Linguistic Gap Analysis — Acts 1–28 (English → Persian)

Purpose and Scope

This document executes PRD Phase 1 Step 8 for the Acts curriculum: it identifies where Persian vocabulary is missing, where existing vocabulary is crowded by competing Islamic (Sunni and Twelver Shia) and Zoroastrian semantic neighbors, and where transliteration rather than translation is the safer strategy. It covers the nine curriculum doctrines (Holy Spirit and Pentecost; Gospel to Jews and Gentiles; Repentance and Baptism; The Church as Community; Apostolic Authority and Miracles; Persecution and Bold Witness; Conversion of Paul; Justification apart from the Law; The Great Commission Fulfilled) across the entire book of Acts, with the core passage (Acts 2:1-41, Pentecost) as the theological anchor, not the boundary of analysis.

This document does not renegotiate any term already fixed in the Romans translation_memory.json / bible_term_registry.json baseline (Section A terms in 08_core_glossary.md). It analyzes the gap that motivated each new-term decision recorded in 08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json, and flags residual risk that Phase 2 review must still watch for even after a rendering has been chosen.

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1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each doctrine: the Persian terms currently available (baseline-reused + newly coined), the specific weakness of each, and the recommended handling strategy for Phase 2.

1.1 The Holy Spirit and Pentecost (thesis doctrine of the core passage)

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
روح‌القدس (Holy Spirit) [BASELINE]	Critical	Identical Quranic phrase, standard tafsir identifies it with the angel Jibril (Gabriel); a created-being reading is the default Muslim-background assumption walking into Acts 2.	Every occurrence in Acts 2 must be accompanied by explicit personal-divine-Person teaching (not merely “power”); do not let the term stand undefined at its first Acts occurrence (1:2).
پنطیکاست (Pentecost)	Medium	No native Persian equivalent; the Jewish Feast of Weeks (Shavuot) background is simply absent from Muslim-background readers’ religious memory — not a false-collision risk but a total-gap risk.	Retain the transliteration (already established Persian Bible-translation practice) but require an explanatory gloss (fifty days after Passover) at first use; do not assume Torah-festival literacy.
زبان‌های دیگر (other tongues)	High	Persian has no single word distinguishing “real known foreign language” from “ecstatic/unintelligible utterance”; both senses would use زبان.	Use دیالکت-confirming context (2:6,8,11 — “each in his own dialect”) explicitly in teaching material to lock the “real known language” sense before any discussion of related phenomena elsewhere in the NT.
زبانه‌های آتش (tongues of fire)	High	Persian religious memory carries strong indigenous fire-sanctity resonance independent of Islam: Zoroastrian fire temples, the Nowruz-adjacent Chaharshanzi Suri fire-jumping ritual, and popular residual reverence for fire as a purifying/divine element.	Mandatory translator note at 2:3 distinguishing this as a unique, one-time, non-repeatable sign of the Spirit’s historical arrival — not a hierophany of fire itself, and not an invitation to read Persian fire-veneration practice sympathetically into the text.
پر شدن (از روح) (filled with the Spirit)	Medium	Risk of being read as a transient ecstatic/trance high-point rather than a repeatable, character-consistent empowering (cf. 4:8,31; 9:17; 13:9).	Teach the pattern across Acts (repeated fillings tied to bold proclamation) rather than treating 2:4 as a singular, unrepeatable emotional peak.
عطایای روحانی (spiritual gifts) [BASELINE]	Medium	Could be read as ordinary talent if the روحانی qualifier is dropped in paraphrase.	Always retain the full compound; never abbreviate to عطایا alone in Acts 2/8/10/11 gift-of-the-Spirit contexts.

Core passage note (Acts 2:1-41): This is the single highest-density doctrinal cluster in the book. The Pentecost narrative combines three simultaneous linguistic risk vectors — the fire/Zoroastrian resonance, the tongues/xenoglossy precision requirement, and the روح‌القدس/Jibril tafsir collision — inside eleven verses (2:1-11). Phase 2 must treat this span as requiring theologian review of every clause, not merely the flagged terms individually.

