Open Questions

Open Seraphim of Sarov

Why It Is Open Nilus published the text in 1903 from papers he said reached him from Motovilov's widow, roughly seventy years after the conversation it describes. The manuscript he worked from has not been available for examination. Nobody holds a position on the proportions, because there is nothing to hold one against: this is an absence of evidence rather than a disagreement between readings.

What Would Settle It The recovery of Motovilov's original papers, or of any independent copy predating Nilus, and a textual comparison against the printed version. Failing that, a stylometric study of the printed text against Nilus's other known writing would narrow the question without closing it.

Expertise Needed Russian church history; textual criticism

Question posed in Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, Irina Paert, On the Motovilov material.

Open Trinity Lavra of St Sergius

Why It Is Open The monastery is well documented as historically one of Russias wealthiest landowners through the 19th century, but no source addressing its finances since its 1945 reopening to the Church was located.

What Would Settle It A published statement from the Lavra administration or the Moscow Patriarchate naming any income, endowment or budget figure, or scholarly research into post-Soviet Russian Orthodox monastic finances.

Expertise Needed Russian Orthodox Church administration and post-Soviet religious economics.

Question posed in Trinity St. Sergius Monastery (David B. Miller, Encyclopedia of Russian History, via Encyclopedia.com), David B. Miller.

Open Kashyapa

Why It Is Open The identification is old and attractive, because the tortoise is a creation figure elsewhere in the same literature and a progenitor who is also a tortoise would join two strands neatly. The two may equally be homonyms, and a resemblance that suits a later theology is the kind of thing a later theology can produce.

What Would Settle It Comparative evidence from cognate Indo-Iranian vocabulary, or a demonstration that the tortoise sense is attested for the name before the Prajapati tortoise material that makes it attractive.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit etymology and comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Vishvarupa

Why It Is Open Both are the ordinary Sanskrit compound meaning having all forms, and the atlas holds them as separate subjects sharing a word. Whether the epithet was ever felt to carry any of the older figure, or whether the coincidence is nothing more than a common adjective doing two jobs, has not been settled.

What Would Settle It A survey of the epithet in epic and Puranic usage checking for any passage that plays the two senses against each other, which would show the connection was felt, or its absence across the corpus, which would show it was not.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit literature and the history of Vaishnava epithets

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Amsha

Why It Is Open The Rigvedic name is amsa, a share, and it stands sixth in the hymn that lists the Adityas. The Vishnu Purana's list of twelve, which is explicitly solar and assigns one Aditya to each month, carries a name usually rendered Amshu, from amsu, a ray or a soma stalk. The Bhagavata Purana's list has neither. No source consulted for this entry argues the identification in either direction.

What Would Settle It A collation of the Aditya lists across the Puranic manuscript traditions, reading the name in each recension rather than in a single printed translation, and a comparison with the Brahmana passages where the count of twelve first appears.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit philology and Puranic textual criticism

Question posed in Vishnu Purana, Anonymous, Book II, chapter 10.

Open Vidhatri

Why It Is Open Vidhatri has no myth, no iconography and no cult, and outside the formulaic pairing with Dhatri he barely occurs in Sanskrit. Yet the disposer becomes an ordinary way of naming destiny in later devotional and vernacular speech. Nothing in the surviving Sanskrit sources sets out how the one became the other.

What Would Settle It A philological trace of the Dhatri and Vidhatri pairing through Puranic, epic and regional devotional literature, showing where the formula stops naming an act of divine arrangement and starts naming an agent who fixes a person's lot.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit philology, and the study of regional devotional and vernacular literatures

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open The Vasus

Why It Is Open The class has a fixed size and an unfixed roll. The surviving lists agree that the eight cover the elements and the abodes and differ on which names fill the slots and in what order. No version has the standing to correct the others, and the Mahabharata story fixed the membership in practice without settling the textual question.

What Would Settle It A comparative collation of the lists across the Brahmana, epic and Puranic sources establishing whether one order is prior and the others derive from it, or whether the variation goes back as far as the class does.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit textual criticism

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Kartir

Why It Is Open Kartir's own four rock inscriptions, the only sustained first person account of the early Sasanian priesthood to survive, describe his rise across the reigns of four kings from Ardashir I through Bahram II and his own religious offices and honors, but they are a career record, not a birth notice, and no outside chronicle supplies one either.

