Executive Summary — Luke Language Package (Persian)

Why it matters

Luke is the Gospel of Jesus as Savior of everyone — Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, righteous and sinner — anchored in his own inaugural claim at Nazareth (4:16-21) to be the Spirit-anointed fulfillment of Isaiah 61. For a Persian-speaking, overwhelmingly Muslim-background and Twelver Shia-shaped audience, that claim collides immediately with two live, specific competing frameworks: the popularly awaited Mahdi as the future deliverer (منجی), and the deeply devotional Karbala/Ashura martyrdom-intercession pattern around Imam Hussein’s blood. This package extends the baseline Romans Persian Language Package, without contradicting it, to give Phase 2 translators an enforced, doctrine-aware vocabulary for the entire book, not just the core passage.

Key findings

• 85 total enforced terms: 41 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 44 newly introduced by Luke’s distinctive narrative content (Savior, Son of Man, Samaritan, Repentance, Body and Blood, Ascension, etc.).
• 26 total doctrines tracked in the risk registry, matching the eight curriculum doctrine themes plus their narrative sub-doctrines (deity/sonship/resurrection/ascension of Christ, etc.).
• Two new documented, curriculum-critical collisions not present in the Romans baseline: (1) the Quran’s unrelated “al-Sāmirī” golden-calf figure (20:85-97) sharing the identical Persian transliteration سامری with Luke’s Good Samaritan and grateful leper narratives; (2) منجی, the standard Persian Shia term for the awaited Mahdi, which must be explicitly rejected as a rendering for “Savior.”
• Luke intensifies three baseline Critical risks rather than introducing them fresh: the Holy Spirit/Jibril conflation (sharpened by angel-Spirit narrative proximity in ch. 1-2), the Karbala/Hussein intercession parallel (sharpened by the literal body/blood institution text of 22:19-20), and the crucifixion-resurrection denial (sharpened by Luke’s uniquely detailed passion narrative and explicit “flesh and bones” apologetic at 24:39).

Risks

• 51 terms (23 Critical + 28 High) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence per the Phase 2 escalation rules.
• 23 doctrines (10 Critical + 13 High) require mandatory human theologian review; only 2 Medium-risk and 1 Low-risk doctrine fall to lighter-touch review.
• The single highest-severity risk is the Ascension (24:50-53): mishandled, it can be silently absorbed into the Quran 4:158 “raised instead of killed” substitution narrative, retroactively erasing both the crucifixion and resurrection from the audience’s theological memory in one verse.
• The Lord’s Supper (22:14-20) compounds two already-Critical baseline risks (salvation, intercession) into a single concrete liturgical text set directly against the annual Muharram/Ashura ritual calendar — the most culturally loaded single passage in the book.
• Good News to the Poor (4:18 and throughout) risks being spiritualized away from Jesus’ concrete socioeconomic concern into the pre-existing, prestigious Sufi faqir/darvish voluntary-poverty ideal.

Opportunities

• Persian’s native, pre-Islamic vocabulary assets (خدا, دیو-avoidance-informed روح پلید, native دعا for prayer) continue to serve this curriculum as they did the Romans baseline, giving translators genuine bridge terms rather than only collision terms to manage.
• The Quran’s own affirmation of the virgin birth (19:20) and shared mercy vocabulary (رحمت / al-Rahim) provide unusually strong, documented starting points for the Incarnation and Compassion doctrines respectively — genuine agreement to build from rather than only friction to correct.
• Persian hospitality culture’s positive value on table-fellowship (نان و نمک) gives the Compassion and Table Fellowship doctrine an unusually resonant cultural entry point, provided the translation preserves the scandal Luke intends alongside the warmth.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json (Luke) and assets/bible_term_registry.json (Luke) alongside the Romans baseline for every Phase 2 batch; never process Luke segments against the Romans files alone.
2. Enforce the mandatory سامری footnote and the منجی/نجات‌دهنده forbidden substitution without exception during automated validation, not only during human review.
3. Route all Luke 22-24 material (Last Supper, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension) and the core passage (4:16-21) for priority theologian sampling given their Critical-tier density.
4. Keep 12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Luke) and the baseline Romans requirements document loaded together in every Phase 2 system prompt; treat any conflict as an error to escalate, not an implicit override.