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Sodom and Pelagius each carry three contested facts in this atlas, tied at the same count with many other subjects. They are told on one page not because their two debates bear on each other, they do not, but because reading each set individually finds the identical shape: two of the three facts carry no supporting note at all, and the third alone carries the entire developed argument.

Sodom: Two Empty Facts, One Named Dispute

Founding-origin carries no note. Claimed-location carries only a methodological aside rather than a finding: "Cited to the proponent's own statement of the case so that the camp is represented in its own words rather than through its critics. The atlas takes no position." Historicity alone carries the real content, a named, two-camp argument: "Steven Collins, the excavator of Tall el-Hammam, argues from the site's size, its position in the plain and the geography of Genesis 13 that it is Sodom, and has published the case at book length. His critics hold that the site's destruction does not line up with the biblical period as usually reckoned, that the geographic argument admits of other readings, and that no inscription names the site." Its own description states what would end the argument and has not: "No text found at any candidate site names Sodom, which is what would settle it."

Pelagius: The Same Shape, a Different Subject

Contested-legacy carries no note. Origin-place carries no note. Theology alone carries the real content: Augustine of Hippo and the councils that condemned Pelagius "held instead that grace is necessary at every stage of the will's turn toward good, and that Adam's sin left his descendants unable to turn to good without it," against Pelagius's own position "that humans possess the innate freedom and capacity to live without sin, without depending on a special infusion of divine grace." The record itself is asymmetric: "Pelagius's own works survive only in fragments and in Augustine's quotations of them," since Augustine's rebuttal, On Nature and Grace, answered a book of Pelagius's, On Nature, that does not survive complete. Two subjects, the same structural pattern: a real argument concentrated in exactly one fact, with two neighbouring facts carrying nothing to add to it.

Where To Read More

• SodomCities of the PlainThree contested facts, two carrying no note; historicity alone holds the Collins-versus-critics argument over Tall el-Hammam
• PelagiusClergy, Theologians & Religious OfficialsThree contested facts, two carrying no note; theology alone holds the Pelagian-versus-Augustinian argument, read from Augustine's own rebuttal since Pelagius's book does not survive complete