Disputed Statements

Nazi Germany, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Religion

Currently States Argued. Steigmann-Gall holds that many leading Nazis understood themselves as Christians of a kind and that the movement cannot simply be called anti-Christian; the more usual reading holds that the churches were tolerated tactically and were to be supplanted after the war. Both cases are built from the same speeches and diaries

Steigmann-Gall's thesis and the sustained criticism of it are both in print and both current. A third strand, traced by Goodrick-Clarke, follows the volkisch and ariosophical currents feeding the movement's milieu without treating them as its cause.

Source The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Richard Steigmann-Gall tier 1

Nazi Germany Persecutes Jehovah's Witnesses, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1945

1945, the war's end and with it the persecution; the casualty scale within this period is the source's own named inconsistency (2,000 to 10,000 imprisoned; 1,200 to 5,000 dead), not a settled figure this atlas rounds to one number.

Source Persecution Of Jehovah's Witnesses In Nazi Germany (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Ne ⲛ, 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

Near-Death Experience, Psi Phenomena

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Critic

Currently States Cognitive neuroscientists reviewing van Lommel's study have argued that measurement of "flat" brain activity during cardiac arrest is too coarse to rule out brief neural activity capable of generating vivid experience.

Source Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands, Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, Ingrid Elfferich tier 1

Nebra Sky Disc, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Date Attributed

Currently States c. 1600 BC (Early Bronze Age)

Ernst Pernicka and colleagues published Why the Nebra Sky Disc Dates to the Early Bronze Age: An Overview of the Interdisciplinary Results in 2020, defending the disc's custodian institution's Early Bronze Age dating, around 1600 BCE, against a 2020 challenge. Pernicka's method draws together the original excavation stratigraphy, metal composition analysis and comparative art history, and the paper represents both the majority scholarly position and the specific custodian dating that a competing 2020 study proposed replacing with a much later Iron Age date.

Source Why the Nebra Sky Disc Dates to the Early Bronze Age. An Overview of the Interdisciplinary Results, Ernst Pernicka and others tier 1

Nebra Sky Disc, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Alternative Dating

Currently States Iron Age (c. 800-50 BC), proposed 2020

Rupert Gebhard and Ruediger Krause published their critical remarks on the find and interpretation of the Nebra Sky Disc in 2020, arguing on stylistic and contextual grounds for an Iron Age date substantially later than the Early Bronze Age dating the disc's custodian institution maintains. Their proposal was examined and rebutted in a response published in the same year in Archaeologia Austriaca, volume 104, which is why the atlas records it as a minority position within a live methodological dispute over how to weight excavation context against comparative stylistic dating.

Source Critical remarks on the find and interpretation of the Nebra Sky Disc (Gebhard and Krause), Rupert Gebhard and Ruediger Krause tier 1

Nefes, Hymns & Liturgical Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Seven poets are named as the great ones: Nesimi, Fuzuli, Shah Khatai, Pir Sultan Abdal, Kul Himmet, Yemini and Virani.

The repertory circulated orally in variants for centuries and attributions move between poets. The poems ascribed to Pir Sultan Abdal are far more numerous than one man could have written, and the name has served partly as a signature later poets took up. The fixed list of seven is itself a product of the late Ottoman and Republican codification.

Source Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam, Markus Dressler tier 1

Nembus, Fixed Stars

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Disputed. Johann Bayer's 1603 Uranometria records it as of Arabic origin, but the form of the name reads as Latin rather than Arabic, possibly tied to the sword Perseus used to behead Medusa. An alternative Arabic name for the same star, Al Anfal, "the spoils of war", is also recorded.

Source The Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology, Vivian E. Robson tier 2

Nemontemi, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States The last days of January into the first day of February

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Neolithic, Historical Periods

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Religious Traditions

Currently States None can be named. What the period leaves is architecture, burial, figurine and deposit, so every religious reading of it, including whether its great buildings are sanctuaries at all, is inference from material rather than report from a tradition

Source So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East, E. B. Banning tier 1

Nerthus, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Debated

Nerthus rests on exactly one ancient testimony, Tacitus, writing as an outside Roman observer rather than a participant, so every further detail beyond his bare description, which tribes took part, how widely the cult spread, whether it continued past his own century, is scholarly inference rather than independent attestation. The clearest scholarly puzzle is the name itself: Nerthus is the precise linguistic ancestor of Old Norse Njordr, a MALE sea god in the later Eddic sources, and specialists read the mismatch as evidence that an earlier, possibly paired or twinned Germanic earth and sea deity later split along gender lines in different regional traditions, though which half is older, or whether that account is right at all, is not settled.

Source Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall tier 1

Nestorianism, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Held By

Currently States A fifth century position associated with Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, holding the union of Christ divine and human natures to be looser than the mainstream confessed; condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and rejected by the historic Chalcedonian churches. Communities descending from those who did not accept Ephesus ruling continue as the Assyrian Church of the East, which disputes that it holds what was condemned under this name, a live scholarly and ecumenical question rather than a settled one.

Modern historians and the Assyrian Church of the East itself dispute whether the position condemned at Ephesus matches what Nestorius actually taught or what the Church of the East actually holds; the 1994 Common Christological Declaration between Rome and the Assyrian Church of the East treated the christological difference as substantially terminological rather than a real disagreement.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Nestorianism, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Proponent

Currently States Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, though how much of the position later condemned under his name he actually held is itself disputed by historians.