1.2 The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
انجیل (gospel) [BASELINE]	High	Tahrif (corruption) assumption — treated as a lost/corrupted predecessor text to the Quran.	Teach as the NT record itself, per baseline; Acts adds urgency since the gospel is shown being proclaimed live, not transmitted as a book.
غیریهودیان (Gentiles) [BASELINE]	Medium	Low independent risk; avoids the Ummah-root plural.	Maintain consistency; Acts 10-15 is the doctrine’s narrative center.
اسرائیل (Israel) [BASELINE, risk elevated to High in Acts]	High	Iran’s officially propagandized anti-Israel political stance is more totalizing than the general Arab-world association; Acts 1:6’s disciples’ own political-restoration question makes the collision structurally built into the text itself.	Frame Acts 1:6-8 explicitly as correcting a political-kingdom expectation, so the redemptive-historical “Israel” of chs. 1-15 is never allowed to default-read as commentary on the modern state.
مسیحی (Christian)	Medium-High	In contemporary Iran, مسیحی functions as a legally recognized ethnic-minority category (Armenian/Assyrian communities), not a convert-identity term; Muslim-background believers adopting the label face distinct legal/social consequences that born-Christians do not.	Teach 11:26 and 26:28 with this present-day asymmetry explicitly named, not assumed to be a neutral descriptive label.
بت / بت‌پرستی (idols/idolatry)	Medium-High	Shared strong disapproval with Islam is an asset, but Muslim apologetic material sometimes redirects this exact charge at Christian veneration of icons, the cross, or Mary.	Where the text condemns idolatry (14:15; 17:16), do not let the passage become a springboard for unrelated apologetic point-scoring in either direction; keep the focus on the text’s own target (Greco-Roman polytheism).
خدای ناشناخته (unknown god)	Medium	Effective missionary bridge (17:23), but risks being read as affirming the prior pagan worship’s validity if not carefully framed.	Teach explicitly as Paul’s rhetorical starting point, immediately corrected by proclamation of the one true God — not an endorsement.
خداترس (God-fearer)	Medium	A real, shared pious category; risk is treating it as already-saving faith.	Mark as a bridge status (10:2,22,35; 13:16,26), not the goal.
نوری برای غیریهودیان (light for the Gentiles)	High	Isaianic citation language; risk of reducing to a generic “helping the nations” sentiment if the OT fulfillment frame is dropped.	Always pair with explicit citation awareness (13:47; 26:23) so it reads as prophetic fulfillment, not humanitarian metaphor.

1.3 Repentance and Baptism

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
توبه (repentance)	Critical	Exact Quranic root (ت-و-ب). Embedded in Islamic deeds-and-mercy piety; in Shia devotional practice further associated with recurring penitential turning, including through Karbala/Muharram mourning ritual, rather than a decisive, once-for-all turn united to faith in a specific historical person.	Every occurrence (esp. 2:38; 3:19) must syntactically bind توبه to ایمان and به نام عیسی (“in the name of Jesus”) in the same clause or immediately adjacent teaching — never presented as a self-standing devotional act.
تعمید (baptism)	Critical	Risk of collapse into Islamic ritual purification (ghusl/wudu) — repeatable washing before prayer — rather than a once-for-all identification with Christ’s death/resurrection.	Reuse Acts 19:1-5’s own internal distinction (John’s baptism vs. Christian baptism) as the teaching template: baptism is not a purification technique but a union event.
گناه (sin) [BASELINE]	High	Risk of drift toward ritual impurity or impersonal cosmic imbalance (reinforced independently by Zoroastrian Chinvat-Bridge deeds-weighing, per Romans baseline).	Maintain personal-transgression-before-a-personal-God sense throughout Acts’ repentance passages.
بخشش گناهان (forgiveness of sins)	High	Islamic vocabulary of divine forgiveness (al-Ghafur, “the Forgiving”) is generically available and could eclipse the specifically cross-secured forgiveness Acts asserts.	Never let بخشش گناهان stand without an explicit through-Christ anchor in the same sentence (2:38; 10:43; 13:38; 26:18).

