Disputed Statements

Cathedral of San Salvador, Oviedo, Custodians & Museums

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Relevant Holding

Currently States Sudarium of Oviedo, a bloodstained cloth kept within the Arca Santa reliquary chest

The Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, Spain, holds the Sudarium of Oviedo, a bloodstained cloth associated by tradition with the burial of Jesus, and the Arca Santa, a reliquary chest holding further relics. The cathedral's own published institutional account records that radiocarbon testing of the Sudarium produced a date considerably later than proponents of its first-century authenticity had expected, placing the cloth's material within a later historical period on the standard method's own reading. Proponents attribute the discrepancy to contamination of the sample by later handling, incense smoke or other material absorbed over centuries of veneration, a position critics regard as unfalsifiable, since any radiocarbon result inconsistent with the desired date can be attributed to unspecified contamination without independent verification of what contaminated the sample or by how much. The method in dispute is radiocarbon dating and the contamination-correction arguments raised against a specific unwelcome result. Because the contamination claim cannot itself be independently tested, the dating remains debated rather than resolved by either the test or the objection to it.

Source The Sudarium and the Arca Santa - Cathedral of San Salvador, Oviedo, Cabildo de la Catedral de Oviedo tier 2

Caucasian Native Religion, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Polytheistic: many gods

Scholars describe the Circassian strand, with its supreme sky god Tha presiding over a wider community of spirits, as sometimes closer to henotheistic than the plainly polytheistic Ossetian and Abkhaz pantheons, which recognize many roughly coequal holy beings with no single supreme figure common to all of them.

Source Nart Sagas from the Caucasus (Colarusso), John Colarusso tier 1

Cautio Criminalis, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The book is credited with contributing to the ending of witch prosecutions in several German territories.

Some contemporaries said as much directly and historians take the claim seriously. Others hold that the decline in the Holy Roman Empire had several causes running together, including the exhaustion of the Thirty Years War, reform of criminal procedure, the reassertion of higher courts over local ones, and a slow change in what educated people found plausible. A book does not stop a persecution on its own, and no one has isolated its effect.

Source Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History, Wolfgang Behringer tier 1

Cécile Fatiman, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

No first-hand account of Bois Caiman survives; the earliest written record is colonist Antoine Dalmas's in 1814, more than two decades after the event. Fatiman's presence and role rest on this and later retellings rather than contemporary documentation, and scholars including Leon-Francois Hoffmann have argued the ceremony as commonly told may be a later mythologized creation rather than a precise record of what happened that night.

Source Bois Caiman (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Cecilia, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) records that a Roman martyr named Cecilia is attested by her titular church in Rome, but that the Acts of Cecilia, the narrative source for her traditional life, is a fifth or sixth century romance composed centuries after any historical martyrdom, and that nothing in her story, including her association with music, can be traced to a source earlier than that later composition.

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

Celestial Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Celestial Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Celestial Church of Christ, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Founder Samuel Oshoffa's death in 1985 left succession unsettled, and rival claimants to leadership split the church into several formally organized factions across Benin, Nigeria and the diaspora, a division scholars of African Initiated Churches treat as a defining feature of the church's modern history rather than a resolved matter.

Which faction, if any, holds legitimate succession from Oshoffa remains disputed among the church's own leadership bodies and has not been settled by any civil or ecclesiastical authority accepted by all sides.

Source Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, David B. Barrett tier 1

Celtic, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Structure of the Pantheon

Currently States Local and lineage cults gathered under one name, with no single frame

The several hundred Gaulish theonyms recorded in inscriptions are overwhelmingly attested only once and only at a single place, which is the direct evidence behind classifying the Celtic pantheon as a local-cluster structure rather than a shared pan-Celtic one; the same fragmentation appears in the centuries-wide gap between the archaeological Iron Age and the medieval Irish and Welsh texts that record the Tuatha De Danann and figures such as Arianrhod. The Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade, ed.; Jones, ed., 2nd ed., 2005) treats how much of that later literary material reflects genuine pre-Christian structure, as opposed to medieval Christian arrangement of it, as an open and disputed question rather than a settled one.

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

Celts, Cultures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States Whether the Iron Age peoples of Britain and Ireland were Celts, or whether insular Celtic identity is a modern scholarly construction, is debated

Simon James (The Atlantic Celts, 1999) argues that no ancient islander was called a Celt and that the shared insular identity was assembled from eighteenth century philology. John T. Koch and the linguistic continuity school hold that shared Celtic languages, institutions and art justify the shared name. Both positions are live in current scholarship.

