Disputed Statements

Hesychasm, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 400

Hesychasm's contemplative roots trace to the Desert Fathers of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism from around the fourth century, the earliest period represented among the Philokalia's own source texts, while the practice is attested by that name only from around the eleventh century at Mount Athos, with its doctrinal defense by Gregory Palamas following in the 1330s and 1340s. No single date captures both the deep contemplative lineage and the moment the named, organized tradition emerges.

Source The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware (Kallistos Ware) tier 2

Hesychasm, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1100

Hesychasm's contemplative roots trace to the Desert Fathers of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism from around the fourth century, the earliest period represented among the Philokalia's own source texts, while the practice is attested by that name only from around the eleventh century at Mount Athos, with its doctrinal defense by Gregory Palamas following in the 1330s and 1340s. No single date captures both the deep contemplative lineage and the moment the named, organized tradition emerges.

Source The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware (Kallistos Ware) tier 2

Hevajra Tantra, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition Start Year

Currently States 750

David Snellgrove's critical study, the first full Western translation of the text, concludes the Hevajra Tantra existed in its present form by the end of the eighth century CE. Ronald Davidson's later scholarship places its composition closer to the late ninth or early tenth century in eastern India, while Farrow and Menon's study favors the eighth to ninth century in the Bengal region; the three readings overlap only loosely, and no single date commands agreement among specialists in the Yogini class tantras.

Source The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study (David Snellgrove), David L. Snellgrove tier 1

Hevajra Tantra, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States 950

David Snellgrove's critical study, the first full Western translation of the text, concludes the Hevajra Tantra existed in its present form by the end of the eighth century CE. Ronald Davidson's later scholarship places its composition closer to the late ninth or early tenth century in eastern India, while Farrow and Menon's study favors the eighth to ninth century in the Bengal region; the three readings overlap only loosely, and no single date commands agreement among specialists in the Yogini class tantras.

Source The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study (David Snellgrove), David L. Snellgrove tier 1

Hezekiah, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States Removed the high places and concentrated legitimate sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple

According To Judaism

The Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition (Macmillan Reference, 2007), examines the religious reform attributed to King Hezekiah, reported in Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah, against the excavated archaeological evidence at Tel Arad and Tel Beersheba. The encyclopedia's method is comparative textual and archaeological, and it finds historians differ over how much of the reform belongs to Hezekiah himself and how much is projected back onto him from King Josiah's later, better documented reform, while the excavated evidence, though consistent with a centralizing religious measure, cannot be tied to either king's decree specifically.

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

Hieros Gamos, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Largely abandoned as a comparative category

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) distinguishes what the cuneiform evidence supports from what was built on it: the Mesopotamian sacred-marriage rite is attested in Sumerian hymns and ritual texts and is not in doubt, but the Frazerian generalisation built on it, that a fertility rite of this shape was a widespread ancient institution, has not survived examination of the wider evidence. That a Mesopotamian king physically enacted the marriage with a priestess is asserted by older scholarship and rejected by recent work, because the cuneiform sources that survive are hymns and ritual texts that describe no such act.

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

Hieros Gamos, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that hieros gamos, sacred marriage, was applied broadly in earlier comparative religion to ritual and mythic sacred marriage across many cultures. More recent scholarship, examining the specific textual and ritual evidence tradition by tradition rather than assuming a single underlying rite, treats the category more cautiously, questioning whether the cases grouped under it share enough in common to be treated as one phenomenon.

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

Hill Cumorah, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether this drumlin is the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon is unsettled within the movement. Camps: the traditional New York identification, used locally from the 1830s and assumed for a century; and the two-Cumorahs position, held by scholars working from Mesoamerican settings, placing the book's Cumorah far to the south and treating the New York hill as a distinct place of the same name.

According To The Latter Day Saint movement

Source By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, Terryl L. Givens tier 1

Hinduism Arrives In Cambodia With The Kingdom Of Funan, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 100

Chinese historical accounts place Funan's establishment around the first century CE; the source separately notes archaeological evidence for settlement in the region reaching back to the fourth century BCE, but that earlier settlement has no documented Hindu connection, so it is not used as this event's atom.

Source Funan (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Hirohito, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States How much the 1946 rescript actually renounced

John W. Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W. W. Norton, 1999) examines Emperor Hirohito's 1946 Humanity Declaration, drafted under American occupation, against its actual wording. Dower's method is close textual and historical analysis of the declaration's drafting process, and he sets out two camps built from the same document: one reads the wording as narrow, denying only that Hirohito was an akitsumikami, a deity manifest in the world, while leaving the imperial house's descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu and the throne's sacral character otherwise standing; the other holds that this narrow claim was precisely the one the wartime state had rested its authority on, so denying it emptied the imperial institution's wartime ideological content regardless of what else the declaration left standing. Both camps agree the document was drafted under occupation conditions and that its English text circulated before the Japanese.

Source Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower tier 1

Hitbonenut, Practices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1773

Its own text says the practice gives Chabad Hasidism its name and is its central discipline. Sources disagree on the exact year Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi formally founded Chabad as a distinct branch of Hasidism, with 1772, 1773 and 1775 all cited by reputable references; 1773 is used here as a middle point, not a settled date.

