Disputed Statements

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

K, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 2

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

Ka'ahumanu, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1768

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

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

Ka'ahumanu, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1832

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

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

Kaba'ir and Sagha'ir, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Which acts count as grave sins has no closed list. A hadith received in both of the two principal collections names seven destroying things; manuals working from a criterion instead enumerate into the hundreds.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (Brill, 2005), records that which acts count as grave sins, kaba'ir, has no closed list: a hadith received in both of the two principal Sunni hadith collections names seven destroying things, while legal manuals working from a criterion instead of a fixed list enumerate into the hundreds. The encyclopedia sets out two classical positions built from that same evidence: one confines the kaba'ir to the enumerated hadith list and treats the seven destroying things as definitive, the other treats that report as illustrative and defines a grave sin by criterion, as any act carrying a fixed legal penalty or an explicit threat of hellfire, curse or divine anger, a criterion applied in works such as Ibn Hajar al-Haytami's al-Zawajir to yield lists running to several hundred items.

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

Kabbalah Centre, New Religious Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Orthodox and mainstream Jewish religious authorities have repeatedly criticized the Centre for opening traditionally restricted Kabbalistic study to the general public and for selling branded consumer products in its name, while the Centre and its adherents describe this openness as making a valuable spiritual tradition accessible beyond its historical gatekeeping.

Reflects an active disagreement over whether popularizing a closed tradition is a legitimate broadening or a misrepresentation; both positions are held by identifiable communities and neither has been resolved by any outside authority.

Source The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, James R. Lewis (ed.) tier 1

Kabbalah Centre, New Religious Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States A former chief financial officer who left the organization in 2009 described the Kabbalah Centre as holding roughly 60 million US dollars in annual revenue, a 200 million US dollar real estate portfolio and a 60 million US dollar investment fund; separately, a US Internal Revenue Service inquiry examined the organization's roughly 260 million US dollars in total assets for possible personal use by the Berg family that controls it.

Figures come from a departed insider's own account and press reporting on an active IRS inquiry, not from an audited public filing; no confirmed current figure was found.

Source Celebrity-Studded Kabbalah Centre Under Tax Evasion Probe (NBC News/Reuters, 2010) tier 2

Kabir, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historically attested

The Encyclopedia of Hinduism, edited by Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (Routledge, 2008), records Kabir as a historical poet of Varanasi from a Muslim weaving community, established from the internal evidence of the poetry itself and later biographical tradition, while noting that the biography built up around him is legendary and that the corpus of verse attributed to his name grew for centuries after his death through oral and manuscript transmission.

Source Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.) tier 1