Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 Persian Language Package

Why it matters

Acts is the book where the Holy Spirit, the church, and cross-cultural gospel proclamation all get their narrative origin story — and every one of those categories has a live, specific collision point in Iranian Twelver Shia religious culture that the Romans baseline never had to address. Pentecost’s روح‌القدس outpouring sits directly on top of mainstream Iranian tafsir’s identification of the Holy Spirit with the angel Jibril; Peter’s Cornelius vision confronts an actively-taught Shia purity-law system (najasat) almost term-for-term; the apostles’ “witness” identity collides with both the Islamic shahada and the devotionally central Shia shahid/Karbala martyrdom category; and Acts 2:23-24’s crucifixion-then-resurrection sequence is the single most direct textual contact point with Quran 4:157 anywhere in the New Testament. Getting this book’s Persian rendering right is not a stylistic exercise — it determines whether Muslim-background readers hear the gospel Acts actually proclaims or a syncretized approximation of it.

Key findings

• 12 Critical-risk and 12 High-risk doctrines (24 total, out of 27 identified) require mandatory human theologian review across every chapter of Acts — a higher theologian-review burden proportionally than the Romans baseline, driven by Acts’ narrative depiction of the Spirit, resurrection, and persecution rather than Romans’ more abstracted argument.
• Term-level: 26 Critical-risk and 35 High-risk terms (61 combined) require theologian-level enforcement in Phase 2, spanning 47 terms inherited exactly from the Romans baseline and 50 new terms this book introduces.
• The single highest-priority new fencing decision in this Language Package is شاهد/شهادت دادن (witness/testify): it must be taught as eyewitness testimony to a historical event, never a creedal recitation (Islamic shahada) or a merit-generating martyrdom act (Shia shahid/Karbala) — and Acts is structurally organized around this term (1:8, 1:22).
• Acts 2:1–41, the core passage, is the single densest cluster of doctrinal risk in the entire curriculum: Pentecost, tongues, fire-imagery, resurrection, lordship, repentance, and baptism all converge in 41 verses, each with an independent Critical-tier collision risk.
• Three chapters (23, 25, 27) are legal-procedural/narrative in character and were confirmed to introduce no new doctrine beyond continuing threads already covered — explicitly logged, not silently skipped, per the full-book coverage mandate.

Risks

• Compounded risk in the core passage: Acts 2:1-11 alone stacks three independent Critical/High risks (Zoroastrian fire-veneration resonance, Spirit/Jibril tafsir collision, tongues/xenoglossy precision) in a single eleven-verse span; a single mistranslation can compound rather than isolate.
• Purity-code confrontation (Acts 10-11): κοινός (“unclean/common”) maps with unusual precision onto the currently-taught Shia najasat system; softening this into a dietary footnote would silence one of Acts’ most doctrinally load-bearing narrative arguments.
• Jerusalem Council (Acts 15): three baseline Critical terms (فیض, خداوند, نجات) converge in 15:11, and 15:28 asserts the Spirit’s own binding authority — a rendering that reads as mere human consensus would quietly relocate authority from the Spirit to Sunni ijma or Shia Imamate-authority categories.
• Pastoral safety risk, not just doctrinal risk: “boldness” (παρρησία) and “unhindered” (ἀκωλύτως, Acts 28:31) both carry real-world stakes for underground house-church readers; mishandling either could read as an incitement to unsafe public confrontation or generate a false expectation of imminent legal freedom.
• Term-neighbor drift over time: several deliberately-chosen Persian terms (روح پلید not جن; ناپاک not نجس; نشانه‌ها not آیات; خودداری not پرهیزگاری) sit one small, natural-sounding substitution away from their rejected neighbor; translator fatigue or “naturalization” pressure in later Phase 2 cycles is a live, specific risk to guard against.

Opportunities

• Acts’ narrative concreteness (real names, real places, real legal proceedings, an occupied-vs-empty-tomb argument at 13:36) gives this curriculum unusually strong apologetic material against the Quran 4:157 crucifixion-denial — stronger, arguably, than Romans’ more doctrinal treatment.
• Persian is a genuine linguistic asset here: native pre-Islamic vocabulary (خدا, خداوند, گناه) avoids the total dependence on Arabic-Islamic loan-vocabulary that constrains Arabic Bible translation, and Acts’ many everyday-register scenes (a jailer’s question, a shared meal, a farewell address) can lean into that asset.
• The book’s own internal corrective (Acts 1:6-8, disciples’ political-restoration question directly answered) provides a ready-made teaching template for distinguishing God’s kingdom from Iran’s own religious-political state structure, without the curriculum needing to construct that distinction from scratch.
• The shared devotional vocabulary this Language Package deliberately retains rather than avoids (دعا, خداترس, حیات جاودان) demonstrates that engagement, not avoidance, of Islamic-adjacent religious vocabulary is the more theologically serious and more respectful path for this audience.

Recommended actions

1. Route Acts 2:1-41 as a single non-splittable review unit in Phase 2 batch processing, given its compounded risk density; do not assign it across parallel workers.
2. Enforce the Acts-specific forbidden-substitution list (نجس, جن, آیات, پرهیزگاری, طریقت) with the same automated pre-submission validation already used for the Romans list.
3. Mandate theologian sign-off on all 24 Critical/High doctrines and all 61 Critical/High terms before any Phase 2 output is marked approved; native-speaker review is sufficient only for the 3 Medium-tier doctrines (Church Leadership and Office; Kingdom of God and Mission; Divine Providence).
4. Attach the three standing mandatory translator notes (tongues of fire at 2:3; resuscitation-vs-resurrection at 9:36-42/20:9-12; the Θεοῦ/Κυρίου manuscript variant at 20:28) to every occurrence without exception, regardless of whether the translator judges the choice “non-obvious” in a given instance.
5. Brief all reviewers explicitly on the Shia-specific axis (Imamate, Karbala/shahid, najasat, nazr votive-vow piety) documented in Comparative Theology before Phase 2 begins; a reviewer trained only on generic or Sunni-context Islamic theology will miss roughly half of this book’s documented collision points.

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This summary reflects assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (Acts v1: 12 Critical, 12 High, 3 Medium, 0 Low doctrines; 24 requiring theologian review, 3 requiring native-speaker review) and assets/bible_term_registry.json / assets/translation_memory.json (Acts: 26 Critical-risk and 35 High-risk terms, 61 combined, across 47 inherited Romans terms and 50 new Acts terms).