Executive Summary — Titus | English → Marathi Language Package

Why it matters

Titus’s core passage (2:11–3:8) compresses this letter’s seven assigned doctrines — grace that trains, elder qualifications, sound doctrine, salvation by grace not works, regeneration by the Spirit, submission to authority, and avoiding divisive controversies — into one dense theological unit that must land correctly for a Marathi readership shaped by two distinct, well-organized traditions: Warkari bhakti devotion (Vitthal, kripa, the wari pilgrimage) and Navayana Buddhism (Ambedkar’s 1956 anti-caste conversion movement). Titus introduces one of the single highest-stakes coinages in this entire Language Package — नवजन्म for “regeneration” — precisely because Marathi’s existing rebirth vocabulary (पुनर्जन्म, पुनर्भव) is live, load-bearing doctrine in both rival traditions, not inert etymology.

Key findings

• 62 new theological terms were identified and risk-assessed for Titus beyond the baseline Romans package, plus 24 baseline terms confirmed as directly reused (grace, faith, salvation, justification, righteousness, God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, and others), for a translation memory of 86 total governed terms.
• 15 new terms are Critical risk (regeneration, Savior, the “great God and Savior” deity-of-Christ construction, good works, grace-as-trainer, epiphany, God, Jesus, Christ, grace, salvation, justification, righteousness, imputed righteousness, and the Titus 3:5 works-exclusion clause) — every one requires mandatory human theologian review on every occurrence, no exceptions.
• 27 new terms are High risk (mercy, redemption, submission, sound doctrine, godliness/ungodliness, self-control, household-slave code, foolish controversies, divisive person, and more).
• At the doctrine level, the Titus doctrine risk registry records 5 Critical and 10 High doctrines (15 total requiring mandatory theologian review), 3 Medium doctrines (native speaker review), and 2 Low doctrines (automated review) — spanning all three chapters with no silent omissions.
• The letter’s defining theological tension — good works explicitly EXCLUDED as salvation’s ground (3:5) yet explicitly COMMANDED as its fruit (1:16; 2:7,14; 3:1,8,14) — is itself a translation risk: natural Marathi harmonizing tendencies could soften either clause and erase the doctrine that gives Titus its pastoral shape.

Risks

• regeneration (नवजन्म) vs. पुनर्जन्म/पुनर्भव: the single highest risk in the curriculum. पुनर्जन्म names live Hindu cyclical-rebirth doctrine; पुनर्भव names the Buddhist technical denial of a continuous self. Either substitution would silently reverse Titus 3:5’s claim of a one-time, Spirit-wrought new beginning of a continuous person.
• Titus 2:13’s Granville Sharp construction (“our great God and Savior Jesus Christ”) risks a two-referent misreading in Marathi’s flexible relative-clause syntax, which would quietly weaken one of the New Testament’s clearest deity-of-Christ affirmations.
• grace as trainer (2:11-12): grammatical-subject drift could turn grace’s own formative action into believer self-discipline, collapsing the doctrine into Buddhist self-cultivation or Hindu ascetic-effort ethics while every individual word remains superficially “correct.”
• submission (अधीन राहणे) and household-slave code (2:9-10): both carry acute pastoral-sensitivity risk for Ambedkarite Buddhist and Dalit Christian readers if not explicitly fenced from caste-based fixed subordination and caste-servitude history.
• कृपा, सुभक्ति, दास, दया, स्नान, वंशावळी: six crowded Marathi semantic neighborhoods, each already claimed by a rival devotional or philosophical framework (Warkari bhakti or Navayana Buddhism), requiring mandatory fencing notes rather than lexical substitution alone.

Opportunities

• Titus’s “no distinction” universal-accountability language (3:3, “we too were once foolish”) gives this curriculum a direct, theologically faithful way to affirm human equality without echoing caste-karma framing — a message with unusually direct resonance given the Ambedkarite movement’s founding rejection of exactly that doctrine.
• The letter’s repeated, plain-Marathi चांगली कामे (“good works”) — deliberately never सत्कर्म or पुण्यकर्म — offers a clean, non-merit-loaded vocabulary that can be reused consistently across all three chapters and into future curricula.
• Coined, non-transliterated terms (नवजन्म, प्रकट होणे/प्रकटीकरण) are designed to carry meaning on first encounter at the Class 8–10 reading-level target, avoiding the “safely foreign but pastorally empty” failure mode of a transliteration.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json (version 2) — not the Romans-only version 1 — before any Phase 2 segment translation of Titus.
2. Route all 15 Critical-risk terms and all Critical/High doctrines (15 of 20 total doctrines) to mandatory human theologian review; do not allow automated-only approval for any occurrence.
3. Apply the seven mandatory Titus-specific translator notes (regeneration, washing, slave-of-God, household-slave, submission, genealogies, divisive person) on every occurrence, not merely on first use per lesson.
4. Preserve the 3:5/3:8 good-works tension verbatim in every lesson that quotes the core passage — do not allow lesson-writers to resolve it toward either “faith alone without any works emphasis” or “faith plus meritorious works.”
5. Verify every Titus 2:13 occurrence against the Granville Sharp single-referent grammar rule before approving any segment for publication.