every Critical and High risk segment (30 of 40 doctrines) through human theologian review before publication; brief reviewers on both the Warkari-Hindu and Buddhist substitution risks for each term.
• Brief native-speaker reviewers specifically on caste-karma sensitivity and colonial-connotation risk categories, which automated glossary enforcement alone cannot catch.
• Reuse this Language Package’s translation_memory.json for every Romans lesson in Marathi rather than re-deriving terms per document, per the two-phase pipeline design.