What Would Settle It A Sasanian administrative or dynastic text naming Kartir's age or birth before his rise under Ardashir I, distinct from the career narrative his own inscriptions preserve.

Expertise Needed Sasanian history, Zoroastrian religious history

Question posed in A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce.

Open Kartir

Why It Is Open Kartir's own inscriptions and the Paikuli inscription of Narseh together document his public career into 293 CE, but no source records what became of him after that year or gives an actual death date.

What Would Settle It A dated Sasanian inscription, seal or administrative record naming Kartir after 293 CE, or an external source recording his death.

Expertise Needed Sasanian history, Zoroastrian studies, Iranian epigraphy

Question posed in Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, Touraj Daryaee.

Open Kartir

Why It Is Open His own inscriptions at Naqsh-e Rajab, Naqsh-e Rostam and Sar Mashhad, the only sources for his biography, describe his career and titles under Ardashir I through Bahram II but never state where he was born.

What Would Settle It A Sasanian era inscription or record naming his origin, which none of his own surviving inscriptions supplies.

Expertise Needed Sasanian history; Zoroastrian studies; Middle Persian epigraphy

Question posed in Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, Touraj Daryaee.

Open Parah Adumah (The Red Heifer)

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Parah is the only source that supplies a count, and it records a dispute over the total rather than a settled figure. No independent documentary, epigraphic or archaeological attestation of any single performance has been identified, so there is nothing outside that one list against which the number can be checked. Nobody holds a defended position on the true count; the record is simply absent.

What Would Settle It An independent Second Temple period attestation would settle at least one performance: an ostracon, papyrus or inscription referring to the preparation of the ashes or to the water of lustration, or a securely dated installation on the Mount of Olives identifiable with the rite. Systematic re-reading of the Judaean desert documentary material for purity-water vocabulary is the cheapest place to look.

Expertise Needed Second Temple epigraphy and papyrology, archaeology of Roman Judaea

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Parah.

Open Maccabean Revolt

Why It Is Open The Books of Maccabees report casualty figures for a handful of individual battles, but modern military historians consider those ancient counts inflated for morale and legitimizing purposes, most of the revolt's many engagements across seven years have no surviving figures at all, and no historian has attempted to build a single reconciled war-wide death toll from what remains.

What Would Settle It A study working from archaeological evidence, destruction layers and burial contexts in Judea dated to the revolt's decades, that could independently test or bound the ancient chronicles' battle figures rather than relying on the literary sources alone.

Expertise Needed Second Temple Judaism; Near Eastern archaeology

Question posed in Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle Against the Seleucids, Bezalel Bar-Kochva.

Open Sappa (Tza) ፀ

Why It Is Open In the received reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches sappa is sounded exactly as saday is, so the classical value is not recoverable from how the script is read today, and it is reconstructed by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony.

What Would Settle It A transcription of Ge'ez words into a contemporary script that did distinguish the sounds, or an Aksumite-period bilingual or transcribed text in which the letter's value can be read off directly.

Expertise Needed Semitic historical linguistics; Ethiopian epigraphy

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

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all use their letters as figures, and Mandaic descends from the same Aramaic stock, so the practice would be unremarkable. No alphanumeric numeral system for Mandaic is described in the reference literature consulted, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits. Nothing states that the practice was absent either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A survey of numbering in dated Mandaean manuscripts and inscribed lead rolls, checking colophons, quire marks and folio numbers for letters standing as figures, together with a reading of the standard Mandaic grammars on how numbers are written out.

Expertise Needed Semitic palaeography and Mandaean manuscript studies

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium, Mandaic block, U+0840 to U+085F.

Open The Sabians

Why It Is Open The Quran names the Sabians three times and gives no description of them. The two leading identifications, the Mandaeans of southern Iraq and the star-venerating people of Harran, rest on different kinds of evidence and point in different directions, and the Harranian case is complicated by a report that the name was adopted there in order to obtain protected status. The identification has been argued since the ninth century by parties with a legal interest in the answer.

