Disputed Statements

Metis, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Whether the goddess Metis was ever an independently worshipped early deity or is better read as a personification of the abstract quality of cunning intelligence already recognized in Greek thought, a reading Detienne and Vernant's study has encouraged.

Detienne and Vernant's study of metis as a mode of cunning intelligence in Greek culture has led some scholars to read the goddess Metis less as an independently worshipped early deity than as a personification built around an abstract quality already recognized in Greek thought, since she receives no cult of her own and appears in myth chiefly as a genealogical and symbolic figure absorbed into Zeus rather than as an object of worship in her own right.

Source Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, translated by Janet Lloyd tier 1

Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia, Custodians & Museums

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Relevant Holding

Currently States Chalice of Valencia (Santo Caliz), held since 1437 and venerated as the Holy Grail

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia holds the Holy Chalice, an agate cup mounted in a medieval gold setting and venerated by tradition as the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. The cathedral's own published institutional record on the object holds that the agate cup itself is plausibly ancient, consistent in material and workmanship with Mediterranean antiquity, but that its medieval gold mounting and its specific identification as the Last Supper cup rest on tradition rather than on an unbroken documentary chain connecting the object continuously from the first century to its appearance in the historical record centuries later. The method is art-historical and archaeological, dating the agate bowl itself by comparison with other securely dated ancient stone vessels, separately from the later goldwork mounting, which can be dated more precisely by its own medieval decorative style. Because the plausible ancient date of the bowl and the historical identification of that specific bowl as the one used at the Last Supper are two separate claims resting on different evidence, the antiquity is not seriously doubted while the identification remains a matter of tradition rather than documented continuity.

Source Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia (institutional record) tier 2

Metta, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Taught within the earliest strata of the Pali Canon; the canon's own compilation and dating remain debated among scholars, spanning oral transmission from the Buddha's lifetime through committal to writing centuries later. Its systematic treatment as the first brahmavihara is fixed to Buddhaghosa's fifth century CE Visuddhimagga.

Source Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), Buddhaghosa tier 1

Mexicayotl, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Restoration Claim

Currently States Adherents present Mexicayotl as a direct restoration of Aztec and Nahua religion and philosophy. Mexica-identifying scholars and practitioners writing on mexika.org have documented that the movement foundational texts rely heavily on invented and reinterpreted material rather than a continuous unbroken transmission, since Spanish conquest and colonial evangelization broke institutional continuity with pre-Hispanic religious practice by the sixteenth century.

Adherents present Mexicayotl as a direct restoration; Mexica-identifying critics call the foundational texts pseudohistorical.

Source Mexika.org, "The Pseudohistorical Origins of the Mexicayotl Movement," 2017 tier 2

Michael Cerularius, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1000

The source marks this year circa, 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

Michael Cerularius, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1059

The source marks this year circa, 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

Michael Harner, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Whether core shamanism's deliberate separation of technique from specific indigenous cultural and religious context is a legitimate distillation of shared method or an appropriation of sacred material

Michael Harner's The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice (American Ethnologist, 1977) is the scholarly credential behind Harner's later founding of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and his core shamanism training method, which extracts shamanic technique from the specific cosmologies of the Indigenous traditions Harner studied and teaches it to non-Indigenous students independent of those cosmologies. Some Indigenous practitioners and scholars of religion argue that separating the technique from the belief system that gives it meaning amounts to appropriation of closed cultural material; Harner and the Foundation maintained the two could coexist, arguing that revenue from core-shamanism training helped fund preservation efforts for the traditional practices themselves, a position the two sides have not reconciled.

Source The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice, Michael Harner tier 3

Micro-Psychokinesis, Psi Phenomena

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States PEAR's random-event-generator trials, run over 28 years, reported small statistical deviations correlated with operator intention.

