Executive Summary — Revelation | English → Nepali

Why it matters

Revelation is being added to the same Nepali Language Package that already anchors Romans, but it introduces a second, distinct collision surface: apocalyptic throne-room, sacrificial-Lamb, and cosmic-conflict imagery lands directly on Nepal’s Hindu-Kingdom legacy (avatar-monarchy, ended 2008), the still-practiced Newar Tantric Shakti/Kumari cult, nāga veneration, living animal-sacrifice festivals (Dakshinkali, Gadhimai), and the 2017 Muluki Criminal Code’s live restriction on religious conversion. The core passage, Revelation 21:1–8, concentrates more Critical-tier doctrine per verse than any other passage in the book and is treated here as the theological anchor of the curriculum, not its scope — full coverage spans all 22 chapters.

Key findings

• 28 doctrines catalogued across the full book (doctrine_risk_registry.json), with 10 Critical, 13 High, 5 Medium, and 1 Low tier — versus Romans’ 7/23/7/3, reflecting Revelation’s markedly higher doctrinal density and syncretism exposure.
• 56 new Revelation-specific theological terms catalogued in 08_core_glossary.md beyond the 24+ baseline Romans terms reused exactly, with 11 Critical, 20 High, 7 Medium-High, 8 Medium, 4 Low-Medium, and 6 Low risk.
• Revelation 21:1–8 alone touches nine of the ten Critical-tier doctrines (all but Worship of the Lamb, Resurrection Hope, and Lordship/Return, which appear immediately adjacent), making it the highest-density doctrinal passage identified anywhere in this pipeline to date.
• A mandatory new-coinage deviation is required for “Almighty” (सर्वसामर्थी, never the common सर्वशक्तिमान्) — extending, at book-wide scale, the same शक्ति-avoidance principle the Romans baseline established for “power of God.”
• Two genuine lexical gaps requiring new coinage were identified and flagged for theologian sign-off: “New Jerusalem” (नयाँ यरूशलेम) and a Nepali doctrine-label for “apocalyptic” as a genre-adjective (सांकेतिक र प्रकाशनात्मक व्याख्या).

Risks

• Highest risk (ranked #1 in 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md): the core passage’s own opening claim — New Heaven and New Earth vs. Hindu cyclical cosmology (kalpa/sṛṣṭi-pralaya) — is both the curriculum’s theological anchor and its single sharpest collision with Nepal’s dominant cosmological framework.
• Second Death/Lake of Fire vs. नरक (naraka, a temporary rebirth-cycle way-station in both Hindu and Buddhist frameworks) sits in the same eight verses (21:8) and must never soften into a revisable or purgatorial state.
• Lamb (थुमा) vs. living animal-sacrifice practice (Dakshinkali, Gadhimai) is a pervasive, book-wide risk (28 occurrences of ἀρνίον) requiring “once-for-all, self-offered, now-reigning” framing at every instance, not just the core passage.
• Worship (आराधना गर्नु) vs. पूजा carries zero-tolerance forbidden-substitution status across true AND false worship contexts — a single lapse anywhere in the corpus collapses the book’s own worship-contest structure.
• Throne (सिंहासन) vs. Shah-dynasty avatar-monarchy memory is a persistent, non-lexically-fixable, associative risk requiring contextual anchoring at every throne-vision passage (chs. 4–5, 20–22), not a one-time fix.
• Bride/Marriage of the Lamb (दुलही) and Sorcerer/Idolater exclusion language (21:8) both require sustained pastoral-framing discipline in teaching material to avoid, respectively, a dowry/transactional misreading and an ethnographic-condemnation misreading of Nepali cultural practice.

Opportunities

• Nepal’s church is young and largely post-1990, giving this curriculum an audience for whom Revelation’s perseverance-under-persecution and costly-testimony doctrines carry immediate, lived resonance (2017 Muluki Criminal Code conversion restrictions) rather than abstract historical interest — a genuine pastoral strength to leverage in teaching material.
• The book’s own explicit worship-boundary statement (“Worship God!”, 19:10; 22:8-9) offers a direct, textually-grounded entry point for addressing Kumari veneration, guru-devotion, and the former royal cult without requiring the curriculum to raise these topics unprompted.
• The New Jerusalem’s “no temple” declaration (21:22) and “he will dwell with them” (21:3) give this audience — accustomed to Nepal’s temple-saturated religious geography — an unusually vivid, concrete contrast for teaching unmediated grace.

Recommended actions

1. Treat Revelation 21:1–8 as the mandatory Phase 2 pilot segment: translate, theologian-review, and lock it in translation memory before any parallel batch processing of the remaining 21 chapters begins.
2. Load assets/translation_memory.json (Revelation, v1) in addition to, never instead of, the baseline Romans translation_memory.json for every Phase 2 segment.
3. Route all 23 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review (10 Critical + 13 High, per doctrine_risk_registry.json) through theologian sign-off with zero exceptions; the remaining 5 Medium-tier doctrines require native speaker review and 1 Low-tier (Thanksgiving and Doxology) requires automated review only.
4. Secure theologian sign-off specifically on the सर्वसामर्थी deviation and the two new-coinage terms (नयाँ यरूशलेम; सांकेतिक र प्रकाशनात्मक व्याख्या) before they are locked into translation memory.
5. Brief all Phase 2 translators and reviewers on the twelve “misunderstandings a translation must not invite” catalogued in 04_comparative_theology.md before segment work begins, given how many of them recur across multiple chapters rather than isolated verses.

---

This summary synthesizes analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, assets/bible_term_registry.json, and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json. It does not alter any risk tier, term rendering, or review routing decision made in those artifacts.