Executive Summary: Acts 1–28 Polish Language Package

Why it matters

Acts is the New Testament’s most theologically dense narrative for a Polish audience: it puts the Holy Spirit, baptism, repentance, church leadership, and Jew/Gentile inclusion on stage as lived events, not propositions — and nearly every one of those events collides with a specific, deeply embedded feature of Polish Catholic sacramental practice, 20th-century political memory, or contemporary Charismatic devotional culture. Getting the core passage (Acts 2:1–41) right is the single highest-leverage translation task in this curriculum: it contains the Pentecost outpouring, the “repent and be baptized” call, the installation of Christ as Lord and Messiah, and the crucifixion-responsibility statement — four of the five highest-ranked ambiguities in the entire book, all in one 41-verse unit.

Key findings

• 112 glossary terms total (47 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 65 newly introduced by Acts); 53 of them (47%) are Critical or High risk, requiring mandatory human theologian review on every occurrence.
• 45 doctrines mapped across the nine curriculum Bible Doctrines; 32 (71%) require human theologian review (14 Critical + 18 High), 10 require native-speaker review, and only 3 are automated-only.
• Polish is lexically ready — no term requires invention — but is doctrinally crowded: single Polish words like “chrzest,” “pokuta,” “biskup,” “łamanie chleba,” and “Sługa Boży” each already carry a specific, well-established Catholic sacramental or canon-law meaning that does not match what Acts narrates at that point in the text.
• The core passage alone anchors nine of the fourteen Critical-risk doctrines in the entire book (Spirit-baptism, repentance, believer’s baptism, forgiveness of sins, voluntary communal generosity groundwork, Christ’s installation as Lord/Messiah, crucifixion responsibility, resurrection of Christ, messianic fulfillment).
• Full-book coverage confirms every chapter was reviewed; seven chapters (12, 14, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26) introduce no new load-bearing vocabulary and are explicitly logged as reviewed rather than silently skipped.

Risks

• Sacramental collapse risk (highest frequency): “chrzest,” “odpuszczenie grzechów,” “bierzmowanie/napełnienie Duchem Świętym,” “łamanie chleba,” and “diakon/biskup” each sit directly on top of an existing, well-known Polish Catholic sacramental or hierarchical category. Left unflagged, translators will default to the sacramental reading by habit, not by decision.
• Charismatic-doctrine entanglement: “chrzest w Duchu Świętym” and “mówienie językami” are live, contested categories inside Poland’s own Catholic Charismatic Renewal (“Odnowa w Duchu Świętym”). This curriculum must describe Acts’ claims without silently taking either side of an internal Catholic debate.
• Historical-sensitivity risk: Acts 2:23’s “lawless men” and the surrounding crucifixion-responsibility passages (2:36; 3:13-17; 4:27-28) require explicit anti-collective-blame framing given Poland’s own reckoning with antisemitic violence — this is a Critical-tier, non-negotiable safeguard, not a stylistic preference.
• Political-memory interference: “wszystko wspólne” (all things in common, 2:44-45; 4:32-35) risks being read through Poland’s negative communist-era (PRL) collectivization memory in either direction — reflexive suspicion or reflexive over-idealization — unless explicitly fenced as voluntary, Spirit-motivated generosity.
• Anachronism risk: Acts 20’s interchangeable “elder/overseer” language is vulnerable to being explained through Poland’s fully developed three-tier clerical hierarchy, reinforced nationally by the Konferencja Episkopatu Polski.

Opportunities

• Poland’s own strong historical experience of costly, public Christian witness (Nazi occupation, communist suppression, Maksymilian Kolbe, Jerzy Popiełuszko) is a genuine pastoral asset for teaching Acts’ persecution and bold-witness doctrine, provided the Christ-specific claim (“persecuting the church is persecuting Christ,” 9:4-5) remains the center, not the national narrative alone.
• Poland’s own missionary-sending tradition, reinforced by John Paul II’s globally oriented papacy, is a strong cultural bridge for teaching the Great Commission Fulfilled doctrine.
• The translation task is disciplined doctrinal fencing, not vocabulary invention: every core term already has a settled, non-invented Polish rendering (per 05_translation_landscape.md), so Phase 2 effort concentrates on mandatory teaching notes and review routing rather than lexical research.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json (v2) and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (v2.0) together for every Phase 2 Acts translation session — the Acts extension does not replace but supersedes-by-addition the Romans baseline.
2. Route all 53 Critical/High-risk terms and 32 Critical/High-risk doctrines to mandatory human theologian review before Phase 2 sign-off; do not permit automated-only approval for any occurrence on the forbidden-substitution or escalation lists.
3. Prioritize theologian review capacity on the core passage (Acts 2:1-41) first, given its unusually high concentration of Critical-tier doctrine, before proceeding to the rest of the book.
4. Attach the mandatory HOMONYM NOTE (new in this Language Package) to every occurrence of “Sługa Boży,” “biskup,” “diakon,” “bierzmowanie,” and “łamanie chleba” during Phase 2 QA, given their live collision with contemporary Polish Catholic institutional vocabulary.
5. Carry forward all Romans-baseline forbidden substitutions unchanged into Acts; do not re-litigate settled Romans decisions (e.g., “wiara,” “powołanie,” “wstawiennictwo”) during Acts-specific review.

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This summary synthesizes analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, and analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md. Any figure cited here must match its source document; discrepancies should be resolved in favor of the underlying registry and this summary corrected.