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne founded and ran the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory from 1979 to 2007, testing whether a human operator's stated intention could produce a small statistical bias in the output of a hardware random event generator across very large numbers of trials, the claim set out in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (1987). The method is statistical, pooling many thousands of binary trials across many sessions and operators to detect a bias too small to see in any single run, which is itself the disputed feature: critics argue that pooling large-scale trial data this way can produce apparent statistical significance from very small mundane biases in the hardware or in trial selection, rather than from any genuine mental effect. No independent replication using the PEAR protocol has reached wide acceptance outside laboratories with an existing commitment to the research programme. Because the dispute concerns the statistical methodology's own vulnerability to small biases at that scale rather than any single dramatic result, micro-psychokinesis remains a debated key experiment rather than a claim either side's reanalysis has closed.

Source Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, Robert G. Jahn, Brenda J. Dunne tier 2

Mielikki, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Mielikki's name is most often traced to Finnish mieli, "mind" or "mood" or "favor," with a diminutive ending, read as the goddess whose favor a hunter needs to win. An alternative proposal instead connects it to mieltya, "to grow fond of." Neither derivation is settled among Finnish folklorists.

Source Kalevala Mythology, Juha Y. Pentikainen tier 1

Mim م, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States One of the fourteen letters that stand disjoined at the head of a sura

According To The disjoined letters of the Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, HarperOne, 2015) surveys the classical and modern commentary tradition on the disjoined letters that open certain suras and reports no consensus reached across fourteen centuries of that commentary. The positions it records include that the meaning is known to God alone, that the letters abbreviate divine names or attributes, that they function as an oath, that they present ordinary letters of the language as a rhetorical challenge, and that some began as scribal or collectors' marks later treated as scripture. Comparing the internal textual evidence, which letters occur and in which suras, against the range of proposed readings, the commentary confirms which letters appear where while confirming that none of the proposed meanings has displaced the others.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief) tier 1

Minaret, Sacred Architecture

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States No minaret is attested in Islam's first century; the earliest surviving examples date to the Umayyad eighth century, and scholars debate whether the form derives from watchtowers, from absorbed church bell towers, or arose independently.

According To Islam

Source Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editions, P. Bearman et al. (eds.) tier 1

Mirabai, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historically attested

The Encyclopedia of Hinduism (2008) records Mirabai as a Rajput noblewoman and poet of the sixteenth century, while examining the traditional biography built around her and finding almost every specific detail of it legendary, and that the devotional songs sung under her name accumulated over the centuries following her death rather than deriving entirely from her own hand.

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

Miracle of the Sun, Miracles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Skeptical Explanation

Currently States Joe Nickell argues the reported solar movement matches known effects of prolonged sun gazing, including retinal afterimages and involuntary eye movement, and notes observers outside the crowd saw no such motion in the same sun.

Believers hold the crowd witnessed a genuine external sign; skeptics attribute it to optical strain and expectation in a crowd primed by months of anticipation. Both camps agree on what was reported; they disagree on its cause.

Source The Real Secrets of Fatima, Joe Nickell tier 1

Miracles, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

Augustine held a miracle is not contrary to nature but contrary to what is known of nature, making it a fact about the observer, while Aquinas defined it more strictly as an effect exceeding the power of the whole created order. David Hume's 1748 essay Of Miracles then argued, on evidentiary grounds, that no testimony can establish a miracle occurred, since it is always more probable a witness is mistaken or lying than that a law of nature failed, an argument contested continuously since without either side conceding. Within Christianity a further, still-live dispute divides cessationists, who hold the apostolic age's miraculous gifts ceased with it, from continuationists, whose position underlies the Pentecostal and charismatic movements. The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade and, in its second edition, Lindsay Jones (Macmillan Reference, 2005), records this evidentiary and definitional history.

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

Mircea Eliade, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States His interwar sympathy with the Romanian Legionary movement, and his silence about it after the war, are documented. What that means for the work is argued in opposite directions.

