Disputed Statements

Juan Diego, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Stafford Poole's Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531 to 1797 (University of Arizona Press, 1995) examines the documentary record for the Juan Diego apparition tradition. Poole's historical method traces the tradition's appearance in print, and finds it cannot be traced behind the printed accounts of 1648 and 1649, over a century after the claimed 1531 events, and that Juan de Zumarraga, the bishop who appears in the story, never mentions it in his own surviving writings. Defenders hold that no paper trail is to be expected for an indigenous commoner of that generation and cite earlier documents, chief among them a pictorial manuscript dated 1548 which surfaced only in 1995 and whose own authenticity is itself disputed.

Source Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, Stafford Poole tier 1

Juan Diego, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States Traditionally 1474-1548

Stafford Poole's Our Lady of Guadalupe (1995) records that Juan Diego's traditional birth and death dates come bundled with the wider apparition tradition and rest on the same seventeenth century printed accounts whose reliability Poole's own documentary research disputes, rather than on any independent record of his life.

Source Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, Stafford Poole tier 1

Juan Diego, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Stafford Poole's Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (University of Arizona Press, 1995) records that the Guadalupe account places Juan Diego's home at Cuauhtitlan, in the valley of Mexico, some distance from Tepeyac where the 1531 apparition is said to have occurred; Poole's study, which argues that whether Juan Diego was historical at all is genuinely disputed since no sixteenth century document names him, notes this origin place, like the rest of his biography, rests entirely on accounts published only in 1648 and 1649.

Source Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, Stafford Poole tier 1

Juan Diego, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1474

The source calls this a traditional date rather than an independently fixed one.

Source Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, Stafford Poole tier 1

Juan Diego, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1548

The source calls this a traditional date rather than an independently fixed one.

Source Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, Stafford Poole tier 1

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The golem of Prague legend is attached to the name of Judah Loew ben Bezalel (about 1520 to 1609), the Maharal of Prague, only from the nineteenth century; Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) finds nothing in the Maharal's own lifetime or his own writings, including the Gevurot Hashem and the Netivot Olam, that connects him with it.

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel tier 1

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1520

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

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel tier 1

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1609

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

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel tier 1

Judaism Is Exiled To Babylon, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States -597

597 BCE is the standard academic date for the first deportation; rabbinic chronology, following the Seder Olam, places the Temple's destruction more than a century and a half later, at 423 or 403 BCE by its own reckoning, a gap this atlas names rather than resolves.

Source Babylonian Captivity (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Judaism Returns To Zion Under Cyrus, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States -538

538 BCE, the year after Cyrus captured Babylon; whether a specific decree naming Judah, as Ezra describes, is historical, or whether this reflects a broader Persian restoration policy the biblical account has narrowed to one nation, is a live and named scholarly disagreement.

Source Babylonian Captivity (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Judas Iscariot, 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 that if Iscariot is read as man of Kerioth, one of the disputed etymologies proposed for the byname, then Judas's origin place would be Kerioth in Judaea, which would make him the only one of the twelve apostles drawn from Judaea rather than Galilee, a reading that depends entirely on which disputed etymology for Iscariot is accepted.

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

Judas Iscariot, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition (F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) records that the etymology of Iscariot, the byname attached to Judas among the twelve apostles, is disputed: proposals connect it to a Hebrew or Aramaic phrase meaning man of Kerioth, naming a place of origin, to the Latin sicarius, a dagger man, linking him to a group of Jewish insurgents, and to other, less widely held readings, with no derivation commanding scholarly agreement.

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

Jude Thaddaeus, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Text

Currently States Traditionally credited with the New Testament Epistle of Jude, though the letter's own author identifies himself only as a brother of James, leaving the identification a matter of tradition rather than internal textual proof.

The epistle does not name itself as the work of an apostle, and scholars remain divided on whether its author is Jude the apostle himself, a namesake bearing the same name, or a later pseudonymous writer working under his name and reputation.

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

Julia Seton, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Her 1950 obituary in the Evening Star gives Chicago; The National (1918) and Who's Who New England (1909) instead record Schuyler County, Illinois.

Two contemporary records give incompatible birthplaces for Julia Seton: her own 1950 obituary in the Evening Star newspaper gives Chicago, Illinois, while The National, published in 1918 during her lifetime, and Who's Who in New England, published in 1909, both give Schuyler County, Illinois instead. Because the two earlier, contemporaneous sources agree with each other against the later obituary, and no biographer has examined the discrepancy in detail to determine which record reflects an error, the question of which Illinois location is correct remains unresolved rather than settled by the more recent source.

Source Julia Seton (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Julian of Norwich, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1342

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date. The source gives no exact death year, only that she was alive after 1416.

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

Junayd of Baghdad, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 830

Standard reference works place his birth around 830 CE; the sources disagree on the exact year, giving a range across roughly half a decade, so the figure recorded here is the conventional midpoint rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

June, Months of the Year

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Ovid stages a contest for Iunius in the sixth book of the Fasti: Juno claims the month, Juventas answers for the iuniores, the young, and Concordia for the joining of Romans and Sabines; the poet declines to judge

Juno against the iuniores is an argument the Romans themselves conducted; Ovid presents the claimants without deciding, and the derivation remains open.

Source Fasti, Ovid tier 1

Justice, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Spans several centuries. Named among the four virtues in Plato's Republic in the fourth century BCE, taken up by Aristotle and the Stoics, and given the name cardinal only later, by Ambrose of Milan in the late fourth century CE. Its classical scholastic treatment follows later still, in Aquinas's thirteenth century Summa Theologiae.

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

Justinian I, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 482

The source marks this year circa, 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

Justinian I, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 565

The source marks this year circa, 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