Open Questions

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 Aja Ekapada

Why It Is Open He has no hymn, no described act, no attribute and no epithet, and appears almost only inside enumerations of gods. Aja is either a goat or, read as a-ja, the unborn, and ekapada is one-footed or having one support. Readings were proposed in the nineteenth century and nobody has defended any of them at length since, because there is no passage anywhere against which one could be tested. This is a gap rather than a disagreement. He appears only in enumerations, almost always beside Ahi Budhnya, so no domain can be read off the surviving text either.

What Would Settle It A passage from outside the Rigveda that describes rather than merely names him, whether in the Brahmana literature, the Atharvaveda or a comparative Indo-Iranian source; or a demonstration that the formulaic pairing with Ahi Budhnya is itself the whole content of the name, which would close the question by showing there is nothing behind it. A comparative Indo-European study connecting the name to a documented mythic role would serve equally.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Ahir Budhnya

Why It Is Open Budhna means bottom, base or root, and three readings are in use: the lower atmosphere, the floor of the sea, and the foundation of the world. The atmospheric reading rests on the company he keeps in the enumerations rather than on anything said about him, and the enumerations are formulaic.

What Would Settle It A Vedic or Brahmana passage that places him rather than merely lists him, or comparative evidence from Iranian material for a serpent of the deep whose location is specified.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

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 Nefertem

Why It Is Open The name is written nfr plus tm and both halves are ambiguous. It is read as "Atum is beautiful", making the god a statement about the creator, and it is read as "the beautiful one who closes", making it a description of the lotus shutting at dusk. The two readings imply different theologies and Egyptological reference works give both without settling between them.

What Would Settle It An early attestation where the name is written with a determinative or in a context that disambiguates tm as the divine name rather than the verb, or a demonstrably early orthography that rules one reading out.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, philology

Question posed in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.).

Open Slavic

Why It Is Open Every surviving description of Slavic religion was written by Christian outsiders recording what they intended to destroy, and none of them records a cosmogony. The dualist earth-diver story usually printed as the Slavic creation myth is attested only in folklore collected after a thousand years of Christianity, in a form shared with Finno-Ugric and Turkic neighbours. Attempts to recover a pre-Christian original from it have produced competing reconstructions and no agreement, and most specialists have stopped trying.

What Would Settle It A pre-Christian Slavic text of any length would settle it, and none is known to exist. Short of that, an inscribed or iconographic find from a pagan-period sanctuary that depicts a creation sequence, of the kind Arkona or Zbrucz might still yield, would give the reconstruction something outside the folklore to stand on.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the archaeology of pagan-period sanctuaries in the western Slavic lands

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

Open Etruscan

Why It Is Open The Etruscan language is read only in short, largely formulaic texts, and the longest survivals, the Zagreb mummy wrappings and the Capua tile, are ritual calendars rather than narrative. What Roman writers preserved of the Etrusca disciplina is the part that interested them, the reading of lightning and livers, and it does not include a cosmogony. Nobody holds a position on what the Etruscan account was, because there is nothing to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A long Etruscan narrative text would settle it. The known corpus is almost entirely epigraphic and funerary, so the realistic route is a new find of the length of the Zagreb wrappings that is narrative rather than calendrical.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, with epigraphy and the archaeology of Etruscan sanctuary sites

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

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The Old Phrygian corpus is short and largely dedicatory, and the Greek and Roman writers who describe the cult of the Mother report its rites and the story of Attis without any account of origins. It is not that two readings compete; it is that the material has never yielded one, and the question has effectively been set down rather than argued over.

What Would Settle It A longer Old or New Phrygian text of narrative character, or a securely Phrygian iconographic sequence depicting origins, from the highland monuments or a sanctuary excavation.

Expertise Needed Anatolian epigraphy and Phrygian philology, with the archaeology of the Phrygian highlands

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

Open Moinuddin Chishti

Why It Is Open The narrative in circulation comes from Chishti biographical collections compiled in the fourteenth century and later, and from malfuzat attributed to the early masters, several of which specialists regard as fifteenth century compositions back-dated to their subjects. The birth date and birthplace, the itinerary and the account of his arrival in India all rest on that later material.

What Would Settle It Identification of documents contemporary with him, whether Persian administrative records, waqf deeds for the Ajmer site, or attestations in works datable to the thirteenth century, examined independently of the order's own literature.

Expertise Needed South Asian history; Persian manuscript studies

Question posed in Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Chapters on the early Chishti sources.

Open Nefertem

Why It Is Open Sekhmet is his mother in the Memphite triad, which is the arrangement most often reproduced, but Bastet and Wadjet are each named in other local traditions. It is not clear whether one of the three is original and the others are later local substitutions, or whether the triad itself is a Memphite systematisation of a god who began without a fixed parentage.

What Would Settle It A survey of the earliest attestations by site and date rather than by the standard triad, which would show whether the variation is chronological or purely geographical.

Expertise Needed Egyptology

Question posed in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson.

