Disputed Statements

Hekhalot Rabbati, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States 900

Gershom Scholem's foundational study read the Hekhalot corpus as preserving a documented history of Jewish mysticism reaching back before medieval Kabbalah, and later scholarship building on his work generally places the core visionary material in the fourth to sixth century CE. The text as it survives carries later layers of magical adjuration added through the eighth to tenth century, and the earliest actual manuscript evidence, Cairo Genizah fragments, dates only to the ninth through twelfth century, so the received text reflects a long redactional history rather than a single date of composition.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Hel, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Scholars disagree about how much genuine pre-Christian belief stands behind Hel as described in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. Some read her as an authentic goddess of death attested independently in skaldic kennings, while others argue that Snorri, writing two centuries after Christianization, substantially personified the abstract Old Norse noun hel, meaning the grave or the state of death, turning a common noun into a named being for his own systematizing purposes.

Source Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States The True Cross relics are the fragments of wood venerated from the fourth century onward as remnants of the cross of the crucifixion, first associated with Helena's journey to Jerusalem by Ambrose of Milan in 395 and, within a generation of that journey, already reported being shown at Jerusalem by Cyril of Jerusalem; Drijvers's Helena Augusta (Brill, 1992) traces how fragments were distributed widely from Jerusalem and became the basis of the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Source Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Jan Willem Drijvers tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States Drijvers's Helena Augusta (Brill, 1992) dates the earliest surviving statement of the finding-of-the-cross legend to Ambrose of Milan's funeral oration for the emperor Theodosius in 395, more than sixty years after Helena's own journey to Jerusalem in the 320s and decades after Eusebius's silence on the point, placing the tradition's origin in the late fourth century rather than in Helena's own lifetime.

Source Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Jan Willem Drijvers tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States Jan Willem Drijvers's Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (E. J. Brill, 1992) notes that Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote at length about Helena's pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 320s and about Constantine's building program there, says nothing at all about her finding a cross, even though he is the fullest contemporary witness to the journey itself.

Source Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Jan Willem Drijvers tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 246

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

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 330

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

Helmut Schmidt, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States Electronic random number generators driven by radioactive decay, built at the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories and reported from 1969, the design that founded micro-psychokinesis research

Helmut Schmidt's Precognition of a Quantum Process (Journal of Parapsychology, 1969) reported testing whether subjects could predict which of several lamps a quantum-mechanically random electronic device, based on radioactive decay, would light next, above the rate chance would predict. Schmidt's apparatus, using genuine physical randomness rather than a pseudo-random algorithm, and his statistical method for scoring predictions against it are widely admired within the parapsychological literature as methodologically careful; the reported above-chance effect itself has not been accepted as demonstrating precognition outside the field, since independent physicists and psychologists have not treated the result as meeting the evidentiary bar extraordinary claims require.

Source Precognition of a Quantum Process, Helmut Schmidt tier 2

Henry Sidgwick, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The Census of Hallucinations, conducted with Eleanor Sidgwick, Alice Johnson, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore and reported in 1894

Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore and Alice Johnson published the Report on the Census of Hallucinations in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1894, surveying thousands of respondents about waking hallucinatory experiences and comparing their frequency, especially hallucinations of a specific person coinciding with that person's death, against a calculated chance baseline. The survey itself, its scale and its data collection, is a real and substantial piece of Victorian social-scientific work; the two elements later methodologists have criticised since its publication are the chance baseline's own assumptions about hallucination frequency in the general population and the survey's reliance on respondents' retrospective, unverified self-report of experiences often recalled years after the fact.

Source Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson tier 1

Hephaestus, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Hephaestus's name has no secure Greek etymology and is widely thought to be a pre-Greek loanword, though the exact source is unsettled.

Hephaestus's name has no secure Greek or Indo-European etymology, and specialists widely consider it a loanword from a pre-Greek Aegean language, though no single derivation has won general acceptance among scholars.

