Disputed Statements

Pearl of Great Price, Scriptures & Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Texts produced by Joseph Smith; the Book of Abraham presented as translated from Egyptian papyri

Egyptologists identify the recovered papyri as common funerary texts postdating Abraham by centuries; the church's Gospel Topics essay acknowledges the findings, and positions within the tradition range from lost-portions theories to catalyst-for-revelation readings.

Source The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (eds.) tier 1

Peh פ, 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

Peh פ, 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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Taught that human nature retains full freedom to choose good without needing a special infusion of divine grace beyond what God gave at creation, denying that Adam's sin corrupted or was inherited by his descendants.

Augustine of Hippo's On Nature and Grace (De Natura et Gratia, 415 CE) is a direct, point-by-point rebuttal of Pelagius's own book On Nature, which does not survive complete and is known chiefly through Augustine's quotations of it in the course of arguing against it. Augustine and the church councils that subsequently condemned Pelagius held that divine grace is necessary at every stage of the will's turn toward good, since Adam's sin left his descendants unable to choose good unaided, against Pelagius's own position, reconstructed from Augustine's quotations, that human will retains the unaided capacity to choose righteousness. That opposition is what defines the Pelagian and Augustinian camps of the controversy, with the losing side's argument preserved only inside its opponent's refutation of it.

Source On Nature and Grace (De Natura et Gratia), Augustine of Hippo tier 1

Pelagius, Historical 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 Pelagius's origin as Britain, the description his own contemporaries in Rome, where he was active around 400 CE before his teaching on human freedom from sin brought him into conflict with Augustine of Hippo and condemnation at the synods of Carthage and Milevis, consistently gave him; no more specific birthplace within Britain is recorded by any contemporary source.

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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Pelagianism as formally condemned is, according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005), largely the construction of his opponents, chiefly Augustine of Hippo, and of the councils that judged him; how much of it Pelagius (about 354 to after 418) himself actually held, as against positions attributed to him in controversy, is still argued.

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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 354

Pelagius's exact birth and death dates are unknown; he is conventionally dated by his known period of activity, floruit circa 354 to circa 418 CE.

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

Pelagius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 418

Pelagius's exact birth and death dates are unknown; he is conventionally dated by his known period of activity, floruit circa 354 to circa 418 CE.

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

Penal Substitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether penal substitution develops Anselm's satisfaction account or departs from it

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) examines whether penal substitution develops Anselm's eleventh century satisfaction account or departs from it. Anselm framed punishment and satisfaction as alternatives and chose satisfaction; the sixteenth century Reformed doctrine instead makes the satisfaction consist in the punishment being borne, moving the setting from a court of honour to a criminal one. Readers who trace a continuous Western tradition across both texts read this as a development; readers who examine the sixteenth century sources' own legal vocabulary against Anselm's read penal substitution as a departure. Both readings are argued by serious historians of doctrine, and the texts themselves show a real change of legal category between the two.

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

Penal Substitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Binding, without a formal definition

According To Protestant Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) sets out the camps on penal substitution, stated in each side's own terms. Defenders, reading Isaiah 53, Galatians 3:13 and 2 Corinthians 5:21 as their controlling texts, hold that substitution is the plain sense of those passages, that this is not the Father punishing an unwilling third party but God bearing in himself the cost of forgiving so that the Trinity is not divided against itself, and that because the penalty has already been borne it will not be exacted again, which is what grounds Christian assurance of salvation on this reading. Critics, examining the same texts through the Reformed doctrine's sixteenth century legal framing, read the theory as importing a criminal-court model of justice the biblical texts themselves do not require.

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

Penal Substitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States Penal substitution, the sixteenth century Reformed recasting of Anselm's satisfaction account in penal and forensic terms, stated at length in Calvin's Institutes, holds that sin incurs a real penalty that is not simply cancelled and that Christ bears it in the place of those who incurred it, drawing on the fourth servant song in Isaiah, Galatians' statement that Christ became a curse, and the exchange described in 2 Corinthians 5:21. It is confessed in the Reformed and Lutheran standards, including the Westminster Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and remains the working assumption of a great deal of Anglophone evangelical preaching, but it has faced sustained criticism from within the tradition since Faustus Socinus in the sixteenth century and, in the twentieth century, from theologians who hold that it divides the Trinity and dignifies innocent suffering.

According To Protestant Christianity

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

Peoples Temple, New Religious Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Membership Over Time

Currently States Peoples Temple publicly claimed as many as 20,000 total members at its peak in the mid-1970s after relocating its headquarters to San Francisco, though only between about 4,800 and 5,000 people are documented to have given the church their personal details for a membership card during the same period, according to the Jonestown Institute's own review of the group's surviving membership records.

