Disputed Statements

The Yoruba Four-Day Week, Calendars

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The Kojoda reckoning, which numbers years from a remote epoch and opens the year in early June, is a twentieth century construction rather than an attested traditional era.

The four day week and the market cycle are attested in the earliest records of the language. The numbered Kojoda year is a modern cultural revival scheme and is presented as traditional in a good deal of popular writing.

Source African Religions and Philosophy, John S. Mbiti tier 1

Themistocles, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Manner of Death

Currently States Disputed

Ancient tradition offers competing accounts: ordinary illness, poison, and a dramatic suicide by drinking bull's blood rather than fight against the city that had exiled him, the version Plutarch preserves centuries later. No contemporary source settles which, if any, is accurate, and modern historians treat all three as unverifiable rather than choosing among them.

Source Histories, Herodotus tier 1

Themistocles, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Manner of Death Detail

Currently States Plutarch, writing centuries later, gives suicide by poison as the most dramatic version, drunk rather than fight against the city that had exiled him; other ancient accounts give ordinary illness. No contemporary source settles which, if any, is accurate.

Source Histories, Herodotus tier 1

Themistocles, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -524

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source Histories, Herodotus tier 1

Themistocles, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States -459

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source Histories, Herodotus tier 1

Theodore of Mopsuestia as the Authoritative Interpreter of Scripture, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States The Second Council of Constantinople condemned him in 553, in the affair of the Three Chapters, more than a century after his death, and the Church of the East neither received that council nor accepted the condemnation. A father honoured by one church and anathematised by another is one of the sharpest markers of the division.

Theodore of Mopsuestia, who died in 428, is known in the East Syriac tradition simply as Mpashqana, the Interpreter, without further qualification, and his historical, literal Antiochene method of reading scripture, contrasted with the Alexandrian school's allegorical reading, became the Church of the East's normative exegetical method; his christological vocabulary underlies that church's later two qnome formula. Christoph Baumer's history of the Church of the East records that the Second Council of Constantinople condemned Theodore in 553, in the affair known as the Three Chapters, more than a century after his death, on the ground that his christology anticipated the errors later associated with Nestorius. The Church of the East neither received that council nor accepted the condemnation, since it does not recognise the council's authority over its own tradition, and continues to honour as authoritative the same father another major church tradition anathematised. A father honoured by one church and formally condemned by another is treated by Baumer as one of the sharpest institutional markers of the ancient division, and the disagreement has not closed because it turns on which councils each church recognises as authoritative in the first place, a question prior to and not settled by any argument about Theodore's theology itself.

Source The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity, Christoph Baumer tier 1

Theories of the Origin and Function of Religion, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Structure

Currently States Documented functional accounts include the Durkheimian functionalist tradition, the Marxist ideology critique, Peter Berger's plausibility structures and sacred canopy, and intellectualist and cognitive science of religion accounts.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Theories of the Origin and Function of Religion, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Critics of the Marxist ideology critique point to the historical role of religiously motivated movements, including abolitionism and liberation theology, in challenging rather than stabilizing unjust social orders.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Theories of the Origin and Function of Religion, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) surveys documented functional accounts of religion's origin, including Durkheimian functionalism, the Marxist ideology critique, Peter Berger's plausibility structures and sacred canopy, and intellectualist and cognitive science of religion accounts, and records that they compete without a single settled theory. Critics of the Marxist critique, examining historical cases of religiously motivated social movements, point to abolitionism and liberation theology as counter-evidence that religion is not purely an instrument of the ruling order.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Theotokos, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Whether Theotokos or Christotokos correctly names Mary's role

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) records that the Church of the East, sometimes called Nestorian, rejects the title Theotokos and continues to hold a Christology closer to Nestorius's own fifth century position, against the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic and most Protestant churches, which affirm the title as settled by the ecumenical councils at Ephesus in 431 CE and Chalcedon in 451 CE. Whether Theotokos or the rejected alternative Christotokos correctly names Mary's role remains, on that division, an open dispute between the Church of the East and the churches that accepted the conciliar settlement rather than a question those councils actually closed for all of Christianity.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Therigatha, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The seventy-three poems of this Khuddaka Nikaya collection carry the names of individual bhikkhunis of the earliest Buddhist community, an attribution preserved in the Pali text itself. Caroline Rhys Davids, whose Psalms of the Early Buddhists: Psalms of the Sisters (Pali Text Society, 1909) was the first full English translation, records that scholars remain divided over whether these attributions are genuine historical authorship or a later canonical framing imposed on older verse, since both readings draw on the same transmitted text and neither has displaced the other.

