Open Questions

Open Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Why It Is Open The Bulgarian Orthodox Church's own governing Statute, adopted by the Sixth Church-People's Council on 11 December 2008 at Rila Monastery and read in full at its official hosted address, covers ecclesiastical structure, the selection of church leaders, synodal organization and diocesan administration, and contains no provision anywhere on parish funding, member giving, tithes, dues or voluntary contributions. No other Bulgarian Orthodox source addressing member giving specifically has yet been found on this axis.

What Would Settle It A primary Bulgarian Orthodox Church source (a parish or diocesan stewardship statement, a Holy Synod financial policy) or a scholarly study of Bulgarian Orthodox parish finance, stating whether an ordinary member is expected to give a set amount or percentage.

Expertise Needed Bulgarian Orthodox studies, primary source review of Bulgarian Orthodox Church financial governance

Question posed in Statute of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Open Reconquista

Why It Is Open Historians have never attempted a single aggregate casualty figure for the Reconquista: nearly eight centuries of intermittent campaigns, sieges and truces across several separate Christian kingdoms fighting several separate Muslim states, with no continuous or comparable record keeping across that whole span, make a single defensible total a different kind of undertaking than counting the dead of a bounded war fought at one time by two sides. A figure of seven million dead is nonetheless widely repeated in popular accounts, but it traces to no named historian, study or archival source, and Joseph O'Callaghan's scholarly history of the conflict's crusading and religious framing gives no aggregate total either.

What Would Settle It A historical demographer's attempt to build a period by period and kingdom by kingdom casualty accounting across the centuries long conflict, rather than the single figure a bounded war can be given.

Expertise Needed Medieval Iberian history; historical demography

Question posed in Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, Joseph F. O'Callaghan.

Open Santo Daime

Why It Is Open The tradition's own English language materials cover belief, ritual and history but say nothing about a member's financial obligation, and the scholarship on Brazilian ayahuasca religions checked in this search addresses supply and commercialization between communities rather than an individual member's own giving.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of the tradition's own Portuguese language materials, or ethnographic scholarship that specifically addresses whether a member owes a financial contribution to their own church or line.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious studies and the anthropology of new religious movements

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

Open União do Vegetal

Why It Is Open The tradition's own United States affiliate FAQ was read in full and covers history, legal status and ritual practice in detail, but says nothing about a membership fee or any other financial obligation, positive or negative.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of Uniao do Vegetal's own Portuguese language internal materials, or published scholarship that specifically addresses member financial obligation.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious studies and the anthropology of new religious movements

Question posed in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418, Supreme Court of the United States.

Open Barquinha

Why It Is Open Barquinha is the least documented of the three Brazilian ayahuasca religions in the material checked for this axis, and no source found in this search, in English or Portuguese, addresses whether a member owes a financial contribution to their own house.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of a Barquinha house's own materials, in Portuguese, or ethnographic fieldwork among Barquinha communities that addresses member financial obligation specifically.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious studies and the anthropology of new religious movements

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

Open Church of God in Christ

Why It Is Open Two scanned editions of the Official Manual, the denomination's own binding text, were located and fetched directly and both render only as compressed image data, not readable text. Four other sources describing the denomination in detail were checked and none of them addresses tithing at all, so the only description of the Manual's own tithing language found so far is a secondhand, unverified reference.

What Would Settle It A text transcription or OCR of the Official Manual's own chapter on tithes and church finance, or a scholarly source that quotes the Manual's tithing language directly rather than describing it secondhand.

Expertise Needed African American religious history and Pentecostal denominational studies

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

Open Sikh-Mughal Wars

Why It Is Open J.S. Grewal's standard modern history of the Sikhs, and other accessible surveys of the conflict, record casualty figures for individual battles and massacres, tens of thousands at the Battle of Bhilowal, thousands at Chhota Ghallughara, hundreds at the siege of Gurdaspur, but none totals them into a single figure for the roughly ninety year conflict, and no comprehensive scholarly count was located. A figure is never invented to fill that gap.

What Would Settle It A scholarly synthesis totaling documented losses across the conflict's 1621 to 1715 span, or a demographic study of Punjab's population comparable to the census based methods used for other early modern wars. No such synthesis was located across the standard modern histories of the conflict.

Expertise Needed Military and demographic history of Mughal India and early Sikh Punjab.

Question posed in J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3), J. S. Grewal.

Open Second Punic War

Why It Is Open Adrian Goldsworthy's scholarly history of the Punic Wars, and the ancient accounts of Polybius and Livy it draws on, record casualty figures for individual battles, roughly 15,000 Roman dead at Trebia, 15,000 at Lake Trasimene, and a toll near 50,000 at Cannae, alongside modern demographic reconstructions of the Roman citizen census, which fell from 273,000 in 225 BC toward roughly half that within the war's first decade. None of these totals a single figure for combat and civilian deaths on both sides across the full seventeen year war, and no comprehensive scholarly count was located.

