Disputed Statements

Chapter 81, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Position in the Canon

Currently States Chapter 81 of 81, in the De part of the received text

Robert G. Henricks's translation (Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching, A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts, Ballantine Books, 1989) compared the received chapter numbering against two excavated manuscript witnesses: the Mawangdui silk texts, recovered from a Han-dynasty tomb near Changsha and dated to the second century BCE, and the Guodian bamboo slips, excavated near Jingmen and dated to around 300 BCE. The comparison found the Mawangdui texts place the De material before the Dao material, reversing the received order, and that the Guodian slips hold only about a third of the received material with no division into the received chapters at all. Because the received numbering appears in neither older witness, Henricks's philological comparison concludes it is a later editorial convenience rather than a feature of how the text was composed, which is why the atlas treats the chapter number as a reliable citation address and not as a claim about original structure.

Source Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching, A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts, Robert G. Henricks tier 1

Chapter 9, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Position in the Canon

Currently States Chapter 9 of 81, in the Dao part of the received text

Robert G. Henricks's translation (Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching, A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts, Ballantine Books, 1989) compared the received chapter numbering against two excavated manuscript witnesses: the Mawangdui silk texts, recovered from a Han-dynasty tomb near Changsha and dated to the second century BCE, and the Guodian bamboo slips, excavated near Jingmen and dated to around 300 BCE. The comparison found the Mawangdui texts place the De material before the Dao material, reversing the received order, and that the Guodian slips hold only about a third of the received material with no division into the received chapters at all. Because the received numbering appears in neither older witness, Henricks's philological comparison concludes it is a later editorial convenience rather than a feature of how the text was composed, which is why the atlas treats the chapter number as a reliable citation address and not as a claim about original structure.

Source Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching, A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts, Robert G. Henricks tier 1

Charity, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Two dates fold into this entry. The Pauline theological triad of faith, hope and charity is stated in the first century, at 1 Corinthians 13, a letter commonly dated to the mid 50s CE. Charity's place as a contrary virtue against greed follows the later Psychomachia of Prudentius, written around 400 CE, with the pairing itself only fixed afterward in medieval catechesis.

Source The Holy Bible, Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Charlemagne, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Not established. Historians most often propose Herstal or Jupille, near Liege in present day Belgium, matching the region of his father Pepin's own family estates; Aachen, his later principal residence, has also been proposed. No contemporary record fixes a single site.

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

Charlemagne, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 748

The source marks this year circa, 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

Charlemagne, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 814

The source marks this year circa, 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

Charles Honorton, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The autoganzfeld series, built to the automation and randomisation standards he and Ray Hyman jointly specified in 1986 and published with Daryl Bem in 1994

Daryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton published Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer in Psychological Bulletin in 1994, a meta-analysis of ganzfeld telepathy experiments Honorton's laboratory had run under an automated protocol designed to answer earlier methodological criticism of the technique. Proponents of the psi hypothesis treat the series as meeting the specific methodological standard the field's critics had set before the experiments were run, which is why it is presented as evidence rather than as a raw claim, while critics dispute that the standard was actually met in practice, and later meta-analyses attempting to replicate the ganzfeld effect with subsequent studies disagree with one another about whether the effect holds up.

Source Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer, Daryl J. Bem and Charles Honorton tier 1

Charles Webster Leadbeater, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Allegations of misconduct toward boys in his care led to two separate periods of formal separation from the Theosophical Society, in 1906 and the early 1920s; his reinstatement each time under Annie Besant remains a contested part of his history

Source Charles Webster Leadbeater (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Charon, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Whether Charon's name derives, as one ancient tradition held, from charopos, a Greek word for fierce, gleaming eyes, or from some other unresolved root modern philologists have not settled.

Ancient sources offer no settled etymology for Charon's name. One ancient tradition connects it to charopos, a Greek word for the fierce, gleaming brightness of the eyes, fitting his grim appearance, though modern philologists regard this as folk etymology rather than the word's actual origin, which remains unresolved and is not addressed by any surviving primary source with authority on the question.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Charon, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Ancient sources disagree on which river Charon ferries the dead across. Some name the Styx, the river by which the gods swore their most solemn oaths, while others, including Virgil in the Aeneid, place him instead on the Acheron, the river of woe, and later poets sometimes merge or confuse the two waterways rather than settling on a single one.

Source Greek Religion, Walter Burkert tier 1

Chastity, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Chastity's literary ancestor is the Psychomachia of Prudentius, written around 400 CE, where Pudicitia defeats Sodomita Libido, the poem's nearest approach to chastity opposing lust. The formal pairing of chastity against lust as one of the seven contrary virtues was fixed only later, in medieval catechetical teaching with no single author or date.