Source The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?, Simon James tier 1

Central African Republic Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States News coverage and international organizations including Amnesty International widely described the conflict as a religious war between the country's Muslim minority and Christian majority, a framing that fit the visible pattern of a mostly Muslim Seleka against Christian-organized anti-balaka militias and the deliberate targeting of mosques and churches. Ludovic Lado, writing for the Wilson Center's Africa Program, and Louisa Lombard, a Yale anthropologist whose study draws on years of fieldwork in the country, both argue the religious label explains less than it seems to: the Central African Republic carried no significant history of Christian-Muslim tension before the Seleka's 2013 offensive, and a genuinely political struggle for control of the state hardened into intercommunal violence that then looked, and increasingly became, religious in how it was carried out, without religion having been its actual cause. The UN Commission of Inquiry's own 2014 report reached a similar conclusion.

Source State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic, Louisa Lombard tier 1

Central African Republic Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 3000.000000

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry's December 2014 report gives a conservative estimate of 3,000 to 6,000 people killed between January 2013 and December 2014, the acute phase the commission itself investigated, not a total conflict toll: fighting has continued at lower intensity in the years since, and no single named source has produced a count covering that longer period.

Source Final Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic, International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic tier 1

Central African Republic Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 6000.000000

See death-toll-min. Human Rights Watch's own contemporaneous investigation, covering only Seleka forces' killings in the conflict's first year, separately documented 800 to 1,200 civilian deaths, a narrower finding consistent with, but not additive to, the Commission's fuller two-year estimate.

Source Final Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic, International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic tier 1

Central African Republic Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States The United Nations Commission of Inquiry's December 2014 report gives a conservative estimate of 3,000 to 6,000 killed in the acute phase it investigated, January 2013 to December 2014; fighting has continued at lower intensity in the years since with no single named source producing a count covering that longer period, so this atlas's range is understood as a floor for the war's full toll rather than a complete total. The conflict is widely reported in Christian-versus-Muslim terms (the mostly Muslim Seleka coalition against the mostly Christian and animist anti-Balaka militias), a framing the UN Commission itself used operationally to describe targeting patterns, though the Commission's own report also attributes the violence substantially to a collapse of state authority and pre-existing regional and ethnic grievance that religious identity came to mark rather than cause outright.

Source Final Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic, International Commission of Inquiry on the Central African Republic tier 1

Ceremonial Order and Magic, Seven Rays

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States Alice Bailey's seven ray teaching, transmitted through Djwal Khul, fixed this ray's name and place as the seventh and last of the sequence; earlier Theosophical writers, Helena Blavatsky and Charles Leadbeater among them, had already sketched ray classifications of their own in less settled form, so which author's scheme is the true origin of this particular ray's naming is read differently by different students of the tradition.

Theosophical and post Theosophical writers do not agree on whether Alice Bailey systematized an existing Blavatsky and Leadbeater scheme or substantially reworked it into something new, and the tradition itself has never settled the question.

Source The Theosophical Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin tier 1

Cessation of the miraculous spiritual gifts, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

Affirmed as settled by the Reformed tradition broadly and by the Churches of Christ; Pentecostal and other continuationist Christians hold the opposite, so a comparison without this doctrine reads the two traditions as merely talking about different subjects when they in fact contradict each other.

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

Chachcha ਚ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief) tier 2

Chachcha ਚ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Historians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

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

Chalice of Valencia, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Cup Dating

Currently States Agate cup dated to the 2nd-1st centuries BC, eastern Mediterranean (Beltran 1960)

Antonio Beltran Martinez's El Santo Caliz de la Catedral de Valencia (1960) examines the agate cup venerated in Valencia Cathedral as the Holy Grail. Beltran's method is art-historical and archaeological dating of the cup itself, and he finds it is a genuine ancient vessel of a date plausible for the first century Near East, while noting no documentary or physical evidence demonstrates any link between this specific cup and Jesus's Last Supper beyond the medieval devotional tradition claiming one.

Source El Santo Caliz de la Catedral de Valencia, Antonio Beltran Martinez tier 1

Cham, Sacred Dances

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historical Origin

Currently States Traditional accounts trace the dance to the eighth century and to Padmasambhava, who is said to have subdued the local deities of Tibet and bound them to the protection of the teaching

According To Tibetan Buddhism

This is the tradition's own account of its origin. The surviving dance manuals are very much later, and scholarship cannot establish how much of the eighth century attribution is history. The atlas records the claim as the tradition makes it and does not assert it as fact.

Source Tibetan Religious Dances: Tibetan Text and Annotated Translation of the Chams Yig, Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz tier 1