Disputed Statements

Repatriation to Africa, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether repatriation is first a mental act, the throwing off of the Babylon account of who one is, with physical return as its completion, or whether the literal return is the demand and the spiritual reading a retreat from it. The argument is live within the movement and cuts across its houses.

Source Rastafari: Roots and Ideology, Barry Chevannes tier 1

Repentance, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) compares how Catholic and Orthodox practice channel repentance through confession to a priest and absolution, while the Reformation churches retained confession in reduced forms while denying a priest is necessary for forgiveness. Islam's tawba has no equivalent institution at all, unmediated between the person and God, and Judaism's teshuvah is likewise unmediated with respect to God but adds, in the rabbinic formulation, that an offence against another person is not forgiven by God until the injured party has been reconciled, a structural difference the encyclopedia records as cutting against reading repentance as simply a transaction with the divine.

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

Res (Ra) ረ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

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

Resh ר, 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

Resh ר, 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

Rhea, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Rhea's name has no secure Greek etymology and is widely considered Pre-Greek in origin, like several other early Titan names.

Rhea's name, like several early Greek Titan names, has no secure Greek etymology and is often considered Pre-Greek in origin. Proposed connections to Greek roots for flowing or ease have not won general acceptance, and specialists treat the name as unexplained.

Source Greek Religion, Walter Burkert tier 1

Rhode Island, States & Territories

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Commonly traced either to the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block's description of a reddish island, roodt eylandt, or to a resemblance early explorers saw to the Greek island of Rhodes; no single account is settled.

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

Rhonda Byrne, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1951

Sources give her birth year as either 1945 or 1951, a discrepancy that runs across her own public biography as an Australian television writer and producer; the more widely repeated figure, 1951, the one her own most consulted reference gives, is recorded here, but no birth record has been found to settle the disagreement between the two years.

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

Richard Hodgson, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Notable Publication

Currently States The 1885 report to the Society for Psychical Research concluding that the Mahatma letters were written by Helena Blavatsky and confederates

Richard Hodgson and the Committee of the Society for Psychical Research published their Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Phenomena Connected with the Theosophical Society in the Society's Proceedings in 1885, concluding after handwriting analysis of Theosophical Society correspondence that Helena Blavatsky had forged the letters she claimed came from Mahatma spirit-masters. Vernon Harrison's 1986 re-examination, published by the same Society, applied more current forensic handwriting standards to the same original letters and argued Hodgson's 1885 handwriting analysis was methodologically unsound. The Society published Harrison's critique without formally withdrawing the original 1885 report, leaving both documents in its own published record as competing findings.

Source Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Phenomena Connected with the Theosophical Society, Richard Hodgson and the Committee of the Society for Psychical Research tier 1

Richard Hodgson, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Critic

Currently States Vernon Harrison, a specialist in questioned documents, whose 1986 paper argued Hodgson had reasoned from a conclusion reached early and had misapplied handwriting comparison

Vernon Harrison's J'Accuse: An Examination of the Hodgson Report of 1885 (Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1986) re-examined the original handwriting samples behind Hodgson's 1885 conclusion that Blavatsky forged the Mahatma letters, applying forensic document examination standards Harrison argued were more rigorous than those available to Hodgson in 1885. Harrison's method was direct comparative handwriting analysis of the original letters, and neither his critique nor Hodgson's original report is regarded by the Society that published both as having settled the matter, since each relies on the examiner's own expert judgment applied to the same ambiguous handwriting evidence.

Source J'Accuse: An Examination of the Hodgson Report of 1885, Vernon Harrison tier 2

Richard Hodgson, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The eighteen-year investigation of Leonora Piper in Boston, using private detectives and anonymous sitters, which found no fraud and which converted Hodgson to belief in survival

The Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia entry on Leonora Piper documents Richard Hodgson's own extended investigation of her mediumship, in which he concluded, after ruling out fraud and normal information-gathering to his own satisfaction, that her results indicated genuine communication with the deceased. Hodgson's conclusion is not the consensus reading among later researchers; sceptical accounts, developed through the same comparative study of cold-reading technique used to explain other mediums' results, attribute Piper's apparent successes to skilled cold reading and to information unintentionally supplied by sitters themselves during sittings, rather than to the paranormal explanation Hodgson's own investigation favoured.

Source Leonora Piper (Psi Encyclopedia), Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research) tier 2

Richard Hodgson, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1855

Biographical accounts of Hodgson consistently place his birth in 1855, in Melbourne, Australia, though no single primary record fixes the year with the same certainty as his sudden death while playing handball in Boston in 1905.

