Open Questions

Open Twelve Tribes

Why It Is Open Twelve Tribes operates roughly 40 largely self-governing communities internationally with no found central financial disclosure; only a single town's property assessment, Plymouth, Massachusetts at more than 7 million dollars, was located, which describes one community's holdings rather than the movement's total.

What Would Settle It A consolidated accounting, whether voluntary or produced by investigative journalism, of Twelve Tribes' property and business holdings, including its Yellow Deli restaurant chain, across all of its international communities.

Expertise Needed New religious movement studies and communal economics, and investigative journalism covering Twelve Tribes' individual communities.

Question posed in My Time with the Twelve Tribes (Plymouth Independent, 2026), Lucia Thomas.

Open Ransom Theory of the Atonement

Why It Is Open Patristic writers who named the devil were answered inside their own century by Gregory of Nazianzus, who held that paying the devil was an outrage and that paying the Father was scarcely better. Anselm denied that any claim existed to be bought out. No formulation of the recipient has ever obtained general assent, and the ransom vocabulary is used today by Christians who reject every mechanism proposed for it.

What Would Settle It Exegetical work establishing whether the ransom sayings were ever intended to carry a recipient at all, or whether the metaphor names a condition of captivity without implying a transaction. A finding either way would decide whether the recipient question is a real gap or a question the sources never posed.

Expertise Needed New Testament exegesis; patristics; the study of biblical metaphor

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open A group of early witnesses gives a shorter text of Luke 22 that stops after the first mention of the cup, and the longer text, printed in most modern critical editions, gives the bread and a second cup. The two readings shape the passage differently and the argument has run for more than a century. This run recorded the dispute on this page but did not establish where the weight of current textual scholarship sits.

What Would Settle It A current survey of the manuscript evidence and of the argument over the Western non-interpolations, with the editorial reasoning of the major critical editions set side by side.

Expertise Needed New Testament textual criticism

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

Open Ranjana

Why It Is Open Ranjana is unencoded, so there is no character standard to settle the inventory. The one openly licensed Ranjana typeface, Nithya Ranjana, ships two builds: the Devanagari-mapped build has no way to reach these six, because Devanagari has no letters for them, while the Newa-mapped build carries a separate outline for each, since the Newa block encodes them as letters of Prachalit. The font therefore draws six shapes whose status in Ranjana's own tradition this run could not establish, so the 47 letters seeded here are the vowels and consonants both builds agree on.

What Would Settle It A reading of Newar alphabet charts and primers that teach Ranjana in the Kathmandu Valley, or of the Ranjana Unicode encoding proposals submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee, either of which would state whether the six are counted as letters. If they are, they belong in the block at ids 5247 to 5252.

Expertise Needed Newar palaeography; South Asian script encoding

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

Open Maitatsine Risings

Why It Is Open The 1981 federal tribunal of inquiry investigated only the December 1980 Kano rising, and even for that episode its civilian count of 4,177 sits beside a separately reported, less formally sourced figure of about 5,000. The four later risings at Bulumkutu, Rigasa, Jimeta and Gombe were never subject to a comparable tribunal, and no historian has combined all five episodes into one reconciled total.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from Nigerian federal and state records, hospital and mortuary registers where they survive, and local press archives for the 1982, 1984 and 1985 risings on the same footing as the 1981 tribunal covered the 1980 Kano rising, to build one casualty estimate across all five episodes.

Expertise Needed Nigerian and West African history; the sociology of religious movements

Question posed in The Maitatsine Risings in Nigeria 1980 to 85: A Revolt of the Disinherited, Elizabeth Isichei.

Open African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

Why It Is Open Reporting outlets and denominational pages carrying a consolidated total-assets or budget figure for the AME Zion Church returned access errors when checked directly; the denomination does not appear to publish a single consolidated financial statement the way some larger denominations do.

What Would Settle It A consolidated financial statement, IRS Form 990-equivalent filing or audited annual report published by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church's own General Board, or a reporting outlet's successful access to one.

Expertise Needed Nonprofit and denominational finance, religious studies

Open Word of Faith Fellowship

Why It Is Open Word of Faith Fellowship is organized and recognized by the IRS as a church, a category exempt from the Form 990 filing that would otherwise make its finances checkable, and it has never published its own financial account. The only dollar figures the public record holds are a fraudulent unemployment claims total tied to individual members and a federal investigation into alleged abuse, neither a statement of the church's own assets or revenue.

