Disputed Statements

Vedanga Jyotisha, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States -400

T. S. Kuppanna Sastry and other scholars working from the text's own astronomical description, a winter solstice coinciding with the full moon in the Dhanishtha nakshatra, calculate a date around 1400 to 1200 BCE using the precession of the equinoxes. David Pingree, Yukio Ohashi and Kim Plofker instead read the text's mathematical technique as showing affinities with methods that reached India from Mesopotamia only around the fifth century BCE, placing the received recension closer to 600 to 400 BCE and treating its archaic astronomical language as inherited rather than original. The two datings differ by roughly a millennium and rest on incompatible kinds of evidence.

Source The Vedanga Jyotisha of Lagadha, in its Rigveda and Yajurveda Recensions, Translated and critically edited by T. S. Kuppanna Sastry tier 1

Vedanta, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

Karl H. Potter's edited Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III: Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils (Princeton University Press, 1981) documents that the Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita schools of Vedanta, examined through their own founding commentaries on the Brahma Sutras by Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva respectively, differ sharply over the relationship between the individual self, atman, and ultimate reality, Brahman. Potter's volume records that Hindu tradition, across these three major commentarial lineages, has never settled on a single reading among them.

Source Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III: Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils, Karl H. Potter (ed.) tier 1

Vedanta, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -800

Vedanta's roots lie in the Upanishads, the latest layer of Vedic literature; estimates for the earliest Upanishads range from about the eighth to the sixth century BCE, and Vedanta itself remained a peripheral school of thought for centuries after.

Source An Introduction to Hinduism, Gavin Flood tier 1

Vedanta, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 450

Vedanta was systematized in Badarayana's Brahma Sutras, dated by different scholars anywhere from about 200 BCE to 450 CE; the school did not become a major tradition in its own right until roughly the eleventh century.

Source An Introduction to Hinduism, Gavin Flood tier 1

Veil of Veronica, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Rival Claim

Currently States The Volto Santo of Manoppello proposed as the original veil (Pfeiffer)

Joe Nickell's Relics of the Christ (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) surveys the several images venerated as the Veil of Veronica, comparing their documented custodial histories and physical examination reports where available. Nickell's method is historical and forensic investigation applied across competing relic claims, and he records that the image's authenticity is contested among the claimant institutions themselves and that the Vatican has not endorsed any single surviving veil as the historical original.

Source Relics of the Christ, Joe Nickell tier 1

Venancio Kamiko, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States How the movement should be read: as indigenous religious renewal, as a Christian prophetic movement, or as organised economic refusal directed at the trading system of the upper Rio Negro.

Robin M. Wright's Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn (University of Texas Press, 1998) sets out three scholarly readings of Venancio Kamiko's nineteenth century Baniwa messianic movement, developed from the same missionary, administrative and oral-historical record. Wright's method treats the three readings as differing in emphasis rather than as strictly exclusive: one stresses the Arawakan initiation material at the ceremonial centre of the movement as its true core, another stresses the cross, salvation preaching and penitential discipline that came upriver with Catholic missions as the movement's actual content, and a third stresses the demand to break off dealings with traders, which in the debt-based riverine economy of the time was the element with immediate material consequence and the part colonial authorities themselves responded to by force.

Source Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For Those Unborn, Robin M. Wright tier 1

Venantius Fortunatus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 530

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

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

Venantius Fortunatus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 600

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

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

Venezuela, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The constitution guarantees freedom of religion and requires religious groups to register with the Directorate of Justice and Religion; relations between the Catholic hierarchy and the government have been openly adversarial since 1999, with registration and property used as pressure.

Venezuela's constitution guarantees freedom of religion and requires religious groups to register with the Directorate of Justice and Religion, a government body with discretion over registration that has given the state a point of leverage over religious organisations. Relations between the Catholic Church hierarchy and the Venezuelan government have been openly adversarial since Hugo Chavez took office in 1999, with the Catholic Church consistently among the most vocal domestic critics of successive Chavista governments' human rights record and economic management, and the State Department's report records that registration requirements and property matters have been used by the government as pressure against the Church during this sustained political conflict. The dispute is over whether the measures cited represent ordinary regulatory action, the government's position, or targeted pressure against an institutional critic using registration law as the mechanism, the position taken by the Church and outside human rights observers.

Source International Religious Freedom Report, United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom tier 1

Veni Creator Spiritus, Hymns & Liturgical Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally ascribed to Rabanus Maurus, the Carolingian scholar who became Archbishop of Mainz, an attribution widespread since the Middle Ages but, as the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) notes, textually uncertain: no manuscript from Rabanus's own lifetime names him as its author, and the hymn's actual composition is dated only broadly to the ninth century.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) examined the medieval attribution of this Latin hymn to Rabanus Maurus, the Carolingian scholar who became Archbishop of Mainz, an ascription that became widespread across the Middle Ages. It finds no manuscript surviving from Rabanus's own ninth century lifetime that names him as the author, and dates the hymn's actual composition only broadly to that century rather than to him specifically, which is why it records the attribution as textually uncertain rather than settled.