Almost nothing survives of Nestorius own case except through his opponents and his later Bazaar of Heracleides; historians read that surviving material differently on whether he held a genuine two person Christology.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Nestorius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Whether Nestorius actually taught the two persons doctrine condemned under his name

Nestorius's own Bazaar of Heracleides, written in his final exile and rediscovered in a Syriac manuscript in 1889, published in English translation by G. R. Driver and Leonard Hodgson (Clarendon Press, 1925), let scholars read Nestorius's actual Christology directly for the first time since his condemnation at Ephesus in 431, rather than only through the hostile summaries of his opponents. Since that rediscovery, many scholars comparing the Bazaar's own statements against the Christological formula later adopted at Chalcedon in 451 read Nestorius's actual position as reconcilable with orthodox Chalcedonian belief, and hold he was condemned for a more extreme position, associated with his name by opponents, than the one his own writing states; others maintain the council's original condemnation read his teaching correctly even in light of the Bazaar.

Source The Bazaar of Heracleides, Nestorius, translated by G. R. Driver and Leonard Hodgson tier 1

Netjer, One and Many, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the monolatrous formulation describes Kemeticism at large or only the teaching of one named body. Independent Kemetics, who practise outside any house, frequently reject it and describe themselves as straightforwardly polytheist, and this is one of the clearest lines inside the modern movement.

Source Kemetic Orthodoxy: the faith and its practice, Tamara L. Siuda tier 3

New Testament, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Apostles and their associates (traditional)

Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Trinity Press International, 2002, argues against the widely assumed hypothetical Q source, a document no manuscript of which has ever been found, that is traditionally posited to explain material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. Goodacre's method is close literary and redaction-critical comparison of the parallel passages across the three Gospels, and he argues the same pattern of agreement is explained at least as well by Luke having read and directly edited Matthew, removing the need to posit a lost source at all. That argument sits within the wider, still-live Synoptic Problem of how Matthew, Mark and Luke relate to one another; what is not in dispute, and what Goodacre's own study takes as its starting point, is that the Gospels are themselves anonymous, their traditional author-names being second century ascriptions rather than the writers' own signatures, while Paul's undisputed letters, whose authorship is secure, remain the earliest Christian writings.

Source The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Mark Goodacre tier 1

New Testament, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Pauls undisputed letters earliest (c. 50s CE), the Gospels anonymous (c. 65-100 CE)

Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Trinity Press International, 2002, argues against the widely assumed hypothetical Q source, a document no manuscript of which has ever been found, that is traditionally posited to explain material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. Goodacre's method is close literary and redaction-critical comparison of the parallel passages across the three Gospels, and he argues the same pattern of agreement is explained at least as well by Luke having read and directly edited Matthew, removing the need to posit a lost source at all. That argument sits within the wider, still-live Synoptic Problem of how Matthew, Mark and Luke relate to one another; what is not in dispute, and what Goodacre's own study takes as its starting point, is that the Gospels are themselves anonymous, their traditional author-names being second century ascriptions rather than the writers' own signatures, while Paul's undisputed letters, whose authorship is secure, remain the earliest Christian writings.

Source The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Mark Goodacre tier 1

New Testament, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States With the Synoptic Problem debated (critical)

Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Trinity Press International, 2002, argues against the widely assumed hypothetical Q source, a document no manuscript of which has ever been found, that is traditionally posited to explain material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. Goodacre's method is close literary and redaction-critical comparison of the parallel passages across the three Gospels, and he argues the same pattern of agreement is explained at least as well by Luke having read and directly edited Matthew, removing the need to posit a lost source at all. That argument sits within the wider, still-live Synoptic Problem of how Matthew, Mark and Luke relate to one another; what is not in dispute, and what Goodacre's own study takes as its starting point, is that the Gospels are themselves anonymous, their traditional author-names being second century ascriptions rather than the writers' own signatures, while Paul's undisputed letters, whose authorship is secure, remain the earliest Christian writings.

Source The Case Against Q: Studies in Marcan Priority and the Synoptic Problem, Mark Goodacre tier 1

Nezahualcóyotl, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States That he worshipped one invisible creator, Tloque Nahuaque, raised a temple to him with no image in it, and opposed human sacrifice.

Encyclopaedia Britannica's online entry (2024) traces the claim that Nezahualcoyotl held monotheistic religious beliefs to colonial-era sources, principally the writings of his own descendant Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl a century after his death. Britannica's entry sets out two readings: one takes it as genuine Texcocan tradition, evidence of an authentic strand of pre-conquest Nahua philosophical speculation about a single supreme deity; the other takes it as a construction made under Christian colonial rule, presenting a converted Mexico with an acceptably monotheistic pagan ancestor. Because the claim survives only through Ixtlilxochitl's own descendant-authored account, with no independent pre-conquest corroboration, neither reading can be checked against a source outside that single family transmission.

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

Nezahualcóyotl, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The songs attributed to him in the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España.

Encyclopaedia Britannica's online entry (2024) examines the two manuscript collections of Nahuatl poetry attributed to Nezahualcoyotl, both alphabetic transcriptions written down decades after the Spanish conquest by scribes trained in the new Latin alphabet, and finds neither carries a verifiable contemporary attribution to him personally. Some scholars accept a genuine Nezahualcoyotl corpus within the collections on internal stylistic and thematic grounds; others hold that individual authorship in the European sense was not how Nahua song composition worked, and that attaching a single named composer's name to inherited or communally performed verse is a later, Spanish-influenced reading habit projected back onto material that was not originally authored that way.

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