Disputed Statements

Book of Mormon, HistoricityHistoricity debated

Standing

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

According to Latter-day Saint tradition the Book of Mormon is an abridgment, engraved on golden plates, of the records of ancient peoples who migrated from the Near East to the Americas, compiled by the prophet-historian Mormon and translated by Joseph Smith at Palmyra, New York, by the gift and power of God, first published in 1830 with three and then eight witnesses testifying to having seen the plates. Mainstream archaeological and genetic scholarship does not corroborate an ancient Near Eastern migration to the Americas of the kind the text describes, which is the genuine disagreement behind the debated status. Terryl L. Givens's By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (2002) treats the book primarily as the founding scripture and cultural keystone of the Latter Day Saint movement, examining its reception and its role in the tradition rather than adjudicating the historicity question itself, which remains argued between the tradition's own claim and outside scholarship.

Source By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, Terryl L. Givens

Book of Mormon, Historicity DetailTerryl L. Givens's By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002) sets the two positions against each other: Latter-day Saint tradition holds the Book of Mormon, first published at Palmyra, New York, in 1830, to be Joseph Smith's translation of an abridgment engraved on golden plates recording ancient peoples who migrated from the Near East to the Americas, while academic archaeology, linguistics and population genetics have found no supporting evidence for that migration and regard the text as a product of its own nineteenth century American setting.

Book of Mormon, Scriptures & Texts

Standing

Concerns Historicity Detail

Currently States Terryl L. Givens's By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002) sets the two positions against each other: Latter-day Saint tradition holds the Book of Mormon, first published at Palmyra, New York, in 1830, to be Joseph Smith's translation of an abridgment engraved on golden plates recording ancient peoples who migrated from the Near East to the Americas, while academic archaeology, linguistics and population genetics have found no supporting evidence for that migration and regard the text as a product of its own nineteenth century American setting.

Source By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, Terryl L. Givens

Book of Numbers, Attributed Author / CompilerComposite, with a priestly framework of censuses, camp arrangements and cultic law enclosing older narrative material, including the Balaam oracles, which many scholars regard as among the oldest poetry in the Hebrew Bible [critical]

Book of Numbers, Scripture Portions

Standing

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Composite, with a priestly framework of censuses, camp arrangements and cultic law enclosing older narrative material, including the Balaam oracles, which many scholars regard as among the oldest poetry in the Hebrew Bible [critical]

The Book of Numbers is traditionally ascribed to Moses, but it contains the Balaam oracles, poems whose language many scholars judge older than the surrounding prose narrative, a pattern Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Georg Reimer, 1883) treats as evidence the book was assembled from sources of different ages rather than composed at one time by one author. The method is linguistic and literary dating: comparing the Balaam poems' archaic grammatical forms and vocabulary against the surrounding prose's later Hebrew, on the reasoning that a text's language ordinarily reflects the period of its composition or of the older material it preserves. Because linguistic dating of embedded poetry depends on how much weight is given to archaic forms a later author could also imitate for effect, the poems' relative age against the surrounding prose is argued rather than settled, and single Mosaic authorship of the book as it now stands is not what the internal linguistic evidence is read as supporting.

Source Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Julius Wellhausen

Borage, Origin of the NameFrom medieval Latin borago, whose own root is disputed: proposed sources include Latin burra, "shaggy garment", for the plant's coarse hairy leaves, or an Arabic phrase meaning "father of sweat" for its traditional use inducing perspiration.

Borage, Plants

Standing

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States From medieval Latin borago, whose own root is disputed: proposed sources include Latin burra, "shaggy garment", for the plant's coarse hairy leaves, or an Arabic phrase meaning "father of sweat" for its traditional use inducing perspiration.

According To A Modern Herbal

Borago's deeper root is not settled: the Latin burra derivation and the proposed Arabic derivation both have supporters among etymologists, and neither has displaced the other.

