Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 (English → Russian)

Why it matters

Acts is the narrative hinge between the Gospels and the epistles, and its core passage — Pentecost, Acts 2:1–41 — is the single most doctrinally loaded chapter this pipeline has processed for Russian: it compresses the Holy Spirit’s inauguration of the church, the call to repentance and baptism, the first exclusive salvation-confession, and the first description of church community into 41 verses. Russian carries a thousand-year, doctrinally rich Christian vocabulary (unlike non-Christian-heritage destination languages this pipeline also serves), so the translation challenge is not vocabulary absence but vocabulary capture — Пятидесятница, покаяние, крещение, епископ, and секта are all live, contested, or legally loaded words in contemporary Russian religious and civic life before this curriculum ever uses them. Getting Acts 2 wrong risks either flattening the text into Orthodox liturgical familiarity, silently taking a side in intra-Protestant (Pentecostal/Charismatic) identity politics, or triggering unintended parallels to Russia’s own legal treatment of religious minorities.

Key findings

• 98 tracked terms in this curriculum’s translation_memory.json (38 inherited from the Romans baseline, reconciled to Acts-specific risk tiers; 60 newly introduced by Acts’ own narrative). 20 Critical + 47 High = 67 terms (68%) require mandatory human theologian review before approval under the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
• 37 doctrines mapped in doctrine_risk_registry.json: 12 Critical + 17 High = 29 doctrines (78%) require human theologian review; 5 require native speaker review; only 3 are automated-only.
• Three risk clusters are new to Acts beyond the Romans baseline’s East-West justification/theosis and post-Soviet secularization axes: (1) live post-Soviet folk-occult culture that Acts itself narratively confronts (Simon Magus, Elymas, the spirit of divination, sons of Sceva); (2) contested Russian church-governance vocabulary (elder/overseer/deacon vs. the Orthodox three-tier ordained hierarchy); (3) the legally loaded contemporary category “секта,” which collides directly with Acts’ own narration of the earliest church being accused of being an illegitimate sect.
• The core passage alone (Acts 2:1–41) contains 6 of the curriculum’s 12 Critical-risk doctrines: Repentance, Baptism, Forgiveness of Sins, Assurance/Ongoing Salvation, and (via 2:36) Lordship/Messiahship, plus Divine Providence at High tier — an unusually dense concentration in a single chapter.

Risks

• покаяние (repentance) and крещение (baptism) at Acts 2:38 sit at the center of a live three-way Russian doctrinal dispute (Orthodox sacramental/infant baptism, Evangelical testimony-baptism, Restorationist baptismal-necessity readings); an unstated translation choice here silently resolves a controversy the source text itself does not fully adjudicate.
• Пятидесятница and (иные) языки simultaneously name a major Orthodox feast, a specific Russian Protestant denomination (“Пятидесятники”), and a live Charismatic identity marker — any unglossed use risks the curriculum appearing to take a denominational side.
• секта carries contemporary legal/anti-extremism weight in Russia; translating Tertullus’s ancient accusation with that weight risks an unintended, potentially dangerous parallel to present-day treatment of Russian Evangelical minorities.
• епископ/пресвитер/диакон: unqualified use of the Orthodox ordained-rank terms for Acts’ plural, ad hoc, functional early-church leadership would import a fully developed three-tier hierarchy onto the text — a live, named congregational-vs.-episcopal church-government controversy.
• Отрок and Начальник жизни (Christological titles, Acts 3:15, 5:31) are both actively misleading if left unglossed — one reads as “the boy Jesus,” the other as either a workplace boss or (if rendered Вождь) a Stalin/Lenin-era totalitarian epithet.
• Назорей/назорейство: the Synodal tradition’s overlapping forms for “Nazarene” and the unrelated Nazirite vow (Numbers 6) create a structural mistranslation risk present in the Russian Bible tradition itself, not introduced by this curriculum.
• “Имели всё общее” (Acts 2:44, 4:32) collides directly with Soviet collectivization rhetoric embedded in national historical memory.
• Antisemitism-sensitivity: the Sanhedrin-opposition narrative (chs. 4–7, 22–24) and “lawless hands” (2:23) require careful framing so historical opposition from specific leaders is never generalized to collective Jewish culpability, given the historical weight of antisemitism in Russian and Soviet history.

Opportunities

• Russian’s existing rich vocabulary for shared Nicene-heritage doctrine (resurrection, incarnation, Trinity, Sonship) means Acts’ Christological material can be translated with confidence and comparatively low risk — the difficulty is concentrated, not diffuse.
• Acts’ own narrative already models the corrective the curriculum needs: it explicitly distinguishes real apostolic signs from Simon Magus’s counterfeit sorcery (ch. 8) and from the sons of Sceva’s magical misuse of Jesus’ name (ch. 19) — giving the curriculum built-in textual warrant to address post-Soviet occult/psychic culture directly rather than by imported polemic.
• The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) offers a ready-made, textually-anchored occasion to teach the Romans baseline’s grace/law distinction concretely, through narrative rather than abstract argument, reinforcing consistency across both curricula.
• Acts 28:31’s triumphant close (“беспрепятственно”) offers a natural, pastorally rich teaching moment on God’s sovereignty over gospel proclamation — framed carefully, it need not be read as a claim about present Russian legal conditions, but as durable hope amid them.

Recommended actions

1. Route Acts 2:1–41 as a single non-parallelized review unit in Phase 2 Step 16, given its unusually dense concentration of Critical-risk terms and doctrines (see 12_ai_translation_requirements.md Performance Notes).
2. Require human theologian sign-off, before any Phase 2 batch is marked complete, on all 20 Critical-risk terms and all 12 Critical-risk doctrines — with explicit sign-off checkpoints at Acts 2:36, 2:38, 13:39, 15:11, 20:28, and every occurrence of Назорей/назорейство, Отрок, Начальник жизни, and секта.
3. Adopt блюститель (never unqualified епископ) and толк/учение (never unqualified секта) as fixed, non-negotiable renderings in Phase 2 tooling, per the forbidden-substitution list in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
4. Brief all human reviewers on the three Acts-specific risk clusters (post-Soviet occult culture, church-governance terminology, the “секта” legal collision) before Phase 2 review begins, since these are not covered by the Romans baseline reviewers’ prior training.
5. Cross-check every Phase 2 output against both this curriculum’s and the Romans baseline’s translation memory files before final approval, to guarantee the two curricula remain terminologically consistent for learners moving between them.

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See assets/translation_memory.json for the full 98-term enforcement database, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json for the full 37-doctrine risk matrix, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md for the chapter-by-chapter doctrine matrix, and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md for the complete Phase 2 instruction set.