Source Our History, Society for Psychical Research tier 2

Richard Wiseman, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Notable Publication

Currently States The 1999 meta-analysis with Julie Milton finding no overall effect across thirty ganzfeld studies conducted after the autoganzfeld series

Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman's Does Psi Exist? Lack of Replication of an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer (Psychological Bulletin, 1999) statistically pooled thirty ganzfeld telepathy studies conducted after Bem and Honorton's original 1994 meta-analysis and found no overall effect across them. A later pooling by Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio, covering studies from 1992 to 2008 using a different set of inclusion criteria, reported a positive effect across that period; the two research teams disagree specifically about which individual studies should be included in a meta-analytic pool at all, a methodological dispute that accounts for much of why their conclusions differ from the same broad body of underlying research.

Source Does Psi Exist? Lack of Replication of an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer, Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman tier 1

Richard Wiseman, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Test Result

Currently States Contested

Ray Hyman's Testing Natasha (Skeptical Inquirer, 2005) reviewed a controlled test of a claimed case of anomalous animal perception, in which the subject scored four correct results out of seven trials. Hyman's statistical method compared that result against both the chance expectation for the task and the specific success criterion both the proponent and the sceptical investigators had agreed in advance would count as a positive result. Four of seven trials correct is above chance expectation but below the pre-agreed criterion for success, and each side has read that same ambiguous outcome differently, one crediting it as suggestive despite falling short of the bar, the other treating the pre-agreed criterion as decisive and the result as a failure to meet it.

Source Testing Natasha, Ray Hyman tier 2

Richard Wiseman, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Test Result Detail

Currently States Ray Hyman's Testing Natasha (Skeptical Inquirer, 2005) records the pre-agreed protocol of the 2004 televised test of Natasha Demkina's claimed diagnostic vision, designed jointly by Hyman, Andrew Skolnick and Richard Wiseman, the British psychologist and former professional magician who was one of the investigators: Demkina was asked to match seven volunteers to their real medical conditions, with a threshold of five correct matches out of seven agreed in advance, and Hyman's own account records she achieved four, below the threshold both sides had accepted before the test began.

Source Testing Natasha, Ray Hyman tier 2

Rimonim, the Torah Finials, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States The pair kept in the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca is generally taken to be the earliest surviving European rimonim, and specialists differ over whether they were made in Majorca or in Sicily

Rimonim, the ornamental finials placed on the wooden rollers of a Torah scroll, survive from the medieval period in forms scholars attribute to specific regional silversmithing workshops based on their decorative style and metalworking technique. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (2007), records that art historians of medieval Jewish silver argue for both a Majorcan and a Sicilian workshop origin for certain surviving examples, each attribution built from comparing the finials' decorative motifs and construction against other securely attributed metalwork from each region. The method is art-historical and technical, comparing surviving stylistic and metallurgical features against documented regional workshop output, since the finials themselves typically carry no maker's mark naming their origin. Because the comparative material from both regions shows genuine stylistic overlap in this period, and no signed parallel has settled the question, both attributions remain argued in the current literature.

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

Ro ⲣ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

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

Roman Imperial Cult, Practices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

An older reading treated the eastern cults as flattery and the Roman forms as constitutional politeness. Price argued instead that the rites were the available language for representing imperial power, and that asking whether participants believed emperors were gods imports a modern question. Both readings remain in use.

Source Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor, Simon R. F. Price tier 1

Roman Judaea, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States The ancient historian Josephus reports that in 54 BCE the Roman general Crassus removed 2,000 talents in coin and a further 8,000 talents' worth of gold, some 10,000 talents in all, from the Second Temple's treasury in Jerusalem on his way to campaign against Parthia. Modern scholarship, surveyed by John W. Welch, treats Josephus's raw figures with caution rather than accepting them as precise, while agreeing that the episode attests to a Temple treasury of substantial wealth.

Settled: ancient sources agree the Second Temple held a large treasury and that Crassus seized a major sum from it in 54 BCE. Open: whether Josephus's specific totals, 2,000 talents in coin and 8,000 talents' worth of gold, are literal figures or rhetorically inflated is not resolved; modern historians differ on how much weight to place on the raw numbers rather than on whether the Temple was wealthy.

Source Herod's Wealth, John W. Welch tier 1

Romania, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The state part funds the clergy of eighteen recognised denominations under a 2006 law that also creates lower tiers of religious association; restitution of Greek Catholic property confiscated in 1948 remains largely unresolved in the courts.

Romania's 2006 law on religious freedom and denominations state-funds the clergy of eighteen recognised religious denominations while creating lower, lesser-funded tiers of religious association for groups not meeting the recognition threshold. Separately, and still working through Romanian courts, restitution of Greek Catholic (Eastern Catholic) church property confiscated by the Communist state in 1948, when the Greek Catholic Church was banned and its property transferred largely to the Romanian Orthodox Church, remains largely unresolved: individual restitution cases continue to be litigated property by property, decades after the Church's legal status was restored following the fall of Communism in 1989. The State Department's report records both the funding tier system and the unresolved restitution as current features of Romania's religious landscape. The restitution question has not been resolved because it requires case-by-case judicial determination of specific properties' history and current occupancy, a slow process no single ruling could close for all affected properties at once.

Source International Religious Freedom Report, United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom tier 1