1.4 The Church as Community

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
کلیسا (church) [BASELINE, elevated to High in Acts]	High	Read as building/institution by default; actual Persian-language congregational life for Muslim-background believers is the underground house-church network.	Teach every Acts ecclesiology passage (2:42-47; 4:32-37) against the lived house-church reality, not an imagined building or state-recognized institution.
مشارکت (fellowship) [BASELINE]	Low-Medium	ش-ر-ک root resonance with shirk (idolatrous partnership); established term, context disambiguates.	No new action required beyond baseline caution.
مشایخ (elders)	Medium	Shares its root with the Islamic honorific “shaykh,” which in Iran carries clerical-jurist connotations.	Contextual gloss required at first occurrence (11:30) distinguishing the New Testament pastoral-oversight office from an Islamic clerical rank.
ناظر (overseer)	Medium	Paired with مشایخ at 20:17,28 for what the text treats as a single office; rendering with two visually/phonetically distinct Persian words risks implying two separate offices.	Explicit note at 20:28 that ناظر and مشایخ denote the same office from two angles (function/oversight vs. seniority/title), matching the Greek’s own interchangeable usage.
میراث (inheritance)	High	Draws on the same lexical field as Islamic inheritance law (fiqh al-mawarith, legal estate-partition); risk of a legalistic/partition reading.	Retain baseline’s adoption-doctrine caution: this is spiritual/eschatological inheritance (20:32; 26:18), explicitly not an estate-partition concept.
پاره کردن نان (breaking of bread)	Medium	Structurally similar to but distinct from Islamic communal iftar-type shared meals; risk of flattening into a generic hospitality custom.	Teach as remembrance-oriented and anticipatory of the Lord’s Supper, not yet a fixed liturgical rite but also not merely a social meal.
همه‌چیز را با هم شریک بودند (all things in common)	Medium	Risk of being read either as a universal economic mandate or, conversely, dismissed as merely descriptive with no ongoing relevance.	Teach as voluntary, situational, Jerusalem-specific generosity — a pattern of costly love, not a political-economic prescription.
شبان / گله (shepherd/flock)	Low-Medium	Low risk; resonant with Persian poetic pastoral imagery.	Standard care only.

1.5 Apostolic Authority and Miracles

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
رسول (apostle) [BASELINE]	High	Collides with Muhammad’s own title; Shia Imamate succession-claims add a further competing-authority layer.	Acts is where the office is exercised, not merely named — teach its content (eyewitness of the risen Christ, founding authority) concretely from the narrative, not abstractly.
نشانه‌ها و عجایب (signs and wonders)	High	نشانه‌ها must be kept clear of آیات, the standard word for Quranic verses — a genuine crowding risk since both terms independently mean “signs.”	Consistently use نشانه‌ها (never آیات) for miracle-events in Acts so readers do not unconsciously import a “scripture-verse” category into a historical-event category.
معجزه (miracle)	High	Draws on the same semantic field as Islamic i’jaz (the Quran’s own claimed miraculous nature/prophetic miracle-signs).	Teach explicitly as authenticating the specific apostolic message about the risen Christ — not an interchangeable marvel-category shared across religious traditions.
گذاردن دست‌ها (laying on of hands)	Medium	Neighboring folk-Sufi baraka-transfer through a pir’s touch, and mullah’s ritual gesture practices (dua-writing, amulet-blessing).	Contextualize as commissioning/blessing/impartation tied to the Spirit’s specific work, not a transferable charismatic substance.
روح پلید (unclean/evil spirit)	Critical	Deliberately chosen over جن (jinn) — see Section 3 below for the fencing rationale.	Teach as demonstrating Christ’s unique, superior authority over demonic power, not entry into a shared exorcism marketplace with rammal/do’a-nevisi folk practitioners.
روح غیب‌گویی (spirit of divination)	High	Directly confronts living Iranian fortune-telling (fal-giri) and rammal folk practice.	16:16-18 must be taught as a direct confrontation narrative, not a generic condemnation disconnected from present-day practice.
جدا کردن / وقف کردن (set apart)	High	Must echo Romans 1:1’s “separated for the gospel” for cross-curriculum consistency.	Verbatim-pattern check against the Romans rendering at every Acts 13:2 occurrence.
بر روح‌القدس و بر ما نیکو آمد (it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us)	Critical	Risk of being read through Sunni ijma (scholarly consensus) or Shia Imamate-authority categories as a purely human deliberative outcome.	Teach 15:28 as asserting genuine joint divine-and-apostolic authority — the Spirit is an active co-decider, not a rhetorical flourish on a human vote.
زنده شدن دوباره (resuscitation)	High	Persian’s single root (زنده شدن) for “coming back to life” does not automatically distinguish a temporary revival (Tabitha, Eutychus) from Christ’s unique, final, glorified قیامت.	Mandatory translator note at every occurrence (9:36-42; 20:9-12) distinguishing this from baseline قیامت.
سرچشمهٔ حیات (Author/Prince of life)	Critical	A deity-adjacent Christological title requiring the same rigor as لرد “Lord.”	Must not be softened to a merely honorific “great leader” (3:15).

