Open Questions

Open Mexican Folk

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds one deity, Santa Muerte, and this atlas has no entry yet for Mexican folk Catholicism or for any tradition that would hold her. The gap is a missing tradition, not a missing link, so no connection can be recorded today.

What Would Settle It A decision on whether folk Catholicism should be catalogued as its own tradition or as a denomination of Catholicism, then the entry itself. The atlas already treats syncretic Afro-Caribbean traditions as their own traditions, which is the nearest precedent.

Expertise Needed Latin American religious studies; anthropology of folk Catholicism

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open Two dates circulate for the same event, September 2007 and November 2007, and the sources carrying them are the organisation's own material and secondary summaries. The registration number quoted in those accounts was not checked against the Portuguese register.

What Would Settle It The entry in the Portuguese register of collective religious entities, or the United States Department of State International Religious Freedom report for Portugal read in full rather than in summary.

Expertise Needed Law (Portuguese religious registration under the 2001 Religious Freedom Act)

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open Accounts of a 2007 decision of the Audiencia Nacional are consistent with one another but every readable one traces back either to the organisation's own publications or to aggregators repeating them. The judgment itself was not obtained during this run, so the claim was kept out of the entry rather than asserted on that footing.

What Would Settle It The text of the judgment from the Spanish judicial documentation service, or the registry entry from the Ministry of Justice, either of which would fix the court, the date and what was actually ordered.

Expertise Needed Law (Spanish administrative and ecclesiastical law)

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open The announcement was made at federal level and concerned listing as a standalone nationwide intelligence target. Several German states ran their own observation from 1997 and their current position was not established by this run.

What Would Settle It The current annual reports of the state offices for the protection of the constitution, in particular those states that began observation in 1997, or a statement from the interior ministries of those states.

Expertise Needed Law and public administration (Germany)

Question posed in Germany Ends Decades-Long Surveillance of the Church of Scientology, KTLA.

Open The Deorala Sati of 1987

Why It Is Open Contemporary accounts contradict one another completely, and no court has made a finding. The prosecutions for abetment and for glorification ran for decades and ended in acquittals, the last in 2024, so nothing was ever established judicially. Witnesses were villagers in a community under intense external scrutiny, and the accounts collected at the time were gathered by parties with declared positions on the question.

What Would Settle It A judicial or commission finding on the abetment question, which the acquittals have now foreclosed; failing that, a scholarly reconstruction that collates the police record, the contemporary press, the depositions and the investigations by women's organisations against one another and states what each can and cannot support. Such a collation has not been published.

Expertise Needed Legal history and the sociology of contemporary India, with access to the Rajasthan police and trial record.

Question posed in The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, Parliament of India.

Open Frankincense and Myrrh Blend

Why It Is Open The nativity account names the two resins together but does not describe them blended or burned as one compound, and a genuine combined incense recipe naming both resins together has not been located.

What Would Settle It A study of ancient or early Christian liturgical incense recipes identifying the earliest instance in which frankincense and myrrh are compounded into a single burned mixture, rather than named or given as a symbolic pair.

Expertise Needed Liturgical history, history of pharmacy

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open The received East Syriac text has no institution narrative, and the Holy See judged eucharists celebrated with it valid in 2001 on the ground that the words are present in the prayer in a dispersed form. Whether the narrative was omitted, was lost in transmission, or was never there is argued from the manuscript tradition and from the structure of the prayer, and this run could not establish which reading holds the field.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest East Syriac manuscript witnesses and their variants, set against the structure of the related Syriac anaphoras, together with the responses published by liturgical scholars to the 2001 guidelines.

Expertise Needed Liturgical history; Syriac manuscript studies

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Most Mandaic letters are named by their own sound with a preceding a (ab, ag, ad...), and their own descriptions state plainly this is a pronunciation label rather than an inherited word with a sense, unlike the Northwest Semitic nouns Hebrew and Syriac kept for the same slots. Six letters break that regular pattern by their own descriptions' own account (Its own text names the set: ushenna, aksa, dushenna, kad and it itself; In and Ash are separately marked as built on a different vowel or sound), and Dushenna and Kad, two of the six, already carry attested senses because they are documented ligatures of a real Aramaic word. The other four, plus Halqa, the very first letter and one of the script's three true vowel signs, whose name is equally outside the regular pattern, have no sense offered by any source consulted, and none of their descriptions states this as a settled absence either.

