Disputed Statements

Mansur al-Hallaj, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 858

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate 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

Mansur al-Hallaj, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 922

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate 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

Manvantara, Yugas (World Ages)

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States Some Puranic king lists give the fourteen Manus and their manvantaras in a different order or with different associated deities from the scheme most commonly followed.

The various Puranas do not fully agree with one another on the list of fourteen Manus, the deities and sages assigned to each manvantara, or the order in which the ages are named, disagreements among the texts that the tradition itself has never reconciled into one single canonical sequence, so any one Purana's account is best read as a version of the scheme rather than the whole of it.

Source Vishnu Purana, Anonymous tier 1

Mappo (The Age of the Dharma's Decline), Ages

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Proposed Dating

Currently States Placed variously by Chinese calculation from the sixth century onward; the Japanese reckoning most widely adopted, and the one the atlas records as a start year below, sets it at 1052.

Chinese calculations, worked out from the sixth century onward, placed the onset of this last age variously; the Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools set it at the year 1052, the date on which those schools' distinctive practices are premised, but the tradition as a whole holds no single settled year.

Source Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, Jan Nattier tier 1

Mappo (The Age of the Dharma's Decline), Ages

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Proposed Dating Start Year

Currently States 1052

The Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools; Chinese calculations before it placed the transition variously, and the tradition as a whole holds no single settled year.

Source Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, Jan Nattier tier 1

Mappo (The Latter Age of the Dharma), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the scheme describes the actual situation, so that reliance on one's own effort becomes self-deception, or is a warning against complacency that leaves practice unchanged. Honen and Shinran took the first reading, and Dogen rejected the reasoning outright on the ground that the dharma is not weakened by the calendar.

Source Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, Jan Nattier tier 1

Maqlu, Incantations, Spells & Curses

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Named Target

Currently States The kassaptu, the witch, named by role and never as an identified person in the text

Whether the series was performed against real people who had been accused, in a society whose law provided for witchcraft accusations, or as therapy for a sufferer with no defendant in view, is argued both ways. The text itself names no one, which is consistent with either reading.

Source The Magical Ceremony Maqlu: A Critical Edition, Tzvi Abusch tier 1

Mar Saba Letter, Textual Witnesses

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Authenticated

Currently States Whether the letter is a genuine copy of a work of Clement of Alexandria or a modern forgery has been argued in print for over fifty years. Morton Smith, Scott G. Brown and Charles Hedrick have defended it; Stephen C. Carlson, Peter Jeffery and Francis Watson have argued it is a modern composition, in Carlson's case that Smith himself wrote it.

A genuine dispute with identifiable camps, arguing from the handwriting, the Greek style, the content and the circumstances of the find. Neither side has produced a decisive argument, and the usual physical tests have never been available to either.

Source Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Morton Smith tier 1

Marabout, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States French colonial administration applied the word to almost any Muslim religious figure it dealt with, and that flattening still colours the outside literature

According To Colonial ethnography

Historians of the colonial archive read the term as substantially an administrative category; specialists on the orders themselves argue there is a real indigenous usage underneath it. Both positions are held in the current literature.

Source The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham tier 1

Marcel Griaule, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Whether the Dogon esoteric cosmology Griaule published reflects Dogon tradition or an artifact of his method

Walter E. A. van Beek's Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule (Current Anthropology, 1991) returned to the Dogon communities Griaule had studied decades earlier and conducted fresh ethnographic fieldwork specifically to check Griaule's published cosmology, centred on his informant Ogotemmeli, against what Dogon people themselves currently held. Van Beek's fieldwork found no living knowledge of Ogotemmeli's cosmology among the Dogon he worked with; defenders of the Griaule school reply that esoteric knowledge in Dogon religion is by design unevenly distributed among initiates, and that van Beek's restudy, conducted a generation later in different villages, may simply not have reached anyone still holding it. The controversy remains open because neither side's fieldwork can rule out the other's explanation.

Source Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule, Walter E. A. van Beek tier 1

Marcion, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Taught that the creator god of the Hebrew scriptures, just but harsh and changeable, was a lesser being distinct from the previously unknown, purely good Father revealed by Christ, and rejected the Hebrew Bible as scripture for Christians on that basis.

Tertullian's Against Marcion (Adversus Marcionem), written to refute Marcion's teaching, is one of the two chief sources through which Marcion's own position survives, since his Antitheses and his edited canon do not survive independently and are known only through Tertullian's and Irenaeus's hostile quotation and summary. The church that excommunicated Marcion around 144 CE at Rome held, against him, that the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ are the same God and that the Hebrew scriptures remain authoritative for Christians, a position Tertullian's treatise defends point by point against Marcion's teaching that they were different and opposed deities. Because Marcion's own sustained argument does not survive, his theology is reconstructed from what his opponents chose to quote in order to refute it.

Source Against Marcion (Adversus Marcionem), Tertullian tier 1

Marcion, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 85

The source gives this year as about, 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

Marcion, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 160

The source gives this year as about, 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

Maria Lionza, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

Devotees and popular tradition tell several competing legends of a historical origin, most commonly an indigenous chieftain's daughter in colonial-era Yaracuy, but no independent historical record confirms any single account, and scholars including Roger Canals treat her chiefly as a devotional and legendary figure whose cult crystallized over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than a documented historical person.

Source A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of Maria Lionza (Canals), Roger Canals tier 1

Marid, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Classical and folk sources disagree on how marid relates to the other named jinn classes, ifrit and shaitan among them: some treat marid as simply the strongest individuals within any of those classes, others as a wholly separate kind, and the Quran and hadith literature never settle the question because they use these words descriptively rather than as a fixed taxonomy.

Marie Anne Lenormand, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The Lenormand card deck bearing her name was first published by a German manufacturer in 1846, three years after her death, and does not reflect a system she herself designed or is known to have used

Source Marie Anne Lenormand (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Marjoram, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States From Old French majorane and medieval Latin majorana, whose own deeper root is unresolved, with proposed but unproven links to Latin major, "greater", and to a lost Mediterranean source word.

According To A Modern Herbal

Majorana's ultimate source is not settled among etymologists; a folk link to Latin major has been proposed but is not treated as established, and an older Mediterranean substrate origin remains possible.

Source A Modern Herbal, Maud Grieve tier 2

Mark the Evangelist, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

The Gospel of Mark's own attributed-author fact already records that the Petrine/John Mark connection rests on a single 2nd century testimony (Papias, via Eusebius) that a substantial number of scholars consider unreliable; the atlas records the same uncertainty here rather than asserting more about the author than it asserts about the text.

Source The Catholic Encyclopedia, Charles George Herbermann et al. (eds.) tier 2

Marpa, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1012

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

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Marpa, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1097

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

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1