1.6 Persecution and Bold Witness

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
دلیری / جسارت روحانی (boldness)	High	Risk of being read as reckless political defiance rather than Spirit-given confidence in proclamation.	Given real underground house-church safety risk, teach as Spirit-given confidence in gospel proclamation, explicitly not an endorsement of unwise public confrontation with authorities.
شاهد / شهادت دادن (witness/testify)	Critical	The single highest-density collision term in the Acts vocabulary set — see ranked list, Section 5, #1.	See dedicated fencing note in Section 3.1.
مجمع / سنهدرین (council/Sanhedrin)	Medium	Structural (not lexical) collision risk with Iran’s own clerical governing councils, given the similar dynamic of religious-legal authority opposing a minority faith movement.	Teach as the specific 1st-century Jewish institution; avoid drawing a direct present-day political parallel that could be read as commentary on Iran’s own governance.
شورش / آشوب (riot/uproar)	Low-Medium	Recurring narrative pattern; low independent doctrinal risk.	Standard care.
اطاعت ایمانی (obedience of faith) [BASELINE]	High	Submission/obedience is the defining category of the surrounding Islamic culture.	Maintain baseline discipline: obedience is fruit of faith (5:29,32; 6:7), never its ground.

1.7 Conversion of Paul

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
رؤیا / خواب (vision/dream)	Medium	Shares vocabulary with Islamic/Shia dream-vision piety (istikhara, visions of the Imams).	Content and authority must remain explicitly Christ-centered at every occurrence (9:10-12; 26:19), not a generic spiritual-guidance category interchangeable with folk dream-interpretation practice.
پسر انسان (Son of Man)	Critical	Danielic divine-authority title (Dan 7:13-14) with no ready Islamic equivalent category — a total-gap risk, not a false-friend risk.	Requires full explanatory teaching at 7:56 rather than assumed background; do not let it default-read as merely “a human being.”
عادل (لقب) (the Righteous One, title)	Critical	Deliberate reuse of the عدالت root as a Christological title; must never drift toward پارسایی.	Cross-check every occurrence (3:14; 7:52; 22:14) against the baseline’s explicit rejection of پارسایی for “righteousness.”
برگزیدگی خدا (election) [BASELINE]	High	Shia Imamate doctrine of specific divine appointment can bridge the concept but imports lineage-based, ongoing-office content.	Acts 9:15’s “chosen instrument” language must be taught as election to a specific mission, not an ongoing successive office.
نسل داوود (seed of David) [BASELINE]	High	Requires OT covenant background not automatically possessed by the audience.	Supply Davidic-covenant background explicitly at 2:30; 13:23, not merely by cross-reference.
قیامت (resurrection) [BASELINE]	Critical	Acts 2:23-24 is the single most direct textual collision in the whole book with Quran 4:157’s crucifixion-denial.	Every resurrection clause in Acts 2, 4, 17, 23-26 must affirm the historical crucifixion as its precondition, not merely assert the resurrection in isolation.

