Disputed Statements

Patrick's Mission to Ireland, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 493

Patrick's own death, which closes the mission this event traces, is disputed between 461 or 462 and 492 or 493; the later range is carried here. Unlike Palladius's securely attested 431 CE mission, no contemporary record fixed Patrick's death: both ranges rest on retrospective annalistic reckoning written centuries afterward, and the dispute itself remains unresolved (T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Source Early Christian Ireland, T.M. Charles-Edwards tier 1

Pauline Missions Through Asia Minor and Greece, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 46

The chronology of Paul's three missionary journeys is reconstructed from a single fixed external anchor rather than any contemporary calendar of its own: an inscription from Delphi datable to 51 or 52 CE places the proconsul Gallio, before whom Acts records Paul appearing at Corinth, in that year. Working backward from that one fixed point, the first journey's start is conventionally placed around the mid-40s CE, but the precise year is not independently attested.

Source The New Testament, Acts of the Apostles, Anonymous tier 1

Pausanias, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 110

The source calls these years approximate, inferred from internal references rather than a direct record.

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

Pausanias, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 180

The source calls these years approximate, inferred from internal references rather than a direct record.

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

Pax, Haab Months

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Usually glossed as planting time, and sometimes connected to a drum, the two readings resting on different derivations.

Because the Haab carried no leap-day correction, an agricultural sense in a month name would have drifted out of alignment with the true planting season within a few generations, which is one reason this gloss is treated cautiously.

Source Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa tier 2

Payt (Pha) ጰ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

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

Peacock, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Pearl of Great Price, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Texts produced by Joseph Smith; the Book of Abraham presented as translated from Egyptian papyri

Egyptologists identify the recovered papyri as common funerary texts postdating Abraham by centuries; the church's Gospel Topics essay acknowledges the findings, and positions within the tradition range from lost-portions theories to catalyst-for-revelation readings.

Source The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (eds.) tier 1

Peh פ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Peh פ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Taught that human nature retains full freedom to choose good without needing a special infusion of divine grace beyond what God gave at creation, denying that Adam's sin corrupted or was inherited by his descendants.

Augustine of Hippo's On Nature and Grace (De Natura et Gratia, 415 CE) is a direct, point-by-point rebuttal of Pelagius's own book On Nature, which does not survive complete and is known chiefly through Augustine's quotations of it in the course of arguing against it. Augustine and the church councils that subsequently condemned Pelagius held that divine grace is necessary at every stage of the will's turn toward good, since Adam's sin left his descendants unable to choose good unaided, against Pelagius's own position, reconstructed from Augustine's quotations, that human will retains the unaided capacity to choose righteousness. That opposition is what defines the Pelagian and Augustinian camps of the controversy, with the losing side's argument preserved only inside its opponent's refutation of it.

Source On Nature and Grace (De Natura et Gratia), Augustine of Hippo tier 1

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition (Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) records Pelagius's origin as Britain, the description his own contemporaries in Rome, where he was active around 400 CE before his teaching on human freedom from sin brought him into conflict with Augustine of Hippo and condemnation at the synods of Carthage and Milevis, consistently gave him; no more specific birthplace within Britain is recorded by any contemporary source.

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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Pelagianism as formally condemned is, according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005), largely the construction of his opponents, chiefly Augustine of Hippo, and of the councils that judged him; how much of it Pelagius (about 354 to after 418) himself actually held, as against positions attributed to him in controversy, is still argued.

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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 354

Pelagius's exact birth and death dates are unknown; he is conventionally dated by his known period of activity, floruit circa 354 to circa 418 CE.

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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 418

Pelagius's exact birth and death dates are unknown; he is conventionally dated by his known period of activity, floruit circa 354 to circa 418 CE.

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

Penal Substitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether penal substitution develops Anselm's satisfaction account or departs from it

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) examines whether penal substitution develops Anselm's eleventh century satisfaction account or departs from it. Anselm framed punishment and satisfaction as alternatives and chose satisfaction; the sixteenth century Reformed doctrine instead makes the satisfaction consist in the punishment being borne, moving the setting from a court of honour to a criminal one. Readers who trace a continuous Western tradition across both texts read this as a development; readers who examine the sixteenth century sources' own legal vocabulary against Anselm's read penal substitution as a departure. Both readings are argued by serious historians of doctrine, and the texts themselves show a real change of legal category between the two.

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

Penal Substitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Binding, without a formal definition

According To Protestant Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) sets out the camps on penal substitution, stated in each side's own terms. Defenders, reading Isaiah 53, Galatians 3:13 and 2 Corinthians 5:21 as their controlling texts, hold that substitution is the plain sense of those passages, that this is not the Father punishing an unwilling third party but God bearing in himself the cost of forgiving so that the Trinity is not divided against itself, and that because the penalty has already been borne it will not be exacted again, which is what grounds Christian assurance of salvation on this reading. Critics, examining the same texts through the Reformed doctrine's sixteenth century legal framing, read the theory as importing a criminal-court model of justice the biblical texts themselves do not require.

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

Penal Substitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States Penal substitution, the sixteenth century Reformed recasting of Anselm's satisfaction account in penal and forensic terms, stated at length in Calvin's Institutes, holds that sin incurs a real penalty that is not simply cancelled and that Christ bears it in the place of those who incurred it, drawing on the fourth servant song in Isaiah, Galatians' statement that Christ became a curse, and the exchange described in 2 Corinthians 5:21. It is confessed in the Reformed and Lutheran standards, including the Westminster Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and remains the working assumption of a great deal of Anglophone evangelical preaching, but it has faced sustained criticism from within the tradition since Faustus Socinus in the sixteenth century and, in the twentieth century, from theologians who hold that it divides the Trinity and dignifies innocent suffering.

According To Protestant Christianity

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

Peoples Temple, New Religious Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Membership Over Time

Currently States Peoples Temple publicly claimed as many as 20,000 total members at its peak in the mid-1970s after relocating its headquarters to San Francisco, though only between about 4,800 and 5,000 people are documented to have given the church their personal details for a membership card during the same period, according to the Jonestown Institute's own review of the group's surviving membership records.

Peoples Temple's own public claim of up to 20,000 members was never matched by the movement's internal paperwork: the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, custodian of the group's surviving records, counts between about 4,800 and 5,000 people who actually submitted personal details for a membership card, and separately estimates that no more than roughly 2,000 people were ever committed enough to travel to Guyana. The gap between the public figure and the documented one is recorded here rather than resolved, since neither has been superseded by the other.

Source Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple, Rebecca Moore tier 1

Peorth, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc Runes

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Old English peorth, a word that occurs nowhere else in the language, so its sense cannot be recovered from Old English itself. One reading takes it from the poem's beer-hall setting as a dice-cup or gaming piece; another takes it as a loan from a Brittonic word for a bush or thicket; a third holds that the poet no longer knew what it meant either. The stanza gives the setting and never the sense.

Source The Old English Rune Poem: A Critical Edition, Maureen Halsall tier 1