Disputed Statements

Bellerophon, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Raised as the son of Glaucus of Corinth

According To Ancient Greek Religion

Pseudo-Apollodorus's The Library records that some sources make the sea god Poseidon Bellerophon's true father, with his mother Eurynome's husband Glaucus standing as a stepfather rather than his blood father, a divine paternity claim of the kind Greek mythography commonly attaches to notable heroes; the ancient tradition as Apollodorus records it does not settle which parentage is original.

Source The Library (Bibliotheca), Pseudo-Apollodorus tier 1

Benin, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Composition

Currently States Vodun is practiced by a substantial share of the population, estimated around 30-40% though widely blended with Christian or Muslim identification; Christian and Muslim communities also form large shares (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020).

Benin's religious composition is difficult to state as clean percentages because of widespread dual practice, in which the same individual identifies with and observes Vodun, indigenous to Benin, and Christianity or Islam simultaneously rather than treating them as exclusive categories a survey can cleanly separate. Pew Research Center's 2010 to 2020 compilation estimates Vodun practice at roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the population while acknowledging this figure represents only the share for whom Vodun is the primary self-identification, with a further, harder to quantify share blending Vodun observance into a primary Christian or Muslim identification. The difficulty is structural rather than a gap in survey method: any classification scheme requiring one primary religious identification per respondent will undercount syncretic practice by design, and no revised survey wording proposed to date has resolved how to count someone who observes both traditions as primary.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center tier 2

Beowulf, Other Writings

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition Start Year

Currently States 700

Scholars have never settled when Beowulf was composed. Proposals range from the early eighth century, contemporary with the poem's Anglo-Saxon Christian framing, to as late as the surviving manuscript itself around the year 1000, and arguments turn on linguistic dating, historical allusions and manuscript paleography that point in different directions. The span given here runs from the earliest seriously proposed composition date to the manuscript date.

Source Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.) tier 1

Beowulf, Other Writings

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States 1000

Scholars have never settled when Beowulf was composed. Proposals range from the early eighth century, contemporary with the poem's Anglo-Saxon Christian framing, to as late as the surviving manuscript itself around the year 1000, and arguments turn on linguistic dating, historical allusions and manuscript paleography that point in different directions. The span given here runs from the earliest seriously proposed composition date to the manuscript date.

Source Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.) tier 1

Bernardino de Sahagún, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1499

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

Bernardino de Sahagún, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1590

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

Bet (Ba) በ, 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

Beta ⲃ, 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

Beta Israel, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Documented as a distinct community from the fourteenth century, consolidated through conflict with the Solomonic monarchy into the sixteenth.

The community's own tradition traces descent from the tribe of Dan or from Menelik's returning retinue, and places its presence in Ethiopia far earlier. Kaplan and Quirin, publishing independently in 1992, both argued for emergence out of Agaw-speaking highland populations in the medieval period. That reading is now mainstream but does not settle where the Israelite practice originally came from.

Source The Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews: A History of the Beta Israel (Falasha) to 1920, James Quirin tier 1

Beta Israel Liturgical Chant, Sacred Sound

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The dating is contested. The liturgy's language and instruments are shared with Ethiopian Christian worship, which places at least its present form well inside the Ethiopian Christian era.

Shelemay reads the repertory as having formed inside Ethiopia in contact with Christian monasticism, and Kaplan reaches compatible conclusions about the community's institutions. The community's own account and a strand of earlier scholarship hold for ancient Israelite descent. Both camps argue from the same evidence.

Source Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, Kay Kaufman Shelemay tier 1

Beth ב, 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

Beth ב, 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

Bhabbha ਭ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief) tier 2

Bhabbha ਭ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Historians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

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

Bhaga, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Textual Note

Currently States Called blind in a few passages, which the tradition explains by story and which also reads as a statement about impartial division.

According To Vedic Hinduism

Bhaga is one of the Adityas in Vedic tradition, and the tradition itself supplies narrative explanations connecting his name to both just allotment and to injury or loss. Arthur Anthony Macdonell's Vedic Mythology (1897), cited here and still the standard handbook survey of the Vedic pantheon's individual figures, records the semantic question as which association is prior in the god's name: whether an older sense of impartial share-giving carries the injury association as a later narrative gloss, or whether the order runs the other way. The method is philological and comparative, working from Bhaga's occurrences across the Rigveda's hymns and from the later narrative material that supplies the injury association, since no single Vedic passage defines the name directly and the semantic history has to be inferred from usage. Because usage rather than definition is all the corpus supplies, the question is recorded as a reading rather than a settled result.

Source Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell tier 1

Bhikkhuni, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Ordination

Currently States The full female ordination lineage is held lapsed; revival contested

According To Theravada

The Theravada bhikkhuni lineage is widely held to have lapsed, in Sri Lanka by about the eleventh century. Ordinations resumed from 1996 with the participation of East Asian bhikkhunis, and the revival is contested: it is recognised in practice in Sri Lanka, while the Thai and Burmese sanghas have not accepted it.

Source The Revival of the Bhikkhuni Order and the Decline of the Sasana, Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20, Bhikkhu Analayo tier 1

Bhikkhuni, Religious Offices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Current Status

Currently States Whether modern bhikkhuni ordinations restore a lapsed Theravada lineage or constitute a cross-tradition innovation remains disputed among Theravada authorities.

Camps: some national Sangha councils, including Thailand's, do not recognize the revived ordinations as valid within Theravada; a growing number of monasteries, teachers and lay communities do recognize them. Neither position is adjudicated here.

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

Bhrikuti, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

According To Tibetan Buddhism

Sam van Schaik's Tibet: A History (Yale University Press, 2011) examines the traditional account of the Nepalese princess Bhrikuti's marriage to the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo. Van Schaik's historical method weighs the marriage against the wider documented pattern of Tibetan royal alliance-building in the period, and finds some historians accept it as likely on that comparative basis while others treat the whole account as a later legend constructed to explain Buddhism's arrival in Tibet.

Source Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik tier 1

Bhrikuti, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States Bhrikuti's marriage to Songtsen Gampo is traditionally placed in the 620s to early 630s, within the seventh century CE generally, but no independent record of her survives outside later Tibetan sources, and she does not appear among the Dunhuang manuscripts that document the period. Sam van Schaik's Tibet: A History (Yale University Press, 2011) treats her seventh century dating as inherited from that later tradition rather than as independently attested by a contemporary record.

According To Tibetan Buddhism

Source Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik tier 1

Bidah, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

According To Sunni

Jonathan A. C. Brown's Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy (Oneworld, 2014) sets out that innovation in religion being blameworthy is agreed across the Sunni schools, but that whether the category admits a good innovation, bidah hasana, as al-Shafii and later jurists held, is disputed. Brown traces that dispute through the history of Sunni legal reasoning and identifies it as the working difference between Salafi and much traditional Sunni practice today.

Source Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy, Jonathan A. C. Brown tier 1