What Would Settle It A securely dated pre-Islamic attestation of the name applied to a specific community, or documentary evidence of self-designation from either candidate group before the Abbasid period, would settle it. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the earliest Quranic commentaries against the Mandaean and Harranian source material could establish which identification the earliest readers actually held.

Expertise Needed Semitic philology, Quranic exegesis and its history, the archaeology and epigraphy of upper Mesopotamia, and Mandaean studies

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

Open Expiation and Propitiation

Why It Is Open The group carries two histories. In Greek outside the Bible it means placating a person; in the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew kipper, whose objects are sins, persons and holy places rather than God. C. H. Dodd argued from the second, Leon Morris from the presence of wrath in the argument of Romans, and neither case has displaced the other. English versions have chosen differently in each generation, and the choice usually follows the doctrine already held.

What Would Settle It A lexical study covering the whole hilask- group across the Septuagint, the Jewish Greek literature outside it and the papyri, treating the New Testament occurrences last rather than first. The question is whether the Septuagint usage displaced the ordinary Greek sense for these writers or merely sat beside it.

Expertise Needed Septuagint studies; New Testament lexicography; Hellenistic Greek philology

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

Open Imperial Regalia of Japan

Why It Is Open Shinto religious practice keeps all three objects permanently unshown. Atsuta Shrine, Ise Grand Shrine and the Imperial Household Agency have never permitted an outside examination, so nobody outside the shrines and the Agency has verified the objects present or their condition in the modern era.

What Would Settle It A supervised non-invasive examination, such as imaging conducted by the custodial shrines or the Imperial Household Agency themselves, since no outside access has ever been permitted.

Expertise Needed Shinto studies, archaeometry

Question posed in The Imperial Regalia: Japan's Three Sacred Treasures (Nippon.com), Nippon.com.

Open Mata Khivi

Why It Is Open The Guru Granth Sahib, her strongest attestation, records no dates for her at all. The secondary Sikh reference literature that does venture birth and death years disagrees with itself, and no independent Mughal-era or Sikh documentary record has settled the question either way. The sixteenth-century placement usually given rests on her documented contemporaneity with Guru Angad's tenure as Guru from 1539 to 1552, not on a dated record of her own life.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary Sikh or Mughal-era record naming a specific year for her birth or her death would settle this. Absent that, a scholarly reconciliation of the secondary sources' disagreement, explaining which figures are more reliable and why, would at least narrow the range presently offered.

Expertise Needed Sikh history and textual studies

Question posed in The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, vol. 1, Max Arthur Macauliffe.

Open Sikhism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Sikhism as carrying no Practice of kind Therapeutic. Sikh medical service, from Bhai Kanhaiya tending the wounded of both sides to gurdwara dispensaries and hospitals, is real and well attested, but it is the ethic of seva applied to medicine rather than a separate named practice. Triage on 2026-07-29 could not decide whether the atlas should record it twice.

What Would Settle It A ruling on the atlas facet boundary between Charitable and Therapeutic, plus evidence from the Rehat Maryada and Sikh institutional history for a named healing observance.

Expertise Needed Sikh studies, history of South Asian medicine

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

Open The Army, Line 5

Why It Is Open King Wen 7 lines 3 and 5 contain the same two character phrase in the received Chinese text, the one usually rendered as carrying corpses in the wagon. The atlas keeps the image at line 3, whose description reads that the army may carry corpses in its wagons, and drops it at line 5, whose description reads only that disorder follows even a just cause. One phrase is therefore represented twice in two incompatible registers, and nothing on either page tells a reader that the underlying text is the same. Whether this was a deliberate reading or an accident of two passes is not recorded.

What Would Settle It Checking the received text of King Wen 7 lines 3 and 5 against a critical edition, then deciding one way for both lines: either the concrete image is kept in both, or the reason for treating the two occurrences differently is stated on the page. Any correction touches a line description and is owner gated.

Expertise Needed Sinology, specifically the textual history of the Zhou Yi.

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