What Would Settle It A scholarly synthesis totaling documented losses across the war's Italian, Spanish, Sicilian and African theaters, or a demographic study using the Roman citizen census figures to derive a total including allied Italian troops, Carthaginian forces and civilians, comparable to the census based methods used for other wars this atlas records. No such synthesis was located across the standard modern histories of the conflict.

Expertise Needed Roman republican military and demographic history.

Question posed in The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146 BC, Adrian Goldsworthy.

Open The Greco-Persian Wars

Why It Is Open Herodotus's Histories records casualty figures for individual engagements, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea and Mycale among them, but modern scholars regard many of the ancient figures, including the size of the Persian invasion force itself, as unreliable and often inflated. No modern scholarly synthesis was located that totals deaths across the wars' span into a single figure; scholarship instead discusses each battle's own contested numbers on its own terms.

What Would Settle It A modern scholarly total built from revised, rather than Herodotus's own, troop and casualty figures across the wars' major engagements, or a demographic study of Achaemenid and Greek population loss over the conflict. No such synthesis was located.

Expertise Needed Ancient Greek and Achaemenid Persian military history.

Question posed in Histories, Herodotus.

Open Hundred Years War

Why It Is Open Jonathan Sumption's multi volume scholarly history covers the war's campaigns in detail, and named battle losses are documented, thousands of French dead at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt among them, but no historian's synthesis totals combat deaths together with the compounding effects of famine and the Black Death across the war's hundred and sixteen year span into one figure. Totals near two to three million, or as high as five million, circulate widely but trace to popular compilations rather than a named historian's stated methodology.

What Would Settle It A named historian's stated total distinguishing direct battle deaths from indirect famine and plague mortality across the war's full span, comparable to the demographic methods used for other wars this atlas records. No such study was located; only unattributed aggregator totals circulate.

Expertise Needed Late medieval English and French military and demographic history.

Question posed in The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle, Jonathan Sumption.

Open The First Fitna

Why It Is Open The Battle of Siffin and the Battle of the Camel are both remembered with specific traditional casualty figures, commonly around seventy thousand combined at Siffin alone, but those figures trace only to medieval chronicle compilations, chiefly al-Tabari drawing on Abu Mikhnaf, written under later dynasties with their own interest in the outcome. No modern historian has produced an independent whole-conflict synthesis to check them against.

What Would Settle It A modern historian's critical, source-by-source reassessment of the casualty claims in al-Tabari and the other early narrative sources, of the kind Bar Kokhba and the Sikh-Mughal Wars have each already received on this atlas, weighing the chronicles' reliability rather than repeating their totals.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history; source criticism of the classical Arabic chronicle tradition

Question posed in The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate, Wilferd Madelung.

Open The Destruction of the Second Temple

Why It Is Open Josephus claims 1.1 million dead over the course of the siege; Tacitus gives six hundred thousand. Menahem Stern's standard critical edition of the classical sources treats Tacitus's figure, and by extension Josephus's higher one, as rhetorical rather than reliable, and proposes no replacement. No modern historian has converted demographic or archaeological evidence into a defensible death toll for the siege itself.

What Would Settle It A published demographic or archaeological reassessment of the siege's casualties, of the kind Raviv and Ben David produced for the Bar Kokhba War from settlement-survey evidence, applied to first-century Jerusalem's population and the siege's own documented timeline.

Expertise Needed Roman-period Judaean history; historical demography; classical source criticism

Question posed in Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, Volume Two: From Tacitus to Simplicius (1980), Menahem Stern.

Open The Raid on Somnath in 1026

Why It Is Open Turko-Persian chronicles written after the fact give a formulaic figure of tens of thousands killed defending the temple, which Thapar's historiographical study reads as a rhetorical convention repeated across several unrelated conquest narratives of the period rather than a count, and contemporary Sanskrit and Jain inscriptions from Saurashtra do not corroborate it or even mention the raid.

What Would Settle It Independent corroborating evidence from the Saurashtra region itself, archaeological or epigraphic, of a kind that is entirely absent from the record as it stands, or a named modern historian's reasoned estimate in place of the chronicle's formulaic figure.

Expertise Needed Medieval South Asian history; Indology; epigraphy

Question posed in Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, Romila Thapar.

Open The Huichang Persecution of Buddhism

Why It Is Open Ennin's eyewitness diary and official Tang records document the persecution's scale in detail, including the 260,500 monks and nuns returned to lay life, but neither they nor any later Chinese history drawing on them records a death toll.