Source Tanya (Likkutei Amarim), Shneur Zalman of Liady tier 1

Hlautbolli, the Sacrificial Bowl, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Account

Currently States Whether the account preserves pre-Christian practice or is a literary construction modelled on the Christian liturgy is disputed

Hlautbolli, the sacrificial bowl used to catch blood in accounts of Norse pagan ritual, is described chiefly in medieval Icelandic sources written down after Iceland's conversion to Christianity, raising the question of how much reflects genuine inherited pre-Christian practice. John Lindow's Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001) records one camp holding that specific vocabulary preserved in skaldic verse, an older and more conservatively transmitted poetic form than the prose sagas, anchors a core of genuinely inherited pagan tradition within the later prose descriptions. The opposing camp holds the unusually orderly, systematic detail of the described ritual is itself evidence of a Christian author's literary imagination constructing a plausible pagan rite rather than transmitting a remembered one. The method is philological and literary-historical, weighing the skaldic vocabulary's transmission history against the narrative structure of the prose accounts embedding it. Because the same texts supply evidence for both readings, the origin account remains genuinely disputed.

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

Hoa Hao Buddhism, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Adherents Today

Currently States Vietnam's government reports roughly one point three million registered Hoa Hao Buddhists, concentrated in the Mekong Delta; Hoa Hao's own expatriate and diaspora organizations report considerably higher counts, in some estimates several times that figure. The gap reflects both differing definitions of membership and continuing distrust between the state recognized church and independent Hoa Hao communities.

Two genuinely different countings, an official registration figure and community self-reported estimates, rather than a single number obscured by bad sourcing.

Source Hoa Hao Buddhism in the Course of Vietnam's History, Nguyen Long Thanh Nam (translated by Sergei Blagov) tier 3

Holy Grail, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Physical Claimants

Currently States Santo Caliz (Valencia), Sacro Catino (Genoa), Nanteos Cup (Wales)

Joe Nickell's Relics of the Christ (2007) surveys the several physical objects claimed across European churches as the Holy Grail, including the Valencia chalice and other candidate vessels. Nickell's method is comparative historical and forensic examination of each object's documented custodial history against the biblical and legendary accounts of the Grail, and he finds none of the surviving candidate objects has been authenticated as the vessel of the Last Supper by independent physical or documentary evidence.

Source Relics of the Christ, Joe Nickell tier 1

Holy Hell, Screen Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Reception

Currently States Reviewers split on the film's craft even while agreeing on the strength of its subject: the Boston Globe treated it as a substantial account of the group's arc, while The Film Stage graded it C-, calling it "a disappointing misfire" hampered by excessive voiceover and pacing despite capturing, in its own words, "a documentary villain for the ages."

Recorded as debated because the two cited reviews reach opposite verdicts on the film's craft; neither is treated as the deciding account.

Source Sundance Review: Holy Hell (The Film Stage) tier 2

Holy Spirit, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son. The Latin addition of the Filioque to the creed divides the Western churches from the Orthodox East to this day.

According To Christianity

Timothy Ware, writing as Bishop Kallistos Ware, in The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1993), sets out the Filioque dispute over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, examining the Latin creedal addition's ninth century Western origin against the unaltered Eastern creed. The Catholic West and most Protestant confessions hold the double procession, filioque; the Orthodox East holds procession from the Father alone and rejects the Western addition as both theologically wrong and uncanonically inserted into an ecumenical creed without an ecumenical council's consent. Each camp holds its own reading to be the faith of the undivided early church, and Ware records that a millennium of theological dialogue has narrowed the tone of the dispute but not closed the underlying question.

Source The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware (Kallistos Ware) tier 2

Holy Tunic of Argenteuil, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Blood Type

Currently States AB (reported; the grouping also claimed for the Shroud of Turin)

Two separate forensic literatures examine blood residue on these two textile relics and reach the same limit by different routes. Joe Nickell's Relics of the Christ (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) surveys forensic and pathological examination of Christian relics generally, including the Holy Tunic of Argenteuil, and finds that determining blood type from centuries-old, handled and previously restored cloth is compromised by degraded and contaminated material and by pigments such as iron oxide that can mimic blood under simple testing. Mark Guscin's The Oviedo Cloth (Lutterworth Press, 1998), a documentary and scientific study of the Sudarium specifically, likewise reports that the blood-type findings claimed for it rest on serological testing whose reliability on aged, degraded bloodstains outside a controlled forensic setting is itself disputed. Both studies conclude that blood typing an aged relic cannot be verified to ordinary forensic standard, which is why the same note applies to both objects.

Source Relics of the Christ, Joe Nickell tier 1

Holy Tunic of Argenteuil, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Rival Claim

Currently States The Holy Coat of Trier is a competing seamless-robe relic

Joe Nickell's Relics of the Christ (2007) compares the Holy Tunic venerated at Argenteuil in France against the rival Holy Robe venerated at Trier in Germany, both claimed as the seamless garment of John 19:23. Nickell's comparative method, examining both custodial histories against the same single biblical garment they each claim to be, finds that at most one of the two can be the actual garment described in John, since the gospel describes a single seamless robe rather than two.

Source Relics of the Christ, Joe Nickell tier 1

Homer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition (Hornblower, Spawforth and Eidinow, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012) records that antiquity itself could not agree where Homer, the name attached to the Iliad and the Odyssey, was born: several Ionian cities claimed him, with Chios and Smyrna the two claims that persisted most strongly, a dispute the ancient world never resolved and that modern scholarship, still divided over whether one poet or an oral tradition of singers lies behind the name, has no independent means of settling either.

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

Homer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The Homeric question, unresolved since antiquity, asks whether the name traditionally placed in the eighth century BC belongs to one poet, to two, or to a tradition of oral singers whose work was fixed in writing only later; the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, Hornblower, Spawforth and Eidinow, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012) notes that no ancient life of Homer carries any independent authority.

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