1.8 Justification apart from the Law

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
عدالت / عادل شمرده شدن / عدالت محسوب‌شده [BASELINE]	Critical	Same forensic-vs-performance risk as Romans; Acts 13:39 is a direct verb-family parallel requiring verbatim-consistent handling.	Enforce identical Romans-baseline renderings; do not create Acts-specific variants.
ناموس (law) [BASELINE, elevated to Critical in Acts]	Critical	Acts 15:1-29 (Jerusalem Council) directly stages the law-versus-grace debate; Iran’s own shari’a-based legal-religious system sharpens the sensitivity beyond Romans’ already-elevated risk.	Never substitute شریعت; frame the council’s debate as an internal apostolic-era question about requirements for full covenant membership, not a critique of any present-day legal system.
ختنه (circumcision)	High	Frames the live pastoral question “is an external identity-marker/rite required for salvation/full membership?” — closely parallel to real questions Muslim-background believers face about retaining visible Islamic identity markers.	Teach that the text opposes circumcision-as-salvation-requirement, not the physical practice itself (which is near-universal and religiously neutral in the Iranian setting).
یوغ (yoke)	Medium	Needs to retain the grace-versus-law contrast without becoming a general “burden of religion” cliché.	Anchor tightly to 15:10’s specific referent: the burden of full law-observance as a salvation-requirement.
خودداری (self-control)	High	Deliberately avoids پرهیزگاری, which would reintroduce the Zoroastrian-inflected virtue-piety register explicitly rejected for baseline “righteousness.”	Maintain this avoidance consistently at every occurrence (24:25); do not let a later translator “improve” the wording back toward پرهیزگاری.
نذر (vow)	Critical	Currently and popularly practiced Shia devotional category (votive vows to Imams/Imamzadeh shrines).	Teach Paul’s vow-keeping (18:18; 21:23-26) as a culturally-Jewish, transitional-era practice — neither an endorsement of shrine-vow piety nor a disparagement of the OT Nazirite institution itself.

1.9 The Great Commission Fulfilled

Available term	Risk	Weakness	Recommended strategy
ماموریت (mission) [BASELINE]	Medium	رسالت deliberately avoided (Muhammad’s own prophetic-commission vocabulary); ماموریت is neutral but can feel bureaucratic/administrative if overused.	Keep paired with concrete sending-and-proclaiming verbs so it does not flatten into an abstract program.
ملکوت خدا (kingdom of God) [BASELINE]	Medium	Acts 1:3,6 directly narrates and corrects a political-restoration misreading; Iran’s own explicitly religious-political governance (Velayat-e Faqih) sharpens the collision.	Use 1:6-8 itself as the teaching template for the present-spiritual-reign vs. political-state distinction throughout Acts.
استیناف به قیصر (appeal to Caesar)	Low	Minimal doctrinal risk; legal-procedural term.	Standard care; supports the Rome-ward narrative arc.
بدون مانع / آزادانه (unhindered)	High	The book’s closing word carries acute pastoral tension: proclamation is anything but unhindered for many present-day Iranian house-church readers.	Teach eschatologically/missiologically (the word of God cannot ultimately be bound) while remaining pastorally honest that present restriction is real and not a sign of gospel failure.

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2. Missing Vocabulary — True Gaps (no existing Persian term at all)

These are not false-friend collisions but genuine absences requiring transliteration, compounding, or explanatory paraphrase rather than a single existing word:

1. Pentecost / Shavuot background — no Persian word exists for the OT feast; پنطیکاست is a transliteration requiring mandatory background teaching, not a translation problem per se.
2. Xenoglossy as a distinct category from ecstatic utterance — Persian زبان covers both; the distinction must be carried by context and translator commentary, not by vocabulary alone.
3. “The Way” as the movement’s self-designation — راه is a common noun; Persian has no built-in capitalization or definite-article mechanism to signal “this is a proper name,” unlike English’s capital W. Typographic or explanatory marking is required at every occurrence (9:2; 19:9,23; 22:4; 24:14,22).
4. Sanhedrin as a specific historical institution — no native Persian equivalent institution exists; مجمع is a generic “council/assembly” and سنهدرین a transliteration; both require explanatory framing distinct from Iran’s own clerical governing bodies.
5. Distinguishing “elder” from “overseer” as one office, two functional titles — Persian must import two distinct words (مشایخ / ناظر) for what Greek treats as overlapping titles for a single office; the gap is structural, not lexical.
6. Resuscitation vs. resurrection — Persian lacks a dedicated word for “temporary return to mortal life” distinct from قیامت; زنده شدن دوباره is a workaround construction, not an established term, and needs a standing translator note.
7. God-fearer as a semi-technical status category — خداترس is everyday devotional vocabulary repurposed as a technical term; there is no established Persian Christian precedent for this specific semi-convert status, so it must be defined afresh at first use.

