Dating and Texts
Dating of c. In records of land grants of the fifth century BCE verses are quoted which occur only in the Padma, Bhavishya, and Brahma Puranas, and on this basis Pargiter in 1912 assigned these particular Puranas to an even earlier period. Maurice Winternitz considers it more probable that these verses, both in the inscriptions and in the puranas, were taken as quotations from earlier Dharmashastras, and thus argues that chronological deductions cannot be made on that basis.
According to Maurice Winternitz, the text which has come down to us in manuscript under this title is certainly not the ancient work which is quoted in the Āpastambīya Dharmasūtra. A quotation appearing in the Āpastambīya Dharmasūtra attributed to the Bhaviṣyat Purāṇa cannot be found in the extant text of the Purana.
The Bhavishya Purana itself tells us that it consists of five parts (Sanskrit: parvans), but the extant printed edition of the work contains only four parts (Brāhma, Madhyama, Pratisarga, and Uttara). These four parts have distinctive content and dating.
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