Disputed Statements

Mani the Prophet, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 216

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Mani the Prophet, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 276

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Manichaean, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Attestation End Year

Currently States 1600

The date of the last identifiable Manichaean religious communities, in southern China, is not settled in the scholarship; proposals range from the fourteenth into the sixteenth or seventeenth century CE. 1600 is used here as an approximate, conservative marker of the tradition's latest well-attested activity, not a precise endpoint.

Source Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd edition, Samuel N. C. Lieu tier 1

Manichaean Missionaries Reach the Roman Empire, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 280

280 is an honest round estimate for the missionary movement's earliest reach into Roman Egypt, in the years immediately after Mani's death; the source names the fact of the spread without giving it a first year.

Source Manichaeism (New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com), J. Ries tier 2

Manichaeism Goes Extinct in China, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1370

The two sources this event cites disagree on how precisely to date the faith's final extinction. The New Catholic Encyclopedia entry gives only a loose estimate, last traces disappearing in China by the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries; Wikipedia's own article gives the sharper 1370 Ming dynasty ban and says the faith was subsumed into Buddhism and Taoism before the end of the fourteenth century. 1370 is carried as the end year because it is the more specific, dateable event either source names, with the later, looser estimate named here rather than silently dropped.

Source Wikipedia: Manichaeism, Wikipedia contributors tier 2

Manipuri Sankirtana, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1717

Sources trace Sankirtana through a sequence of Manipuri kings rather than one founding moment. The earliest thread credits King Kiyamba, who ruled 1467 to 1508, with introducing an early form of devotional kirtan singing after receiving an image of Vishnu from a neighboring king, well before Vaishnavism was the kingdom's state religion. The formal turn is usually dated to 1717, when King Gareeb Niwaz embraced Gaudiya, Chaitanya style, Vaishnavism and made it the state religion of the Meitei people, and the tradition's most celebrated form again belongs to a later king, Bhagyachandra, who in the later eighteenth century installed the image of Sri Govindajee and instituted Sankirtana as its regular temple offering. No single one of these three moments is treated as definitive across the sources consulted.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Mansur al-Hallaj, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Term Coined

Currently States The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs, eds., Brill, 2005) records ana al-haqq, I am the Truth, as the utterance for which Mansur al-Hallaj, the Persian born Sufi of Baghdad executed in 922, is remembered; his accusers took it as a claim to be God, while his defenders, Attar among them, read it instead as speech uttered in fana, a state of self-annihilation in God in which the speaker is no longer present to say I, rather than a claim of personal divinity.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Mansur al-Hallaj, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 858

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Mansur al-Hallaj, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 922

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Manvantara, Yugas (World Ages)

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States Some Puranic king lists give the fourteen Manus and their manvantaras in a different order or with different associated deities from the scheme most commonly followed.

The various Puranas do not fully agree with one another on the list of fourteen Manus, the deities and sages assigned to each manvantara, or the order in which the ages are named, disagreements among the texts that the tradition itself has never reconciled into one single canonical sequence, so any one Purana's account is best read as a version of the scheme rather than the whole of it.

Source Vishnu Purana, Anonymous tier 1

Mappo (The Age of the Dharma's Decline), Ages

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Proposed Dating

Currently States Placed variously by Chinese calculation from the sixth century onward; the Japanese reckoning most widely adopted, and the one the atlas records as a start year below, sets it at 1052.

Chinese calculations, worked out from the sixth century onward, placed the onset of this last age variously; the Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools set it at the year 1052, the date on which those schools' distinctive practices are premised, but the tradition as a whole holds no single settled year.

Source Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, Jan Nattier tier 1

Mappo (The Age of the Dharma's Decline), Ages

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Proposed Dating Start Year

Currently States 1052

The Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools; Chinese calculations before it placed the transition variously, and the tradition as a whole holds no single settled year.

Source Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, Jan Nattier tier 1

Mappo (The Latter Age of the Dharma), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the scheme describes the actual situation, so that reliance on one's own effort becomes self-deception, or is a warning against complacency that leaves practice unchanged. Honen and Shinran took the first reading, and Dogen rejected the reasoning outright on the ground that the dharma is not weakened by the calendar.

Source Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, Jan Nattier tier 1

Maqlu, Incantations, Spells & Curses

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Named Target

Currently States The kassaptu, the witch, named by role and never as an identified person in the text

Whether the series was performed against real people who had been accused, in a society whose law provided for witchcraft accusations, or as therapy for a sufferer with no defendant in view, is argued both ways. The text itself names no one, which is consistent with either reading.

Source The Magical Ceremony Maqlu: A Critical Edition, Tzvi Abusch tier 1

Mar Saba Letter, Textual Witnesses

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Authenticated

Currently States Whether the letter is a genuine copy of a work of Clement of Alexandria or a modern forgery has been argued in print for over fifty years. Morton Smith, Scott G. Brown and Charles Hedrick have defended it; Stephen C. Carlson, Peter Jeffery and Francis Watson have argued it is a modern composition, in Carlson's case that Smith himself wrote it.

A genuine dispute with identifiable camps, arguing from the handwriting, the Greek style, the content and the circumstances of the find. Neither side has produced a decisive argument, and the usual physical tests have never been available to either.

Source Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Morton Smith tier 1

Marabout, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States French colonial administration applied the word to almost any Muslim religious figure it dealt with, and that flattening still colours the outside literature

According To Colonial ethnography

Historians of the colonial archive read the term as substantially an administrative category; specialists on the orders themselves argue there is a real indigenous usage underneath it. Both positions are held in the current literature.

Source The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham tier 1

Marcel Griaule, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Whether the Dogon esoteric cosmology Griaule published reflects Dogon tradition or an artifact of his method

Walter E. A. van Beek's Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule (Current Anthropology, 1991) returned to the Dogon communities Griaule had studied decades earlier and conducted fresh ethnographic fieldwork specifically to check Griaule's published cosmology, centred on his informant Ogotemmeli, against what Dogon people themselves currently held. Van Beek's fieldwork found no living knowledge of Ogotemmeli's cosmology among the Dogon he worked with; defenders of the Griaule school reply that esoteric knowledge in Dogon religion is by design unevenly distributed among initiates, and that van Beek's restudy, conducted a generation later in different villages, may simply not have reached anyone still holding it. The controversy remains open because neither side's fieldwork can rule out the other's explanation.

Source Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule, Walter E. A. van Beek tier 1

Marcion, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Taught that the creator god of the Hebrew scriptures, just but harsh and changeable, was a lesser being distinct from the previously unknown, purely good Father revealed by Christ, and rejected the Hebrew Bible as scripture for Christians on that basis.

Tertullian's Against Marcion (Adversus Marcionem), written to refute Marcion's teaching, is one of the two chief sources through which Marcion's own position survives, since his Antitheses and his edited canon do not survive independently and are known only through Tertullian's and Irenaeus's hostile quotation and summary. The church that excommunicated Marcion around 144 CE at Rome held, against him, that the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ are the same God and that the Hebrew scriptures remain authoritative for Christians, a position Tertullian's treatise defends point by point against Marcion's teaching that they were different and opposed deities. Because Marcion's own sustained argument does not survive, his theology is reconstructed from what his opponents chose to quote in order to refute it.

Source Against Marcion (Adversus Marcionem), Tertullian tier 1

Marcion, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 85

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

Marcion, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 160

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