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3. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing

Several Persian roots sit at the intersection of three or more competing frameworks (biblical, Sunni-Islamic, Twelver-Shia-specific, and/or Zoroastrian). These require explicit “fencing” — deliberate lexical choices and mandatory translator notes that prevent the term from sliding into a neighboring frame.

3.1 The ش-ه-د root: شاهد / شهادت (witness) — highest-priority fence in this curriculum

Three distinct frameworks share this single Arabic-derived root in Persian:

• Biblical sense (Acts): an eyewitness testifying to the historical facts of Christ’s death, resurrection, and lordship (1:8,22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39,41; 13:31; 22:15,20; 23:11; 26:16).
• Islamic shahada: the creedal confession of faith (“there is no god but God…”), a recited formula generating religious standing by its utterance.
• Shia shahid/martyrdom: the devotionally central category of the martyr, epitomized by Hussein at Karbala, whose suffering-witness is popularly believed to carry intercessory benefit for those who honor it.

Fence: Every occurrence of شاهد/شهادت دادن in Acts materials must be explicitly glossed as truthful eyewitness testimony to a verifiable historical event — never a recited confession-formula and never an act that itself generates merit or intercessory benefit for the speaker or others. This is the single most consequential fencing decision in the entire Acts glossary, because Acts is structurally organized around the apostles as witnesses (1:8, 1:22) and because Stephen’s death (ch. 7) sits directly adjacent to the martyrdom category it must be distinguished from.

3.2 The ت-و-ب root: توبه (repentance)

Shared with Quranic repentance-and-mercy vocabulary, and further loaded in Shia piety with recurring penitential turning through Muharram/Karbala mourning ritual. Fence: always syntactically bind to faith-in-Christ’s-name in the same clause; never allow توبه to stand as a self-sufficient devotional act.

3.3 The روح root family

روح (spirit) is shared across: روح‌القدس (Holy Spirit, divine Person), generic “spirit/soul,” روح پلید (unclean/evil spirit, deliberately fenced from جن), and — at a further remove — Zoroastrianism’s own intermediary-spirit cosmology (Amesha Spentas) that informs the baseline’s caution on تجسد (incarnation). Fence: روح‌القدس must never be abbreviated to bare روح in translated material; the definite compound is the load-bearing safeguard against drift toward a generic-spirit reading.

3.4 نجس vs. ناپاک (ritual impurity)

Twelver Shia fiqh maintains an elaborate, currently-taught najasat (نجس) purity system. The Acts glossary deliberately selected the softer ناپاک over the fiqh-technical نجس for κοινός (unclean/common, 10:14-15,28; 11:8-9) specifically to avoid triggering the full apparatus of that legal-purity system by name, while still permitting the text’s confrontation with purity-code thinking to register. Fence: teach Peter’s vision as overturning purity-code categories as a principle, without inviting a technical fiqh debate the term نجس would provoke.

3.5 شیخ-root: مشایخ (elders)

Shares its root with the Islamic honorific “shaykh” (a clerical-jurist title in Iran’s religious establishment). Fence: contextual gloss required at first occurrence distinguishing a New Testament congregational pastoral office from an Islamic clerical rank with legal/juridical authority.

3.6 نذر (vow) and شفاعت (intercession)

Both terms sit inside the single most actively-practiced devotional complex in contemporary Iranian Shia piety: votive vows and intercession-seeking at Imam/Imamzadeh shrines. Fence: Acts’ vow references (18:18; 21:23-26) must be framed as culturally-Jewish practice specific to that transitional era; Acts’ intercession references (7:59-60; 12:5,12) must model, but never replace, Christ’s own unique and complete intercession (cf. baseline Romans 8:26-27,34 framing) — this is a Critical-risk item precisely because Stephen’s prayer for his killers sits so close to the shahid/martyrdom-intercession pattern.