Source Greek Religion, Walter Burkert tier 1

Hercules (1997), Screen Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Subject Matter

Currently States Dramatizes the birth and heroic trial of Hercules within Greek myth, but rewrites the central relationships that Greek religious tradition uses to explain his suffering. In the myths preserved by ancient sources, Heracles is the illegitimate son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, and Hera's enduring hostility toward him, born of that adultery, later drives him to madness and the killing of his own family, a crime his famous labors exist to atone for. The film instead makes Zeus and Hera a devoted married couple and Hercules their legitimate son, drops the madness and the killing entirely, and reassigns Hera's traditional antagonism to Hades. It also has Hercules himself slay Medusa, a feat the myths credit to Perseus.

Vasillis Lambrinodakis, an antiquities expert at the University of Athens, said the studio should have changed the characters' names if it wanted this much freedom with them. Yiannis Tzedakis, director of antiquities at Greece's Culture Ministry, called the result a distorted portrayal of the Herculean myth and said plainly the film was not made for Greece. Disney itself distributed explanatory booklets at Greek screenings stating the film was not a lesson in mythology, an acknowledgment built into the release that its version and the version Greek tradition tells are not the same story. Sourced to the Guardian report carried by Deseret News, corroborated by Wikipedia's own reception section and by the Deseret News critique cataloguing the specific departures from the myths.

Source Smith, "Greek Viewers Hiss at Distortion of Myths in Disney's 'Hercules,'" The Guardian via Deseret News, 1997, Helena Smith tier 2

Hermann of Reichenau, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The Salve Regina and the Alma Redemptoris Mater are both traditionally ascribed to Hermann of Reichenau, known as Hermannus Contractus for the severe physical disability he lived with from birth in 1013 at the Benedictine monastery on Reichenau. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) treats neither ascription as certain.

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

Hermann of Reichenau, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Historians are almost equally divided between Saulgau and his father's castle at Altshausen, both in Swabia (present day Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany). He is also sometimes styled "Hermann of Vohringen" after a third place tied to his birth.

The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive's biography of Hermann of Reichenau, by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson (University of St Andrews, School of Mathematics and Statistics), reports historians genuinely split between two named birthplace traditions, both in Swabia: the town of Saulgau and the family castle at Altshausen. The archive's biographical entry adds that Hermann is sometimes styled Hermann of Vohringen after a third place tied to his birth, a detail the record preserves without resolving, and notes that neither of the two sources already cited elsewhere on this page settles which of the three locations is correct, since medieval biographical notice of him focuses on his scholarly and monastic career rather than his birth.

Source Hermann of Reichenau (MacTutor History of Mathematics biography), J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews tier 1

Herod Antipas, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -20

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date. The source gives no exact death year, only that he was alive after 39 CE.

Source Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, Flavius Josephus tier 2

Herod the Great, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States Named in the gospel of Matthew as ordering the killing of the male infants of Bethlehem

According To Christianity

Per Bilde's Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works, and Their Importance (Aarhus University Press, 1988) examines the Massacre of the Innocents, which appears in Matthew's Gospel alone, against Josephus's own first century catalogue of Herod's killings. Bilde's method is comparative source history, and he finds Josephus catalogues Herod's killings in detail, including of his own wife and sons, and does not mention the Bethlehem massacre; most historians, reading Matthew's account against its own narrative structure, read it as a literary parallel to the infancy of Moses rather than as reported history, while a minority argue a killing in a village Bethlehem's size would have been too small for Josephus to have recorded.

Source Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works, and Their Importance, Per Bilde tier 1

Herod the Great, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -73

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

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) tier 1

Herodotus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -484

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Herodotus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States -425

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Hesiod, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -750

Hesiod's exact dates are contested. Scholars generally place his active period between about 750 and 650 BCE, with ongoing disagreement over whether he wrote before or after Homer.

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

Hesiod, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States -650

Hesiod's exact dates are contested. Scholars generally place his active period between about 750 and 650 BCE, with ongoing disagreement over whether he wrote before or after Homer.

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