Caroline Rhys Davids, whose Psalms of the Early Buddhists: Psalms of the Sisters (Pali Text Society, 1909) was the first full English translation of this Khuddaka Nikaya collection, examined the attributions the Pali text itself preserves, naming individual bhikkhunis of the earliest Buddhist community as the authors of its seventy-three poems. Because both the reading that takes these as genuine historical authorship and the reading that takes them as a later canonical framing imposed on older verse draw on that same transmitted text with no independent way to adjudicate between them, she records the question as genuinely divided among scholars rather than settled either way.

Source Psalms of the Early Buddhists: Psalms of the Sisters, Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids (translator) tier 1

Theta ⲑ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Third Crusade, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 2500.000000

Scoped to a single documented engagement, not an aggregate for the whole Third Crusade: Richard the Lionheart's execution of the Acre garrison's Muslim prisoners at Ayyadieh outside Acre on 20 August 1191, after the agreed deadline for Saladin to deliver the ransom, the True Cross relic and further prisoner exchanges passed. Secondary accounts of the massacre report figures from about 2,500 to 3,000 killed; this atlas records the lower reported bound as its floor.

Source A History of the Crusades, Volume 3: The Kingdom of Acre (Runciman), Steven Runciman tier 1

Third Crusade, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 3000.000000

The same Ayyadieh execution of Acre garrison prisoners, 20 August 1191. The higher reported bound, about 3,000 killed, appears alongside the lower 2,500 figure across the secondary literature on the siege; this atlas records the spread rather than a single smoothed number because primary chronicle counts for a mass execution of this kind were never tallied with the precision a modern casualty count would require.

Source A History of the Crusades, Volume 3: The Kingdom of Acre (Runciman), Steven Runciman tier 1

Third Crusade, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States The recorded figure is scoped to a single documented atrocity, Richard the Lionheart's execution of the Acre garrison at Ayyadieh on 20 August 1191, not an aggregate for the whole Third Crusade, whose wider campaign losses (Hattin, the siege of Acre itself, Arsuf) have no reconciled total in the scholarship consulted. Steven Runciman's account treats the Ayyadieh killings as a calculated reprisal for Saladin's missed ransom deadline rather than religious massacre for its own sake, a political reading of an episode often remembered in purely confessional terms.

Source A History of the Crusades, Volume 3: The Kingdom of Acre (Runciman), Steven Runciman tier 1

Third Eye, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The Sat-Cakra-Nirupana is the sixth chapter of his Sri-tattva-cintamani

According To Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Third Eye, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Its date is given as 1526 in some reckonings and 1577 in others

According To Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Third Eye, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Purnananda, a sixteenth-century Bengali tantric author

According To Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Third Eye, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1919

According To The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body (Ibis Press, 2016) dates the London publisher Luzac and Co.'s first printing of Arthur Avalon's (John Woodroffe's) The Serpent Power, the work that fixed the seven-chakra scheme for Western readers, to 1919, based on the publisher's own catalogue record; some other library catalogues, and the Chakra 1 article elsewhere in this collection, instead give 1918. Leland does not adjudicate the one-year gap, which most likely reflects the ordinary difference between a book's printing date and its public release date, a common source of catalogue disagreement for this period. The atlas records 1919 as the publisher-attributed year and flags the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Third Eye, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1919

According To The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body (Ibis Press, 2016) dates the London publisher Luzac and Co.'s first printing of Arthur Avalon's (John Woodroffe's) The Serpent Power, the work that fixed the seven-chakra scheme for Western readers, to 1919, based on the publisher's own catalogue record; some other library catalogues, and the Chakra 1 article elsewhere in this collection, instead give 1918. Leland does not adjudicate the one-year gap, which most likely reflects the ordinary difference between a book's printing date and its public release date, a common source of catalogue disagreement for this period. The atlas records 1919 as the publisher-attributed year and flags the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1