Source The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature, Morton W. Bloomfield tier 1

Chatat (The Purification Offering), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Literal Meaning

Currently States Formed from a verb stem read either as to sin or as to decontaminate, which is the whole of the dispute over the class

According To Judaism

The Hebrew noun chatat, from the root ch-t-a, has two competing philological derivations that produce two different English translations and two different accounts of the offering's target. Jacob Milgrom's Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (1991) derives the noun from the intensive verbal stem of the same root, meaning to purge or decontaminate, making the class a purification offering whose target is the sanctuary's accumulated impurity. The older reading, retained in standard English translations as sin offering, derives it instead from the ordinary simple verb meaning to sin, making the offering's target the offerer's own moral fault. Jonathan Klawans, in later scholarship on the historiography of the debate, has argued the framing of the question itself, treating purification and atonement as necessarily opposed, has been shaped by modern assumptions about ritual predating either reading. The method is comparative Semitic philology, tracing the root's occurrences across the Hebrew Bible and cognate languages, and because the root supports both derivations grammatically, the meaning remains genuinely debated.

Source Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom tier 1

Chatat (The Purification Offering), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Purpose

Currently States To repair a breach of holiness. On the dominant modern reading the blood removes impurity from the sanctuary rather than guilt from the offerer.

According To Judaism

The chatat, conventionally translated sin offering, is prescribed in Leviticus both for cases of unintentional wrongdoing and for cases, such as after childbirth or a bodily discharge, where no wrong has been committed at all. Jacob Milgrom's Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (1991) argues this pattern is the strongest evidence that the offering's true purpose is purifying the sanctuary of accumulated ritual impurity rather than atoning for a moral fault, since impurity without wrongdoing still requires the same offering. Against that reading, the same passages repeatedly use Hebrew vocabulary conventionally rendered as forgiveness, language that sits more naturally with an offense needing pardon than a physical space needing purification, which Milgrom identifies as the strongest evidence on the opposing side. The method is philological and text-critical, weighing the same Levitical passages' vocabulary and prescribed occasions against each of the two proposed purposes. Because both the childbirth and discharge cases and the forgiveness vocabulary sit within the identical legislation, the purpose remains debated on the text's own internal evidence.

Source Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom tier 1

Chavin Religion, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -900

Chavin de Huantar's sanctuary flourished from around 900 to 200 BCE and the site's own building phases are radiocarbon dated within that span, but archaeologists date the sanctuary's use across a range rather than a single founding year, and ceremonial activity at the site may predate the monumental phase this range describes. 900 BCE is recorded as the conventional early bound of that range, not a settled founding date.

Source Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization, Richard L. Burger tier 1

Cheetah, 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

Cheondoism, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Adherents Today

Currently States South Korean self-reported figures fell sharply, from roughly one point one three million in a 2005 count to about sixty five thousand in the 2015 national census. North Korea's own state statistics report several million adherents, treating Cheondoism as a state-favoured indigenous religion organized through the Chondoist Chongu Party, while outside assessments such as the US State Department's have put practising numbers there far lower, in the range of tens of thousands.

A genuine split between self-report and outside assessment on both sides of the Korean border, not a single obscured figure.

Source Eastern Learning and the Heavenly Way: The Tonghak and Chondogyo Movements and the Twilight of Korean Independence, Carl Young tier 1

Chernobog, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Debated

The familiar modern picture of Chernobog as the dark half of a good-versus-evil pair, opposed by a bright counterpart usually called Belobog, White God, in a Zoroastrian-style dualism, is a nineteenth century Romantic and folkloric reconstruction rather than a reading grounded in Helmold's own thin testimony or any other medieval source. Belobog is not independently attested in any primary record at all: the name surfaces only in early modern place-names and later folklore collection, centuries after Helmold, and specialists in Slavic religion generally treat the paired dualism as a modern scholarly and popular invention built out of Chernobog's ominous name rather than as a demonstrated feature of pre-Christian Slavic belief. This atlas records the one genuine attestation and names the popular dualism as a later construction rather than repeating it as settled fact.

Source The Slavs (Gimbutas), Marija Gimbutas tier 2

Chesed, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States A central ethical term throughout the Hebrew Bible from its earliest strata; its rabbinic systematization as one of the world's three foundations is attributed to Shimon HaTzaddik, traditionally placed in the early Second Temple period, within Pirkei Avot as compiled into the Mishnah around 200 CE.

Source The Mishnah: A New Translation, Jacob Neusner, trans. tier 1

Cheth ח, 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

Cheth ח, 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