What Would Settle It A study of Mandaic's own manuscript and liturgical tradition for these specific six names, checked against Mandaic vocabulary and against the older Aramaic sequence's inherited nouns for the same six slots (Aleph, Waw, Heth, Yod, Ayin, Shin), beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.

Expertise Needed Mandaic studies; comparative Aramaic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem

Why It Is Open The two and a half leaves carrying the letter ascribed to Clement of Alexandria were removed from their host volume in the patriarchate library, reportedly for separate conservation, and have not been publicly produced since. Searches reported in the 2000s did not locate them, and no statement of their whereabouts has been published by the library or by anyone else.

What Would Settle It A statement from the patriarchate library, or a catalogue entry recording the leaves as a separate item with a shelfmark, would settle whether they are still held. Producing them for ink and paper analysis would additionally settle the authenticity question that currently depends entirely on photographs.

Expertise Needed Manuscript librarianship and codicology, with analytical conservation science if the leaves are produced

Question posed in Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery, Scott G. Brown.

Open Sarajevo Haggadah

Why It Is Open The manuscript's marginal notes place it in Italy by the sixteenth century, and it was purchased by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo in 1894, but no source consulted names an owner, a sale or a route connecting the two. Three centuries of the manuscript's history are undocumented.

What Would Settle It An archival record, an auction or sale document, an ownership mark, or a scholarly study of the manuscript's codicology that names an intervening owner or location between its sixteenth century appearance in Italy and its 1894 purchase in Sarajevo.

Expertise Needed Manuscript provenance research, Sephardic Jewish history

Question posed in National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah Catalogue Record, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Open Aleppo Codex

Why It Is Open The codex was in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo when it burned in the riot of December 1947 and reached Israel in 1958 with about two fifths of its leaves gone. The leaves were never observed to burn, and the surviving pages show no fire damage consistent with the loss. Two leaves have since surfaced from private hands, in 1982 and in 2007, which shows that at least some left Aleppo intact. Beyond that there is no established account. Competing suspicions have been aired, about the community in Aleppo, about those who carried the codex out, and about the institution that received it, and none has been tested to a finding. This is an absence rather than a scholarly dispute: no one holds a position that can be read and argued with.

What Would Settle It Provenance research in the archives of the parties who handled the codex between 1947 and 1958, including the Ben-Zvi Institute's own acquisition file and the Israeli state inquiry papers; and forensic examination of any further leaf that surfaces, since the two recovered so far were identified by matching parchment and hand.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and archival provenance research; Hebrew and Arabic; the modern history of the Syrian Jewish communities.

Question posed in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, Matti Friedman.

Open Bodleian Library

Why It Is Open The Bodleian holds significant alchemical and occult manuscript collections, including Ashmole material, but specific holdings for the works in this atlas were not verified to the point where a custody relation could be cited.

What Would Settle It Shelfmarks from the Bodleian's catalogue for named works, which is largely searchable.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and catalogue research.

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Vatican Apostolic Library

Why It Is Open The library plainly holds material relevant to this atlas, and popular accounts make expansive claims about it. Specific holdings could not be verified well enough to assert a custody relation for any individual work, and asserting one without evidence would be exactly the kind of confident claim the atlas exists to avoid.

What Would Settle It Shelfmarks from the library's own catalogue, which is partly published, for specific works already in this atlas.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and catalogue research; Latin and Italian.

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Mar Saba Letter

Why It Is Open The leaves were removed from their printed volume at the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem after the examination of 1983 and have not been publicly produced since. Nobody has stated where they are. Every argument about the document, on both sides of a fifty-year dispute, therefore rests on two sets of photographs, one black and white from 1958 and one colour from 1983. No ink analysis, no paper analysis and no examination of the writing under magnification by a document examiner with the original in front of them has ever been carried out. This is not a case of scholars disagreeing about evidence; it is a case of the evidence being unavailable.