Source A Modern Herbal, Maud Grieve

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Legal StatusThe 2004 Law on Freedom of Religion guarantees religious freedom and recognises four traditional communities; the Dayton constitutional structure allocates political office by ethnonational category, which in practice tracks religious affiliation.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Countries

Standing

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The 2004 Law on Freedom of Religion guarantees religious freedom and recognises four traditional communities; the Dayton constitutional structure allocates political office by ethnonational category, which in practice tracks religious affiliation.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's 2004 Law on Freedom of Religion guarantees religious freedom and formally recognises four traditional religious communities, Islamic, Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Jewish, reflecting the country's post-war religious landscape. Separately, and in tension with a purely religious-freedom framing, the Dayton Peace Agreement's constitutional structure, which ended the 1992 to 1995 war, allocates the country's highest political offices by ethnonational category, Bosniak, Croat and Serb, categories that in practice track religious affiliation closely even though they are formally ethnic rather than religious. The State Department's report documents this arrangement as the country's operative constitutional order without adjudicating whether it should be read as religious discrimination under another name or as a necessary post-war power-sharing mechanism. The tension has not been resolved because the Dayton structure was a war-ending compromise between ethnonational communities, and altering it would require renegotiating the underlying peace settlement itself.

Source International Religious Freedom Report, United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom

Bosnian War, Religious DimensionHistorians divide over how far to read the Bosnian War in religious terms. An ethnoreligious reading, argued at length by Michael Sells, holds that Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic religious nationalism supplied the operative ideology, drawing on mythologies such as the Kosovo cult and what Sells terms Christoslavism to dehumanize Bosniak Muslims and help legitimize their mass killing, including at Srebrenica, so that religion functioned as a real and specific engine of the violence rather than incidental coloring. An ethnonational reading, argued by Noel Malcolm and shared by other historians of the war, holds that the conflict was fundamentally a war of political and territorial aggression manufactured by nationalist political leaderships, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Franjo Tudjman among them, pursuing ethnonational state building and territorial conquest, with religious affiliation functioning chiefly as an ethnic marker used to sort populations for expulsion rather than as the war's own motivating belief, and this camp explicitly warns against an ancient religious hatreds narrative the combatants themselves did not act from. This atlas records both readings without adopting either.

Bosnian War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States Historians divide over how far to read the Bosnian War in religious terms. An ethnoreligious reading, argued at length by Michael Sells, holds that Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic religious nationalism supplied the operative ideology, drawing on mythologies such as the Kosovo cult and what Sells terms Christoslavism to dehumanize Bosniak Muslims and help legitimize their mass killing, including at Srebrenica, so that religion functioned as a real and specific engine of the violence rather than incidental coloring. An ethnonational reading, argued by Noel Malcolm and shared by other historians of the war, holds that the conflict was fundamentally a war of political and territorial aggression manufactured by nationalist political leaderships, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Franjo Tudjman among them, pursuing ethnonational state building and territorial conquest, with religious affiliation functioning chiefly as an ethnic marker used to sort populations for expulsion rather than as the war's own motivating belief, and this camp explicitly warns against an ancient religious hatreds narrative the combatants themselves did not act from. This atlas records both readings without adopting either.

Source The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Sells), Michael A. Sells

Bosnian War, Death Toll Minimum97207.000000

Bosnian War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 97207.000000

The demographically verified count from the Sarajevo Research and Documentation Center's Bosnian Book of the Dead database, led by Mirsad Tokaca and confirmed by Ewa Tabeau, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's own demographic expert witness, using record linkage cross-checked against the 1991 pre-war census: 97,207 individually confirmed named war dead. This atlas records this lower, individually verified figure as its floor.

Bosnian War, Death Toll Maximum200000.000000

Bosnian War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 200000.000000

The widely cited wartime and immediate postwar estimate, roughly 200,000 dead, current in international reporting and in early scholarship including Norman Cigar's 1995 study of the war's genocidal policy. Later demographic record-linkage research revised this figure substantially downward; this atlas records it as the upper bound the literature carried before that revision.