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

Venus, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The origin of the name Venus is debated. One view derives it from an Indo-European root meaning desire or longing, cognate with words for winning favor, which would make her name transparently mean the goddess of charm. Another holds that Venus began as an obscure garden and vegetable deity whose name was only later reinterpreted to carry an erotic sense once she was identified with the Greek Aphrodite; the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes the second reading is favored by several Latinists.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Veronica, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) traces the Veronica figure to two separate strands, the vera icon relic tradition and the Acts of Pilate's Bernice narrative, and finds no early testimony attests a historical woman behind either. The dictionary records her as absent from the canonical Gospels and as a legendary figure that developed within later Passion devotion rather than as a documented participant in the crucifixion narrative.

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

Vettius Valens, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 120

Vettius Valens gives no direct statement of his own birth year; what survives is a set of dated horoscopes within his Anthology, mostly cast between 152 and 162 CE, from which historians of ancient astrology have worked back an approximate birth around 120 CE rather than reading it from any external record.

Source Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem), Vettius Valens tier 1

Vettius Valens, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 175

No external record states when Vettius Valens died. His latest securely dated horoscope falls in the 170s CE, and historians of ancient astrology cite a death somewhere around 175 CE on that basis, an estimate drawn from the latest surviving dated material rather than from any independent record of his death.

Source Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem), Vettius Valens tier 1

Vidhatri, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Textual Note

Currently States The Bhagavata Purana names Vidhatri among the twelve Adityas beside Dhatri. The Vishnu Purana list of twelve does not name him, giving Amshu in his place.

According To Puranic Hinduism

Vidhatri is named among the twelve Adityas in the Bhagavata Purana, one of the two Puranic lists that between them supply the class's canonical membership. The Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana agree on ten of the twelve names and differ on the remaining two, and Vidhatri is one of the two figures the Bhagavata Purana includes where the Vishnu Purana instead names Parjanya and Amshu. Both are anonymous Puranic compilations transmitted across centuries by different lineages rather than fixed by a single author or date, so the variance cannot be resolved by identifying a copying error in either text. The method, following Arthur Anthony Macdonell's Vedic Mythology (1897), is textual comparison of the two received lists against each other; since the tradition itself hands down both without treating either as the correction of the other, the atlas records which text names him rather than treating his membership as settled.

Source Bhagavata Purana, Anonymous tier 1

Vietnam War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 791000.000000

The lower named camp: Hirschman, Preston and Vu's 1995 peer reviewed demographic survey, using retrospective kin mortality data from the 1991 Vietnam Life History Survey, reports a most likely national total of 882,000 Vietnamese dead between 1965 and 1975, with a stated range of 791,000 to 1,141,000. This atlas records the low end of that range as its own lower bound. A separate camp puts the toll far higher: Vietnam's own 1995 government estimate for 1955 to 1975 totals roughly 3.1 million Vietnamese military and civilian dead on both sides, and historian Guenter Lewy's 1978 estimate for 1965 to 1974 alone is 1,353,000. The wide spread reflects genuinely different methodologies, survey sampling against government tallying against battlefield reporting, rather than a single contested number.

Source Vietnamese Casualties During the American War, A New Estimate (Hirschman, Preston and Vu, 1995), Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi tier 1

Vietnam War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 3812000.000000

The higher named camp: Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou's 2008 study in the BMJ, using sibling survival histories from the World Health Survey Programme, reports 3,812,000 Vietnamese dead between 1955 and 2002, of which 3,091,000 fall between 1955 and 1975, the same war years the lower camp's 1995 demographic study covers. The two studies cover overlapping but not identical windows and use different survey methods. This atlas records both named camps' own totals as its bounds rather than resolving the disagreement, and does not merge either figure with United States or allied military deaths, which are recorded separately.

Source Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths From Vietnam to Bosnia (Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou, 2008), Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray and Emmanuela Gakidou tier 1

Vietnam War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (Low Estimate)

Currently States 840000.000000

The regional total a UNHCR press release marking the June 1996 closure of Malaysia's last refugee camp gives: since 1975, 840,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers had reached the countries of South East Asia and Hong Kong by sea and by land.

Source UNHCR Press Release: Closure of Malaysia's Last Vietnamese Boat People Camp (25 June 1996), United Nations (UNHCR) tier 1

Vietnam War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (High Estimate)

Currently States 980000.000000

The regional total above, plus the roughly 140,000 Vietnamese evacuated directly to the United States around the fall of Saigon in April 1975, a separate and earlier wave the regional figure does not include. This atlas does not add the further, separately estimated 200,000 to 400,000 believed to have died attempting the sea crossing, since that is a mortality estimate rather than a count of the displaced.

Source UNHCR Press Release: Closure of Malaysia's Last Vietnamese Boat People Camp (25 June 1996), United Nations (UNHCR) tier 1

Vila, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Slavicists hold several competing derivations for vila from Proto-Slavic vila, none settled. One reading connects it to words for wind and storm (compare Bulgarian vihar, "gale"), fitting the vile's associations with rainbows and weather. A second connects it to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to chase, to pursue," giving an original sense closer to "haunter." A third derives it from a root meaning "to perish," making the vile cognate with a Baltic word for the spirits of the dead, consistent with folk accounts that a vila is the soul of a woman who died before marriage. A fourth reconstructs it as a compound meaning roughly "little holy woman." Each reading fits a different strand of vila folklore, which is part of why none has displaced the others.

Source The Slavs (Gimbutas), Marija Gimbutas tier 2