What Would Settle It Locating the leaves within the Patriarchate library and permitting a standard document examination: ink composition, comparison of the ink against other eighteenth-century writing in the same collection, paper and pen analysis, and assessment of the hand by a forensic document examiner. Any of those would bear directly on whether the writing is of the eighteenth century or the twentieth, which is the question the whole dispute turns on.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and Greek palaeography; forensic document examination and ink chemistry; and the cooperation of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Question posed in Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery, Scott G. Brown.

Open Thomas Rudd

Why It Is Open The Harley, Sloane and Wellcome manuscripts attributed to Rudd carry no colophon naming his birth or death, and the attribution of the pairing scheme to him is itself questioned; nothing in the catalogued source establishes his life dates.

What Would Settle It A parish register, will, or dated professional record, a military engineering commission or a mathematical publication, identifying this Thomas Rudd distinctly from others of the same name, or a codicological study dating the Harley and Sloane manuscripts against a known biography.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, seventeenth century English biography

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Ginans

Why It Is Open Ginans are attributed to named pirs of the Satpanth mission, but the surviving Khojki manuscripts are considerably later than the men they name, the corpus went on growing after those men had died, and an attribution in this tradition asserts lineage and authority as well as composition. Scholars therefore treat the ascriptions as traditional rather than as established, without being able to say which texts are early.

What Would Settle It Systematic dating of the Khojki manuscript collections, and linguistic analysis of the corpus against securely dated South Asian texts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, would let the earlier strata be separated from the later. The manuscripts were catalogued only in the twentieth century and much of that comparative work has not been done.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, South Asian historical linguistics and Ismaili studies

Question posed in Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams, Tazim R. Kassam.

Open Diego de Landa

Why It Is Open Four Maya codices survive in the world. Landa records twenty seven books burned at Maní, but the Relación survives only as a shortened copy of a lost original, so his own figure cannot be verified against what he wrote. No census of the pre conquest manuscript corpus was ever made, and Maní was not the only burning. Nobody holds a position on the size of the corpus, which makes this an unfilled gap rather than a scholarly disagreement.

What Would Settle It A recovered fuller copy of the Relación would establish what Landa actually claimed. An archaeological find of interred or cached bark paper manuscripts, of the kind that has produced fragmentary codices in Maya burials, would begin to establish the scale of production. Systematic study of codex fragments already excavated but too degraded to read may become possible with improved imaging.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy and archaeology; colonial Spanish archival history; conservation imaging

Question posed in Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa.

Open Hussite Wars

Why It Is Open Surviving chronicles report battle and siege deaths individually across fifteen years of campaigning and five crusades, and demographic studies estimate Bohemia's wider population loss over the era, but nobody has reconciled combat deaths against the indirect toll of famine and disease that followed the campaigning armies into one figure attributable to the war itself.

What Would Settle It A historical demographic study working from Bohemian parish, manorial and tax records where they survive across the 1419 to 1434 period, disaggregating direct war casualties from the era's broader disease and famine mortality.

Expertise Needed Medieval Bohemian history; historical demography

Question posed in The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia, Thomas A. Fudge.

Open Wilton Diptych

Why It Is Open The panel carries no signature and no surviving documentary record names its painter; art historians disagree over whether the artist was English or French (or Franco-Flemish) trained, a debate more than a century old and still unresolved.

What Would Settle It A documentary record from Richard II's own household accounts naming a payment to a specific painter, or a technical or stylistic match confidently linking the panel to another securely attributed work from the same workshop.

Expertise Needed Medieval English and French art history

Question posed in Wilton Diptych (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Perth Museum (Culture Perth and Kinross)

Why It Is Open No documentary or physical evidence has ever settled whether monks at Scone hid the genuine stone and gave Edward I a substitute in 1296. The question has never been resolved.

What Would Settle It Discovery of a contemporary thirteenth or fourteenth century record describing the 1296 removal in enough detail to confirm or rule out a substitution, or a comparative petrological study against any stone independently documented as being at Scone before 1296.

Expertise Needed Medieval history, geology

Question posed in Perth Museum (institutional record).