Peoples Temple's own public claim of up to 20,000 members was never matched by the movement's internal paperwork: the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, custodian of the group's surviving records, counts between about 4,800 and 5,000 people who actually submitted personal details for a membership card, and separately estimates that no more than roughly 2,000 people were ever committed enough to travel to Guyana. The gap between the public figure and the documented one is recorded here rather than resolved, since neither has been superseded by the other.

Source Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple, Rebecca Moore tier 1

Peorth, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc Runes

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Old English peorth, a word that occurs nowhere else in the language, so its sense cannot be recovered from Old English itself. One reading takes it from the poem's beer-hall setting as a dice-cup or gaming piece; another takes it as a loan from a Brittonic word for a bush or thicket; a third holds that the poet no longer knew what it meant either. The stanza gives the setting and never the sense.

Source The Old English Rune Poem: A Critical Edition, Maureen Halsall tier 1

Perennial philosophy, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

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

Antoine Faivre's Access to Western Esotericism (State University of New York Press, 1994) traces perennial philosophy as held by the Traditionalist school of Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy in the twentieth century, and in a looser form by Aldous Huxley's 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy. Faivre records that most scholars of religion reject it, on the ground that it reads a single hidden essence into traditions that differ precisely in what they claim, and that the essence found tends to resemble the one the finder brought to the comparison.

Source Access to Western Esotericism, Antoine Faivre tier 1

Perennial philosophy, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

Antoine Faivre's Access to Western Esotericism (1994) sets out perennial philosophy as the comparative thesis that all major religions share one common mystical truth beneath differing forms. Faivre records that scholars of religion who stress that traditions differ irreducibly rather than converging on one core experience hold the thesis contested rather than established, since the claimed common core has to be read into each tradition's own categories rather than found stated in them.

Source Access to Western Esotericism, Antoine Faivre tier 1

Perpetua, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 181

The surviving Passio describes her as about twenty two years old at her martyrdom in 203 CE, which places her birth around 181 CE; the account gives an approximate age rather than an exact one, so the birth year carries the same margin.

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

Perun, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Mythic Association

Currently States Comparative mythologists have reconstructed a Perun myth in which the thunder god pursues and slays a serpentine adversary identified with Veles, a combat pattern paralleled by Indra's slaying of Vritra and Thor's battles with the Midgard serpent in other Indo-European traditions. This reconstruction, most influentially argued by the linguists Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, is assembled from scattered later folklore, place names and Christianized legend rather than preserved intact in any single pre-Christian Slavic source; some Slavists accept it as a plausible recovery of a genuine inherited pattern, others regard it as overconfident, and how much reflects real pre-Christian belief rather than modern comparative projection remains an open, actively debated question.

Source Slavic Gods and Heroes, Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel tier 1

Peter Bulkeley, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States As co-moderator of the 1637 Newtown synod, Bulkeley helped frame the doctrinal findings later used against Anne Hutchinson; historians differ over whether the synod's action defended the colony's covenant orthodoxy or represented doctrinal intolerance toward a genuinely held dissenting position.

Reflects ongoing historiographical disagreement over the Antinomian Controversy rather than a single settled scholarly verdict.

Source David D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History (Duke University Press, 1990), David D. Hall tier 1

Peter Waldo, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1205

No record fixes Peter Waldo's death precisely. He is last clearly attested in the historical record in the 1180s after his excommunication, and the surviving Waldensian and chronicle tradition usually places his death around 1205, roughly two decades later, without documentary confirmation of the exact year.

Source Peter Waldo (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Phaladeepika, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition

Currently States Its date of composition is unsettled; scholars have placed it anywhere from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.

The Phaladeepika is a classical Sanskrit treatise on horoscopic astrology traditionally attributed to Mantreswara, but the period in which it was composed is not fixed by any external record. David Pingree's Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature (Otto Harrassowitz, 1981), part of the History of Indian Literature series and a scholarly survey of Sanskrit astral and mathematical texts, traces the textual history of works in this genre. The method is philological, placing a text within the wider tradition of jyotisha literature by comparing its technical content and its relationship to other datable astral texts it draws on or is drawn on by, since works in this genre typically name no external event that would fix a date directly. Because the Phaladeepika's own colophon supplies an author's name but no dated context, and its technique set overlaps with material from more than one period of the genre's development, the era of its composition is placed within a broad window rather than fixed to one century.

Source Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature, David Pingree tier 1