3.7 جن vs. روح پلید (evil/unclean spirits)

جن (jinn) is the default Iranian folk vocabulary for possessing spirits, embedded in a living exorcism marketplace (rammal, do’a-nevisi practitioners). The glossary deliberately selected روح پلید instead. Fence: never substitute جن in Acts exorcism narratives (8:7; 16:16-18; 19:12-16); the distinct lexical choice is itself the fence, but translators must not “correct” it back toward the more familiar folk term.

3.8 آیات vs. نشانه‌ها (signs)

آیات is the standard word for the verses of the Quran. نشانه‌ها و عجایب was deliberately chosen for “signs and wonders” to avoid importing a scripture-verse category into a historical-event category. Fence: never use آیات for miracle-signs anywhere in Acts material.

3.9 اسرائیل and مسیحی — political/legal crowding rather than lexical crowding

Both terms are lexically unambiguous but are crowded by external, non-textual frameworks: state anti-Israel propaganda, and the ethnic-minority-vs-convert legal asymmetry for “Christian” identity respectively. Fence: pastoral framing notes required at every Acts 9-15 Israel reference and at 11:26/26:28’s “Christian” reference; this is a political/social fence, not a semantic-substitution fence.

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4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Category	Strategy	Examples	Rationale
Established proper names	Transliterate, following existing Persian Bible tradition (Tarjome Ghadeem / Mojdeh)	عیسی (Isa), مسیح (Masih), پولس (Pulos), داوود (Davud)	No naming controversy in Persian (unlike Arabic); established forms carry no additional negotiation.
Proper nouns / titles with no Persian equivalent institution	Transliterate + mandatory gloss	پنطیکاست (Pentecost), سنهدرین (Sanhedrin, alongside descriptive مجمع)	The gap is informational, not lexical; a coined Persian word would obscure rather than clarify the specific historical referent.
Aramaic/liturgical intimacy terms	Transliterate, preserved untranslated (baseline precedent)	ابا (Abba)	Cross-curriculum consistency with Romans 8:15; retains an intimacy a translated “Father” alone would not fully carry.
Doctrinally load-bearing forensic/legal concepts	Paraphrase via established compound, never single-word	عادل شمرده شدن (justification), عدالت محسوب‌شده (imputed righteousness)	A single Persian word inevitably tips toward either “made righteous” (process) or “earned” (merit); the compound is required to hold the forensic, credited sense.
Manuscript-sensitive Christological statements	Paraphrase with mandatory translator note, never abbreviated	کلیسا را با خون خود خرید (church purchased with [God’s/the Lord’s] own blood)	The Greek’s own textual variant (Θεοῦ/Κυρίου) and the statement’s deity-of-Christ weight both require the fuller phrase and an accompanying note; abbreviation risks silently resolving a live text-critical question.
Everyday Persian words repurposed as technical terms	Retain the everyday word, add semi-technical gloss at first use	خداترس (God-fearer), دعا (prayer), روزه (fasting, with contrast to obligatory Ramadan sense)	These words are genuine linguistic assets (unforced, native vocabulary) but need their scope narrowed/clarified for the biblical technical sense without inventing an artificial neologism.
Concepts sharing a root with a rejected/dangerous neighbor	Choose the lexical variant one step removed from the collision, and fence it (see Section 3)	روح پلید (not جن); ناپاک (not نجس); نشانه‌ها (not آیات)	Where two live Persian options exist for the same referent, prefer the one with less gravitational pull toward the competing framework, even if slightly less colloquially common.
No natural Persian equivalent, but concept is genuinely explainable	Coin a transparent descriptive compound rather than a single neologism	زنده شدن دوباره (resuscitation), بر روح‌القدس و بر ما نیکو آمد (it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us)	Transparent compounds are more teachable and more resistant to drift than an invented single word with no existing usage history.

