Executive Summary — Matthew — English → Nepali Language Package

Why it matters

Matthew is the Nepali church’s bridge Gospel — the first sustained New Testament narrative most new believers encounter — and it lands directly on top of Nepal’s most consequential, still-living religious-political fault lines: a former Hindu Kingdom (until 2007), a monarchy venerated as living avatars of Vishnu (until 2008), a caste-purity legal code (the Muluki Ain, in force until 1963), and a current criminal-code restriction on religious conversion (2017 Muluki Criminal Code). Nearly every distinctive Matthew doctrine — the virgin conception, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Great Commission, “greater righteousness,” the Son of Man’s authority to judge — has a specific, named Nepali cultural or legal collision point, several of them (कुमारी, अवतार, स्वर्ग, नरक) more concrete and more currently active than anything the Romans baseline had to navigate.

Key findings

• 113 total glossary terms now govern Phase 2 translation: 47 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 66 newly introduced by Matthew’s distinct vocabulary (Beatitudes, Kingdom of Heaven, Son of Man, virgin conception, Great Commission, Gehenna, ransom, discipleship).
• 70 of those 113 terms (62%) are Critical or High risk (21 Critical, 49 High) and therefore require mandatory human theologian sign-off before entering Phase 2 translation memory — a materially heavier doctrinal load than a typical epistle curriculum, driven by Matthew’s narrative density and its concentration of Christological titles.
• 41 distinct doctrines are tracked in the Matthew doctrine risk registry (12 Critical, 21 High, 6 Medium, 2 Low); 33 of the 41 (80%) require human theologian review, 6 require native-speaker review, and only 2 are automated-only.
• The single highest-severity, most currently active cultural collision in the entire Language Package is कुमारी (virgin) — Nepal’s living-goddess Kumari tradition is a still-practiced, state-historically-linked cult, not a merely textual or historical risk; it requires a mandatory कुमारी कन्या modifier at every occurrence with no exceptions.
• The Matthew curriculum surfaces one genuinely new grammatical-doctrinal structure with no baseline precedent: the Trinitarian baptismal formula’s grammatically singular “the name” (28:19), which carries the full weight of one-God-three-Persons doctrine in a single number agreement.

Risks

• False-friend vocabulary, not missing vocabulary. Matthew’s core risk profile is Nepali having too many fluent, ready-sounding words — स्वर्ग, कुमारी, सिद्ध, नरक, चेला, करुणा, दण्डवत्, भूत, युग — each already owned by an established Hindu, Buddhist, or former-monarchy concept that actively contradicts the intended doctrine. Silence (an unglossed literal choice) is the dominant failure mode, not mistranslation of an absent term.
• Verse-specific overrides invert trained defaults. At Matthew 28:19 specifically, the baseline’s own correct अन्यजाति default becomes the wrong choice; translators and even automated linters trained on the baseline are at elevated risk of applying it precisely where it must not apply.
• Live legal exposure, not merely cultural sensitivity, attaches to the Great Commission and Mission-Discourse material (10:5-42; 24:14; 28:18-20) under Nepal’s 2017 Muluki Criminal Code conversion-restriction provisions.
• Pastoral risk compounds doctrinal risk at the persecution Beatitude (5:10-12) and the confession/denial-of-Christ passages (10:32-33; 26:69-75), given the Nepali church’s own recent history of legally restricted practice.

Opportunities

• Matthew 15:11-20’s heart-vs-ritual-purity teaching is a constructive engagement point, not merely a risk to fence — Jesus’s own relocation of defilement from external categories to the heart speaks directly and favorably into Nepal’s Muluki Ain caste-purity history and should be taught explicitly, not translated around.
• The Beatitudes/Woes literary pairing (5:3-11 / 23:13-29) offers a built-in teaching structure (धन्य / धिक्कार) that reinforces doctrinal consistency across the curriculum with minimal additional glossing burden.
• Reuse of 47 baseline Romans terms exactly means nearly 40% of the Matthew glossary requires no new theological adjudication — only propagation and Matthew-specific occurrence mapping.

Recommended actions

1. Lock the 8 Critical new-Matthew terms (immanuel, virgin, end_of_the_age, baptismal_formula_name_singular, son_of_man, eternal_punishment, gehenna_hell, ransom) for mandatory theologian sign-off before any Phase 2 batch touches chapters 1, 5, 8-9, 13, 16-17, 19-20, 24-25, or 28.
2. Route Matthew 13 and 24-25 (the densest concentrations of Critical-risk vocabulary) to a single reviewer or reviewer team rather than splitting across parallel Phase 2 workers, to protect internal consistency.
3. Add the two Matthew-specific forbidden-substitution pairs not present in the baseline validator (सिद्ध for “perfect”; युग/युगको अन्त्य for “end of the age”) to the automated pre-submission linter immediately, alongside a dedicated grammatical-number check for the Trinitarian baptismal formula.
4. Brief all Phase 2 translators on the verse-specific अन्यजाति → सबै जातिहरू override at 28:19 as a standalone training point, given its unusually high “trap” risk.
5. Treat Matthew 15:11-20 as a flagged opportunity passage in teaching-material style guides, not only a risk passage, so translators do not default to over-cautious avoidance where direct doctrinal engagement is actually the stronger choice.