What Would Settle It A voluntary financial disclosure, a court-ordered accounting from a future civil or criminal proceeding, or investigative journalism that totals the church's property, cash holdings and revenue as an organization, distinct from the individual-level fraud figures already on record.

Expertise Needed Nonprofit and tax law concerning church filing exemptions, and investigative journalism covering Word of Faith Fellowship's internal finances.

Question posed in Word Of Faith Fellowship Inc, Organization Record (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).

Open Mennonites

Why It Is Open Mennonite Church USAs Executive Board publishes its own annual audit, and a net-asset figure was reported in secondary coverage, but that figure could not be independently confirmed by reading the underlying audited document in this research pass, so it was not written into the atlas.

What Would Settle It A directly readable copy of Mennonite Church USAs own audited financial statement, or a current Mennonite World Conference Fair Share total with its underlying figures.

Expertise Needed Nonprofit financial reporting and Anabaptist denominational administration.

Question posed in Fair Share Contribution (Mennonite World Conference).

Open Alaf ࠀ

Why It Is Open The continuity between Paleo-Hebrew and the Samaritan script is not in doubt, but the intervening centuries are thinly attested, so the stages by which the monumental Iron Age forms became the manuscript hand the community writes today are known only in outline.

What Would Settle It Dated Samaritan inscriptions or manuscript fragments from the intervening period, of the kind the Mount Gerizim excavations produced for the earlier end of the sequence.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic palaeography; archaeology of Samaria

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

Open The Identity of the Breastplate Leshem

Why It Is Open This investigation set out to identify the ninth breastplate stone and stopped without a conclusion, because every avenue it examined turned out to be inferential. The ancient versions disagree and none of them is independent of the others; comparison with neighbouring stone lists establishes what was available rather than what was meant; and etymology alone has not narrowed the four candidates. Nobody holds a defended position that a specialist could go and read against a rival one, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A securely dated use of leshem outside the two Exodus lists, in a Hebrew or closely related Northwest Semitic text, in a context that identifies a physical object. Failing that, a labelled or securely provenanced stone from a Second Temple period priestly context, or a decisive argument from Semitic cognates. Absent one of those, the honest answer is that the question may not be decidable on present evidence, and establishing that would itself be a result.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic philology, biblical archaeology and historical gemology

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

Open Ligure

Why It Is Open No securely dated ancient Hebrew source uses leshem outside the Exodus breastplate list in a context that fixes what stone it names, so every proposed identification, jacinth, amber, tourmaline or opal, rests on inference rather than direct attestation. The Septuagint, the Vulgate and the later translation tradition do not agree on a referent for this ninth breastplate stone either, which is the visible symptom of the unsettled identification.

What Would Settle It An independently attested, securely dated use of leshem in a non-biblical ancient Hebrew or closely related Northwest Semitic inscription or document, ideally alongside a described or surviving physical object, would let philologists cross-check the word against a known referent. A securely provenanced, labeled exemplar from a Second Temple period priestly context would serve the same purpose.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic philology, biblical archaeology and historical mineralogy

Question posed in The Holy Bible, Anonymous (multiple authors).

Open Hammurabi

Why It Is Open No inscription or chronicle records when Hammurabi was born. What survives fixes only his reign, conventionally 1792 to 1750 BCE under the Middle Chronology, and everything about his life before the throne is unrecorded.

What Would Settle It A dated Old Babylonian document naming Hammurabi's age or birth before his accession, distinct from the reign dates fixed by his own year names and later king lists.

Expertise Needed Old Babylonian history, Mesopotamian chronology

Question posed in Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Jeremy Black and Anthony Green.

Open Slovo Ⱄ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.

What Would Settle It A ninth or tenth century source that gives the letter names in full as a continuous text, rather than as a list, would show the sequence being read as an utterance at a date close to the alphabet's making. The acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the letters in verse, are the most likely place for such evidence, and a study that separated what those poems inherit from what they compose would bear directly on the question.

Expertise Needed Old Church Slavonic philology; Slavic historical linguistics; medieval Slavonic literature

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open The Nine Herbs Charm

Why It Is Open Old English plant names do not correspond one to one with modern species, and the medical manuscripts are not consistent with each other. Mucgwyrt, wegbrade, fille and finule can be identified with reasonable confidence. Maegde and attorlathe have proposals that have not been accepted. Stune and wergulu have no identification that anyone defends, and nobody holds a position on them, so the question is an unfilled gap rather than a live argument. Every attempt to read the charm as pharmacology stops here.