Source Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing" (Cigar), Norman Cigar

Bosnian War, Death Toll AssessmentThe demographically verified figure, 97,207 individually confirmed named war dead from the Sarajevo Research and Documentation Center's Bosnian Book of the Dead database (Mirsad Tokaca, cross-checked by ICTY demographic expert Ewa Tabeau against the 1991 pre-war census), superseded the roughly 200,000 figure current in wartime reporting and early scholarship including Norman Cigar's 1995 study; this atlas records both, the individually verified figure as its floor and the earlier wartime estimate as the ceiling the literature carried before the demographic revision. The war's religious dimension (Bosniak Muslim, Bosnian Serb Orthodox and Bosnian Croat Catholic communities) was central to how belligerents targeted victims, documented in the Srebrenica genocide finding specifically, though the war's own causation is more commonly read by historians as ethno-nationalist and territorial, using religious identity as an ethnic marker, than as a war fought over doctrine.

Bosnian War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States The demographically verified figure, 97,207 individually confirmed named war dead from the Sarajevo Research and Documentation Center's Bosnian Book of the Dead database (Mirsad Tokaca, cross-checked by ICTY demographic expert Ewa Tabeau against the 1991 pre-war census), superseded the roughly 200,000 figure current in wartime reporting and early scholarship including Norman Cigar's 1995 study; this atlas records both, the individually verified figure as its floor and the earlier wartime estimate as the ceiling the literature carried before the demographic revision. The war's religious dimension (Bosniak Muslim, Bosnian Serb Orthodox and Bosnian Croat Catholic communities) was central to how belligerents targeted victims, documented in the Srebrenica genocide finding specifically, though the war's own causation is more commonly read by historians as ethno-nationalist and territorial, using religious identity as an ethnic marker, than as a war fought over doctrine.

Boxer Rebellion, Death Toll Minimum30000.000000

Boxer Rebellion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 30000.000000

Missionary society and mission board records from the period, the best documented tally available, count roughly thirty thousand Chinese Christian converts killed by the Boxers along with close to two hundred foreign missionaries and their family members. This narrower figure covers the anti-Christian killings alone, not the war's wider combat and reprisal deaths.

Source The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900, Diana Preston

Boxer Rebellion, Death Toll Maximum100000.000000

Boxer Rebellion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 100000.000000

Historians including Diana Preston put the conflict's total dead, combining the Boxers' own killed, Qing and allied combat deaths, and the extensive reprisal killings and looting allied troops carried out in the countryside during the punitive campaign after Beijing's relief, at as many as one hundred thousand. No detailed casualty records exist for this broader estimate, and it is repeated across popular and reference accounts rather than independently derived.

Source The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900, Diana Preston

Boxer Rebellion, Religious DimensionHistorians dispute how central religion was to the uprising. The traditional reading emphasizes the Boxers' explicit anti-Christian violence and their millenarian spirit possession rituals as a genuinely religious response to foreign missionary intrusion. Joseph Esherick's revisionist social history instead reads the movement's origins chiefly through economic and ecological stress in Shandong, flood, drought and unemployment among displaced boatmen and laborers, with anti-Christian violence following from missionaries' legal privileges and land disputes rather than driving the movement from the start.

Boxer Rebellion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States Historians dispute how central religion was to the uprising. The traditional reading emphasizes the Boxers' explicit anti-Christian violence and their millenarian spirit possession rituals as a genuinely religious response to foreign missionary intrusion. Joseph Esherick's revisionist social history instead reads the movement's origins chiefly through economic and ecological stress in Shandong, flood, drought and unemployment among displaced boatmen and laborers, with anti-Christian violence following from missionaries' legal privileges and land disputes rather than driving the movement from the start.