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5. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in Acts

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision depth × likelihood of reviewer/translator drift), specific to this book (as distinct from the Romans baseline’s own ranked risks):

1. شاهد / شهادت دادن (witness/testify) — Critical. Triple collision (eyewitness testimony vs. Islamic shahada vs. Shia shahid/Karbala martyrdom-intercession); structurally central to Acts’ own self-description of its subject (1:8, 1:22) and unavoidable at Stephen’s death (ch. 7). Highest risk of silent doctrinal drift in the entire curriculum.

2. زبانه‌های آتش (tongues of fire) + روح‌القدس, within Acts 2:1-11 — Critical, cluster risk. The core passage’s opening scene stacks the fire/Zoroastrian-resonance risk directly on top of the Spirit/Jibril-tafsir risk and the tongues/xenoglossy-precision risk in a single eleven-verse span; any one mistranslation compounds the others.

3. توبه (repentance), especially at 2:38 — Critical. The verse that functions as this doctrine’s thesis statement for the whole book sits exactly on the Quranic root; the syntactic binding to faith-in-Christ’s-name is not optional stylistic preference but the entire doctrinal safeguard.

4. قیامت (resurrection) at Acts 2:23-24 — Critical. The single most direct point of textual contact with Quran 4:157’s crucifixion-denial in the whole book; Acts 2 asserts the crucifixion as historical precondition in the same breath the core passage proclaims resurrection — a compressed doctrinal target.

5. نذر / شفاعت crowding around Acts 7:59-60, 12:5,12, 18:18, 21:23-26 — Critical. Two Critical-risk terms sharing the same devotional complex (Karbala votive-vow and intercession practice); risk of readers assimilating apostolic-era prayer and vow-keeping into an active, currently-practiced shrine-devotion framework rather than reading them as historically situated.

6. ختنه (circumcision) and یوغ (yoke) at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) — High. The chapter stages the law-versus-grace argument as a live pastoral debate about external identity-markers, which maps with unusual precision onto real questions Muslim-background believers ask about retaining visible Islamic markers after conversion; mishandling risks either (a) implying circumcision/markers are now forbidden, or (b) implying they remain salvation-necessary.

7. کلیسا (church) throughout, elevated risk relative to Romans — High. Every ecclesiology passage (2:42-47; 4:32-37) risks defaulting to an institutional/building reading disconnected from the underground house-church reality that is the actual lived referent for the primary audience.

8. روح پلید vs. جن at Acts 8:7; 16:16-18; 19:12-16 — Critical. A single lexical substitution away from entering a live, currently-practiced Iranian folk exorcism marketplace (rammal, do’a-nevisi); translator fatigue or “naturalization” pressure is the specific drift risk to guard against in Phase 2.

9. اسرائیل across Acts 1-15 — High. Political-propaganda crowding rather than lexical ambiguity; risk is pastoral misapplication (readers importing state-political framing) rather than mistranslation per se, but the risk is amplified by Acts 1:6 raising the political-restoration question explicitly in the text itself.

10. زنده شدن دوباره vs. قیامت (Tabitha/Eutychus vs. Christ’s resurrection) — High. A subtler risk: without the mandatory translator note, readers could conclude Christ’s resurrection is categorically the same kind of event as these temporary revivals, quietly flattening the uniqueness claim central to Acts 2’s kerygma.

11. بدون مانع / آزادانه (unhindered) at 28:31 — High. Acute pastoral (not doctrinal-content) risk: the book’s climactic closing word could generate false expectation of imminent earthly freedom for readers whose present house-church reality is, in fact, hindered; mishandling risks either false triumphalism or discouragement.

12. بر روح‌القدس و بر ما نیکو آمد (Acts 15:28) — Critical. Risk of being read through Sunni ijma or Shia Imamate-authority categories as a merely human consensus-outcome, quietly removing the Spirit’s asserted personal, active role in the decision.

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This analysis extends, and does not contradict, the Romans translation_memory.json / bible_term_registry.json baseline. All Section-A (baseline-reuse) terms in 08_core_glossary.md retain their Romans-fixed renderings without modification; all gap analysis here concerns either residual risk in baseline terms as they recur in new Acts contexts, or the 50 new terms first introduced for this curriculum. See 08_core_glossary.md for the full term inventory and assets/bible_term_registry.json for the registry entries referenced throughout.