Open John Chrysostom

Why It Is Open The texts, their dating and their later use in antisemitic polemic are all documented and not in dispute. What is unsettled is what follows. Historians locate them in a local Antiochene quarrel and in the conventions of ancient invective; others hold that the framing does not answer for the use made of them. Churches that venerate him have acknowledged harm without any agreed consequence for the liturgical texts or the calendar.

What Would Settle It This is not resolvable by evidence. It would be settled, if at all, by a deliberate judgement of the churches concerned, taken publicly and with reasons, in the way other reception questions have been handled.

Expertise Needed Patristics; Jewish-Christian relations; ecclesiology

Question posed in Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop, J. N. D. Kelly, Chapters on the Antiochene preaching.

Open Parshvanatha

Why It Is Open Critical scholarship accepts Parshvanatha and Mahavira as historical figures. Jain tradition holds all twenty four to be historical teachers. For the remaining twenty two there is no independent attestation, so a single answer applied across the group would misdescribe most of it in one direction or the other.

What Would Settle It Independent attestation for any individual Tirthankara beyond the two, whether inscriptional, textual from outside the tradition, or archaeological.

Expertise Needed Indology, Jain studies, and South Asian archaeology.

Question posed in The Jains, Paul Dundas, Second edition, page 19.

Open Soma

Why It Is Open At least three serious candidates have been argued at length and none is established. Wasson proposed Amanita muscaria in 1968; Flattery and Schwartz proposed Peganum harmala in 1989; ephedra is favoured on the grounds that it is the plant used in the living Zoroastrian Yasna, a ritual with no recorded break. Each fits some of the textual evidence and fails on other parts of it.

What Would Settle It A securely dated archaeobotanical find from an Indo-Iranian ritual context with residue analysis, or a philological argument that settles the disputed Rig Veda passages. A fourth possibility deserves testing: that the hymns are liturgical praise rather than pharmacological description, in which case a mild plant is sufficient and the search for a potent one is misconceived.

Expertise Needed Indology, Iranian and Avestan philology, archaeobotany, ethnobotany

Question posed in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, R. Gordon Wasson.

Open Aqidah al-Tahawiyya

Why It Is Open Abu Ja'far al-Tahawi's own lifetime, 853 to 933, is well established, but no source pins the creed's actual composition to a specific year or even a decade within it.

What Would Settle It A securely dated manuscript, a contemporary reference to the work's composition, or a philological study anchoring its text to a particular stage of al-Tahawi's career.

Expertise Needed Islamic intellectual history

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).

Open The Threefold Refuge (Tisarana)

Why It Is Open Tradition places its first use at the very start of the Buddha's teaching career, but the Buddha's own chronology is unsettled among historians, and no source assigns the formula a specific year.

What Would Settle It A firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the formula's earliest use independently of the traditional narrative that carries it.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies

Question posed in The Foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin.

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 Christus Victor

Why It Is Open Aulen argued that a unified dramatic view ran through the patristic period and through Luther, and was obscured by the scholastic and liberal accounts. Specialists in patristics have objected that victory language sits alongside sacrificial, medicinal and pedagogical language in the same writers, and that sorting the material into three types flattens the evidence. The theological position and the historical claim are frequently defended and attacked as though they were one thing.

What Would Settle It A survey of the atonement language in the principal patristic writers that counts and contexts each register separately rather than assigning each writer to a type. This would establish whether the dramatic language is dominant, co-ordinate, or one register among several.

Expertise Needed Patristics; historical theology

Question posed in Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, Gustaf Aulen.

Open Penal Substitution

Why It Is Open Anselm framed punishment and satisfaction as alternatives and chose satisfaction, while the Reformed doctrine makes the satisfaction consist in the punishment being borne, and moves the setting from a court of honour to a criminal one. Both a continuity reading and a discontinuity reading are argued by serious historians of doctrine, and each has a stake in the answer: continuity supports the claim of an unbroken Western tradition, discontinuity supports the charge of a sixteenth century innovation.

What Would Settle It A study of the sixteenth century Reformed texts tracing exactly where the penal vocabulary enters, which medieval sources those writers were reading, and whether they understood themselves to be restating Anselm or correcting him. Their own statements about what they were doing have not been collected in one place.

Expertise Needed Historical theology; Reformation studies; medieval intellectual history

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

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 Kapparah

Why It Is Open Scholars of the Hebrew Bible hold opposing readings of the same texts. A strong modern position takes the chatat as purging the sanctuary of accumulated impurity, with the animal never described as punished; older readings take covering as the governing sense of kipper and read a transfer. The answer bears directly on whether the Christian atonement theories may argue from these rites the way several of them do.

What Would Settle It Close philological work on the objects and prepositions the verb kipper takes across the whole priestly corpus, read alongside comparative material from neighbouring ritual systems, rather than through the categories of later theology.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology; the study of priestly ritual; comparative ancient Near Eastern religion

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