Source The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, Joseph W. Esherick

Boxer Rebellion, Death Toll AssessmentThe two figures recorded, roughly 30,000 Chinese Christian converts and missionaries killed by the Boxers against a wider estimate of up to 100,000 total dead including the allied punitive campaign's own reprisal killings, measure two different things rather than a floor and ceiling of the same count: the narrower figure is the best documented tally, from missionary society and mission board records, of specifically anti-Christian killing, while the wider figure folds in the allied relief expedition's own widely documented looting and reprisal killings against Chinese civilians, which were not religiously motivated. Diana Preston's history treats the rebellion itself as substantially anti-foreign and anti-Christian in character, targeting missionaries and converts as agents of foreign encroachment, while its suppression's own death toll was overwhelmingly a matter of imperial punitive violence rather than religious conflict.

Boxer Rebellion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States The two figures recorded, roughly 30,000 Chinese Christian converts and missionaries killed by the Boxers against a wider estimate of up to 100,000 total dead including the allied punitive campaign's own reprisal killings, measure two different things rather than a floor and ceiling of the same count: the narrower figure is the best documented tally, from missionary society and mission board records, of specifically anti-Christian killing, while the wider figure folds in the allied relief expedition's own widely documented looting and reprisal killings against Chinese civilians, which were not religiously motivated. Diana Preston's history treats the rebellion itself as substantially anti-foreign and anti-Christian in character, targeting missionaries and converts as agents of foreign encroachment, while its suppression's own death toll was overwhelmingly a matter of imperial punitive violence rather than religious conflict.

Source The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900, Diana Preston

Brahmacharya (Chastity), Origin PeriodThe five mahavratas as a codified set of ascetic vows appear already in the Acaranga Sutra, among the oldest surviving Jain Agamas, with brahmacharya named fourth, though the canon's traditional final redaction at the Council of Valabhi is placed in the fifth century CE, leaving how much of the text predates that redaction unsettled. Their classical formal definition is fixed later in Umasvati's Tattvartha Sutra, a text scholars date anywhere from the second to the fifth century CE.

Brahmacharya (Chastity), Virtues

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The five mahavratas as a codified set of ascetic vows appear already in the Acaranga Sutra, among the oldest surviving Jain Agamas, with brahmacharya named fourth, though the canon's traditional final redaction at the Council of Valabhi is placed in the fifth century CE, leaving how much of the text predates that redaction unsettled. Their classical formal definition is fixed later in Umasvati's Tattvartha Sutra, a text scholars date anywhere from the second to the fifth century CE.

Source The Jaina Path of Purification, Padmanabh S. Jaini

Brahmacharya (Continence), Attributed Author / CompilerTraditionally attributed to Patanjali, the compiler of the Yoga Sutras. Scholarship debates whether this is the same Patanjali credited with the Sanskrit grammatical treatise of that name, and whether the text as it stands is the work of a single author or an edited compilation of older material.

Brahmacharya (Continence), Virtues

Standing

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally attributed to Patanjali, the compiler of the Yoga Sutras. Scholarship debates whether this is the same Patanjali credited with the Sanskrit grammatical treatise of that name, and whether the text as it stands is the work of a single author or an edited compilation of older material.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant

Brahmacharya (Continence), Origin PeriodDated by scholars anywhere from the second century BCE, on older assumptions of a single ancient author, to as late as the fourth or fifth century CE, on newer philological readings that treat the text as a later compilation. There is no scholarly consensus on a single date for the Yoga Sutras.