What Would Settle It A documented count from Tang administrative or local records of deaths directly caused by the persecution, distinct from the well recorded laicization total, should one ever surface in the surviving archive.

Expertise Needed Tang dynasty history; Chinese Buddhist history

Question posed in Ennin's Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, Ennin, translated and annotated by Edwin O. Reischauer.

Open Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

Why It Is Open The word asrat, literally "tithe", is well documented historically, but as a state-administered land tax of one tenth of agricultural produce collected by secular officials (mesle, gult gash, cheqa shum), administered separately from the Church's own monastic gult land holdings, per a peer-reviewed regional economic history of one Ethiopian ruler's own early-20th-century tax system. Two bands across this axis have now searched (scholarly databases, the Fetha Nagast, the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica) and found no canonical or doctrinal Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church text stating a personal member giving percentage. A modern US diaspora parish's own fundraising campaign uses the word "Asrat" in its title, showing the term is in living use, but a single campaign title is not a doctrinal statement of what the Church formally expects.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of a canonical Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church text, a Holy Synod statement, or a scholarly ethnography of contemporary EOTC parish finance (in Ethiopia or in the diaspora) stating whether an ordinary member is expected to give a set percentage of income and what follows if they do not.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian studies, primary source review of Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canonical texts

Question posed in The Taxation System of Ras Haylu Taklu Haymanot of Gojjam: 1907-1932, Geremew Eskezia.

Open Georgian Orthodox Church

Why It Is Open A named-author 2021 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace policy report on the Georgian Orthodox Church's political and financial position documents its state funding channels in real detail, annual budget transfers, land, buildings and vehicles from the Georgian government and local municipalities, and never once addresses ordinary parishioner or member giving. Two bands on this axis have now searched specifically for a Georgian Orthodox tithe, due or stewardship norm (the 2002 state concordat, general Orthodox stewardship literature, Georgian-language donation terminology) and found nothing that names the Church's own practice.

What Would Settle It A primary Georgian Orthodox Church source (a parish or diocesan stewardship statement, a Patriarchate financial policy) or a scholarly study of Georgian parish-level finance specifically, stating whether an ordinary member is expected to give a set amount or percentage.

Expertise Needed Georgian religious studies, primary source review of Georgian Orthodox Church financial governance

Question posed in The Orthodox Church in Georgia's Changing Society, Archil Gegeshidze and Mikheil Mirziashvili.

Open Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Why It Is Open The Ukrainian Orthodox Church's jurisdiction is genuinely contested (the Orthodox Church of Ukraine under the 2019 Tomos of Autocephaly against the church previously under the Moscow Patriarchate), and no single source found across two bands establishes a giving norm for either reading of it. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA's own institutional announcement of a general stewardship resource promotes giving only in general spiritual terms, "the deep spiritual roots of Orthodox stewardship", with no stated percentage, due or consequence for a member who does not give, distinct from the codified due-with-consequences shape already recorded on this axis for Serbian and Armenian parish practice.

What Would Settle It A primary source from a specific Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdiction (the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, or the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada) stating a specific dues, pledge or tithe structure and what follows, if anything, when a member does not meet it; or a scholarly study of Ukrainian Orthodox parish finance addressing member giving specifically.

Expertise Needed Slavic Orthodox studies, primary source review of Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdictional finance

Question posed in New Blog: Office of Stewardship.

Open The 1999 Ban and Crackdown on Falun Gong

Why It Is Open Detention, forced labor camp sentences and reports of torture and deaths in custody are well documented since the 1999 ban, but advocacy organizations and the Chinese government publish estimates that diverge by orders of magnitude, and neither is independently verified nor cross-checked against detention records outside state control.

What Would Settle It Independent access to Chinese detention, labor camp and mortality records, or a systematic international investigation with verified access to prison and camp registries from the relevant decades.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in Falun Gong and the Future of China, David Ownby.

Open The Persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan

Why It Is Open Individual killings and mob attacks against Pakistan's Ahmadi community are documented incident by incident since the 1974 constitutional amendment and the 1984 Ordinance XX, but no independent body has compiled a cumulative total across the full decades-long campaign of legal restriction and violence.

What Would Settle It A systematic count from an independent human rights body, cross-checked against Ahmadiyya community records and Pakistani state records, covering the full period since 1974.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in Ordinance XX of 1984 (Pakistan), Government of Pakistan.

Open The Uyghur Internment in Xinjiang

Why It Is Open The OHCHR's 2022 assessment documents serious human rights violations across the Xinjiang internment system, but China has not granted independent international access to detention facility records or mortality data, and no independent body has published a verified death toll.

What Would Settle It Independent international access to detention facility records and mortality data, which has not been granted to date.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).