Mac Linscott Ricketts's Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 (East European Monographs, 1988) documents Eliade's early involvement with the Romanian Iron Guard and fascist movement alongside his later, highly influential theory of religion as encounter with the sacred outside ordinary history. Ricketts's biographical method traces both strands through Eliade's own contemporary writings, and scholars reading that same documented record split into named camps: some treat the politics and the comparative theory of religion as separable intellectual products of the same man, while others read the theory's own anti-historical strand, its treatment of sacred time as escaping ordinary historical causation, as continuous with the political commitments of his youth rather than independent of them.

Source Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945, Mac Linscott Ricketts tier 1

Miri and piri, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

According To Sikhism

J. S. Grewal's The Sikhs of the Punjab (Cambridge University Press, 1998) documents that the Sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind, instituted the doctrine of miri and piri, wearing two swords for temporal and spiritual authority, a historical event Grewal treats as affirmed. What it licenses politically is disputed within the Panth, sharply so since the Indian army's 1984 assault on the Golden Temple, between those who read it as a warrant for Sikh political sovereignty and those who read it as a claim about holding the two spheres together in one life; Grewal's historical method traces both readings to the same doctrinal event without adjudicating between them.

Source J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3), J. S. Grewal tier 1

Miserere mei, Deus (Allegri), Musical Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Release Year

Currently States 1630

No exact composition year survives in the documentary record; scholarship places it during the papacy of Urban VIII, 1623 to 1644, most often estimated to the 1630s, and 1630 is used here only as a nominal midpoint of that range, not a firm date.

Source Miserere mei, Deus (Allegri) (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Mishefa Res, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Canonical Status Detail

Currently States Philip G. Kreyenbroek's Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition (Edwin Mellen Press, 1995) records that the Mishefa Res, the Black Book, reached Western scholarship around 1911 alongside a companion text, the Kiteba Cilwe, both recounting the community's creation account; the prevailing scholarly view Kreyenbroek sets out holds the manuscripts themselves to be productions made for the manuscript trade rather than genuine community originals, while recognising their content faithfully reflects authentic Yazidi oral tradition, so the dispute concerns the documents rather than the beliefs they record.

Source Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition, Philip G. Kreyenbroek tier 1

Mishefa Res, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally reputed to be an authentic ancient Yazidi scripture (traditional)

Philip G. Kreyenbroek's Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition, Edwin Mellen Press, 1995, examines both the Kiteba Cilwe and the Mishefa Res against the fact that Yazidism's own authoritative religious content is primarily oral, transmitted by qewwals, religious singers and reciters, rather than fixed in written scripture. Kreyenbroek's method is comparative and ethnographic: checking each written text's own transmission history, who copied, compiled or published it, and how it relates to the community's oral practice, against the oral tradition itself, and that examination does not clearly establish either document as an authentic internal scripture rather than an external compilation. Its own text states the resulting position directly, that authenticity is genuinely disputed and that the dispute itself, not the existence of the book, is the one settled fact.

Source Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition, Philip G. Kreyenbroek tier 1

Mishefa Res, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The prevailing scholarly view holds the manuscript itself to be a production made for the manuscript trade, though its content faithfully reflects genuine Yazidi oral tradition (critical)

Philip G. Kreyenbroek's Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition, Edwin Mellen Press, 1995, examines both the Kiteba Cilwe and the Mishefa Res against the fact that Yazidism's own authoritative religious content is primarily oral, transmitted by qewwals, religious singers and reciters, rather than fixed in written scripture. Kreyenbroek's method is comparative and ethnographic: checking each written text's own transmission history, who copied, compiled or published it, and how it relates to the community's oral practice, against the oral tradition itself, and that examination does not clearly establish either document as an authentic internal scripture rather than an external compilation. Its own text states the resulting position directly, that authenticity is genuinely disputed and that the dispute itself, not the existence of the book, is the one settled fact.

Source Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition, Philip G. Kreyenbroek tier 1