Brahmacharya (Continence), Virtues

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Dated by scholars anywhere from the second century BCE, on older assumptions of a single ancient author, to as late as the fourth or fifth century CE, on newer philological readings that treat the text as a later compilation. There is no scholarly consensus on a single date for the Yoga Sutras.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant

Brahmi A 𑀅, Origin PeriodOthers argue for a development inside India, and with no securely dated specimen earlier than the edicts the question stays open

Brahmi A 𑀅, Alphabet Letters

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Others argue for a development inside India, and with no securely dated specimen earlier than the edicts the question stays open

According To Indian epigraphy

Brahmi's ancestry is disputed among epigraphists. Richard Salomon's Indian Epigraphy (Oxford University Press, 1998) surveys two live positions on the origin of the script attested in the Ashokan inscriptions: one derives Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire; the other holds that it developed inside India itself. The dispute turns on the corpus, since Brahmi is securely attested only from Ashoka's edicts in the middle of the third century BCE onward, first read again by James Prinsep in 1837, and no earlier specimen on either side is securely dated. Both camps compare Brahmi's letterforms against Aramaic and other Semitic scripts using the same paleographic method, and without an intermediate dated example bridging the gap between any proposed ancestor and the Mauryan era script, neither derivation has been shown to fit the evidence better than the other.

Source Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages, Richard Salomon

Brahmi A 𑀅, Origin PeriodMany epigraphists derive Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire

Brahmi A 𑀅, Alphabet Letters

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Many epigraphists derive Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire

According To Indian epigraphy

Brahmi's ancestry is disputed among epigraphists. Richard Salomon's Indian Epigraphy (Oxford University Press, 1998) surveys two live positions on the origin of the script attested in the Ashokan inscriptions: one derives Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire; the other holds that it developed inside India itself. The dispute turns on the corpus, since Brahmi is securely attested only from Ashoka's edicts in the middle of the third century BCE onward, first read again by James Prinsep in 1837, and no earlier specimen on either side is securely dated. Both camps compare Brahmi's letterforms against Aramaic and other Semitic scripts using the same paleographic method, and without an intermediate dated example bridging the gap between any proposed ancestor and the Mauryan era script, neither derivation has been shown to fit the evidence better than the other.

Source Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages, Richard Salomon

Brahmi Aa 𑀆, Origin PeriodOthers argue for a development inside India, and with no securely dated specimen earlier than the edicts the question stays open

Brahmi Aa 𑀆, Alphabet Letters

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Others argue for a development inside India, and with no securely dated specimen earlier than the edicts the question stays open

According To Indian epigraphy

Brahmi's ancestry is disputed among epigraphists. Richard Salomon's Indian Epigraphy (Oxford University Press, 1998) surveys two live positions on the origin of the script attested in the Ashokan inscriptions: one derives Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire; the other holds that it developed inside India itself. The dispute turns on the corpus, since Brahmi is securely attested only from Ashoka's edicts in the middle of the third century BCE onward, first read again by James Prinsep in 1837, and no earlier specimen on either side is securely dated. Both camps compare Brahmi's letterforms against Aramaic and other Semitic scripts using the same paleographic method, and without an intermediate dated example bridging the gap between any proposed ancestor and the Mauryan era script, neither derivation has been shown to fit the evidence better than the other.

Source Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages, Richard Salomon

Brahmi Aa 𑀆, Origin PeriodMany epigraphists derive Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire

Brahmi Aa 𑀆, Alphabet Letters

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Many epigraphists derive Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire

According To Indian epigraphy

Brahmi's ancestry is disputed among epigraphists. Richard Salomon's Indian Epigraphy (Oxford University Press, 1998) surveys two live positions on the origin of the script attested in the Ashokan inscriptions: one derives Brahmi from a Semitic prototype, most often Aramaic, adapted in the centuries before the Mauryan empire; the other holds that it developed inside India itself. The dispute turns on the corpus, since Brahmi is securely attested only from Ashoka's edicts in the middle of the third century BCE onward, first read again by James Prinsep in 1837, and no earlier specimen on either side is securely dated. Both camps compare Brahmi's letterforms against Aramaic and other Semitic scripts using the same paleographic method, and without an intermediate dated example bridging the gap between any proposed ancestor and the Mauryan era script, neither derivation has been shown to fit the evidence better than the other.

Source Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages, Richard Salomon

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