What Would Settle It A glossary witness pairing one of the unidentified Old English names with a Latin plant name, which is how the secure identifications were made. Failing that, archaeobotanical evidence from a securely dated Anglo-Saxon medical or monastic context, where the plant assemblage could be compared against the list. A systematic re-search of the Old English glossaries and of the English place-name corpus for the elements stune and wergulu, using material catalogued since the standard identifications were made, is the concrete next step.

Expertise Needed Old English lexicography, historical botany and archaeobotany

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

Open Æcerbot

Why It Is Open The word occurs once in the surviving Old English corpus. It is addressed, it is given the epithet mother of earth, and it stands where a name would stand. It has been read as a lost goddess name, as a title, as a loanword, as a corruption of another word, and as an exclamatory particle that is not a name at all. None of these has been accepted, and the reason is not that scholars are divided between defended positions but that a single occurrence gives nothing to test a proposal against. Work on it was begun and could not be concluded.

What Would Settle It A second attestation of the word in any Old English or related source: a charm, a gloss, a place name or a personal name element, showing it in a context that constrains its meaning. Old English glossaries and the English place-name survey have been searched, and re-running that search against material catalogued since, including manuscript fragments and minor place-name collections, is the practical task. A continental Germanic cognate in a comparable ritual context would serve equally well.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, Germanic comparative linguistics and English place-name study

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

Open Beowulf

Why It Is Open The one manuscript is dated on palaeographic grounds to about 975 to 1025, and that date is not seriously contested. The date of composition is, and estimates have ranged across three centuries. Arguments from metre, from linguistic archaism, from the historical allusions and from the poem's Christian frame have each been made to carry the case and each has been answered. The atlas records the manuscript date as a date and the composition date as disputed, rather than choosing.

What Would Settle It A dating argument that does not depend on assumptions about the transmission it is trying to establish. Linguistic and metrical tests have been the most productive line, and a test whose result is independent of whether the poem was copied and modernised on its way to the surviving manuscript would settle far more than another reading of the historical allusions.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, historical linguistics and metrics, palaeography

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

Open Nine worlds

Why It Is Open The Eddas refer to nine worlds without ever enumerating them in one place. The lists that circulate today are modern reconstructions assembled from names scattered across the Poetic and Prose Eddas, not a set any medieval text sets out as such.

What Would Settle It A systematic philological collation of every Old Norse cosmological realm named in the Poetic Edda (Voluspa, Grimnismal, Vafthrudnismal among them) and the Prose Edda, checked for internal consistency, by an Old Norse philologist.

Expertise Needed Old Norse philology

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

Open Norse Paganism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Norse Paganism as carrying no MythicalCreature of kind Hybrids while all three Polytheistic peers do. The Norse bestiary the atlas holds is built from outsized single species beasts, serpents, sea monsters and spirits. Whether Sleipnir, Hraesvelgr, the swan maidens and the merfolk are composite creatures or shapeshifters and beasts in another guise is a question about the facet definition as much as about the sources, and triage on 2026-07-29 could not settle it.

What Would Settle It A definition of the Hybrids facet precise enough to sort cases, applied to a full inventory of creatures in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda and the fornaldarsogur.

Expertise Needed Old Norse philology, comparative mythology

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

Open Vali

Why It Is Open A proposed link between Vali's name and Old Norse words for growing or ripening, motivated by how quickly the god reaches manhood in the myth itself, is treated in the reference literature as an unconfirmed coincidence with the story rather than an established derivation.

What Would Settle It A philological study weighing the proposed growing or ripening derivation against the alternatives, or an independent early attestation of the name outside the mythic narrative that could confirm or rule out the connection.

Expertise Needed Old Norse philology, historical linguistics of the Germanic languages

Question posed in Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow.

Open 1860 Mount Lebanon and Damascus Massacres

Why It Is Open Fawaz's Mount Lebanon estimate and Rogan's Damascus estimate come from two separate archival reconstructions written thirty years apart, each focused on a different phase and place; no single study has combined them into one reconciled figure for the whole 1860 violence, and the much higher contemporary press and missionary claims that circulated at the time remain uncorrected in some popular accounts.

What Would Settle It A study working from Ottoman provincial and central archives, European consular correspondence and the records of the 1860 international commission of inquiry, applying a consistent method across both Mount Lebanon and Damascus, to produce one combined, reconciled casualty estimate for the whole episode.

Expertise Needed Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history

Question posed in An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, Leila Tarazi Fawaz.