Executive Summary — Matthew (English → Polish)

Why it matters: Matthew is the highest denominational-collision curriculum processed for Polish to date. It carries every risk already flagged in the Romans baseline (Polak-katolik identity fusion, powołanie/priesthood narrowing, Marian intercession, sacramental-automaticity around salvation) and adds the pipeline’s first mandatory-review clusters touching Petrine primacy, the Eucharist, sacramental confession, and Catholic marriage doctrine — all matters of first-order national as well as theological weight in Poland, intensified by the cultural legacy of Pope John Paul II.

Key findings:

• Full 28-chapter coverage completed; the core passage (Matthew 5:1-12, the Beatitudes) is confirmed as the theological anchor, not the scope boundary.
• 116 total enforced terms in the Matthew translation memory: 35 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline, 81 newly proposed for this book.
• Doctrine-level risk tally (45 doctrines total): 23 Critical, 12 High, 6 Medium, 4 Low — 35 doctrines (78%) require mandatory human theologian review, versus 20 of 40 (50%) in the Romans baseline.
• Term-level risk tally for new Matthew-specific terms alone: 17 Critical, 12 High, 14 Medium, 3 Low (46 new terms).
• Twelve collision points are flagged for mandatory theologian review at every single occurrence, the highest concentration in the pipeline so far, headlined by Matthew 16:18’s untranslatable Πέτρος/πέτρα wordplay underlying Catholic Petrine-primacy doctrine.

Risks:

• Hard linguistic gap, not just doctrinal sensitivity: the Peter/rock pun (16:18) cannot be reproduced in Polish orthography at all; only a translator’s note can supply what the Greek text supplies by ear.
• Single-word overload: “sprawiedliwość” must carry both Matthew’s ethical/kingdom-conduct sense and Romans’ forensic/imputed sense with no lexical fork available — the pipeline’s most structurally significant vocabulary gap to date.
• Idiom secularization: “nosić swój krzyż” (cross-bearing) functions as a fully secular Polish idiom for “endure any hardship,” with zero residual connection to Christ in ordinary usage — the single most likely default mistranslation-by-omission in the glossary.
• Directional-opposite risk: “Syn Człowieczy” (Son of Man) reads in plain Polish as simply “a human being,” the inverse of its intended Daniel 7 exaltation force.
• Purgatorial softening pressure: Poland’s czyściec framework creates asymmetric pressure to soften “kara wieczna” (eternal punishment) relative to “życie wieczne” (eternal life) at Matthew 25:46, against the text’s own symmetrical grammar.
• Sacramental-automaticity risk compounds at the Great Commission: near-universal Polish infant baptism raises the stakes on correctly sequencing “czynić uczniami” before “chrzcić” at Matthew 28:19.

Opportunities:

• Poland’s strong missionary-sending self-identity (reinforced by John Paul II’s global papacy) is a genuine cultural asset for teaching Matthew’s mission-to-all-nations doctrine.
• Divine Mercy devotion (Św. Faustyna) gives the mercy beatitude (5:7) unusually strong positive resonance, provided the note balancing receiving and actively showing mercy is retained.
• Existing liturgical familiarity with “Hosanna” (Sanctus) and the Transfiguration feast (Przemienienie Pańskie) gives two otherwise-difficult passages an accessible cultural entry point.
• The curriculum’s explicit non-adjudicating approach to the Petrine-primacy, Eucharist, and divorce-exception collision points models a defensible, ecumenically respectful translation posture the whole pipeline can reuse for future high-collision books.

Recommended actions:

1. Route all 35 Critical/High doctrines and all Critical/High terms to mandatory human theologian review before Phase 2 release; do not permit automated or native-speaker-only sign-off on any of the twelve flagged collision clusters.
2. Build standing teaching-note templates now (not per-segment, ad hoc) for the five highest-frequency mandatory notes: Petros/petra wordplay, Son of Man/Daniel 7, ethical-vs-forensic sprawiedliwość, cross-bearing de-idiomatization, and Great Commission disciple-making/baptism sequencing.
3. Lock the Matthew 5:1-12 (Beatitudes), Matthew 6:9-13 (Lord’s Prayer), Matthew 16:18-19/18:18 (rock/keys/binding-loosing), and Matthew 28:18-20 (Great Commission) renderings as fixed reference text before any parallel Phase 2 worker begins segment translation, given their curriculum-wide consistency requirements.
4. Confirm with stakeholders, before translation begins, the intended posture on the two ambiguity-flagged numeric/interpretive cruxes (Matthew 11:12’s βιάζεται; Matthew 18:22’s 77-vs-490) to avoid inconsistent renderings emerging independently across parallel workers.
5. Carry forward all Romans-baseline forbidden substitutions unchanged into Phase 2 QA scripts, and add the twelve new Matthew-specific forbidden substitutions to the same automated validation pass before human review begins.