Scholars tend to regard the Vishnu Purana as a layered and evolving composition rather than a single, fixed revelation. By attending closely to language, style, and internal consistency, they discern earlier and later strata within the work, noting where the tone, vocabulary, or theological emphasis shifts. References to dynasties, social institutions, and recognizable historical developments are used to sketch a relative chronology, with a broadly earlier “core” and subsequent accretions. The relatively coherent pañca-lakṣaṇa structure is often read as the result of deliberate editorial systematization, organizing diverse materials into a more unified Vaishnava compendium. In this way, the text is approached as a living archive of religious memory, shaped over time by those who transmitted and revered it.

A central tool in this inquiry is the comparative study of manuscripts from different regions, especially the broad North and South Indian recensions. By collating these witnesses, scholars identify verses confined to particular manuscript families, abrupt narrative breaks, duplications, and divergent chapter arrangements, all of which can signal redactional activity or local interpolation. Critical and semi‑critical editions attempt to approximate an archetypal form while preserving significant variants in their apparatus. Commentarial traditions are also consulted, both to see how earlier readers understood problematic passages and to gauge which readings were already established or contested in earlier periods. Through such philological work, the text’s transmission history gradually comes into clearer focus.

Redaction and interpolation are further traced through the lens of theology and sectarian orientation. The Vishnu Purana clearly privileges Vishnu, yet it also preserves more general Brahmanical material and hints of other sectarian currents, which suggests an older, less sharply defined religious substratum overlaid by increasingly explicit Vaishnava affirmations. Passages that strongly intensify Vishnu’s supremacy, introduce more systematized bhakti, or echo later doctrinal debates are treated as likely products of later redactors seeking to align the Purana with evolving Vaishnava sensibilities. Conversely, sections that sit uneasily with this orientation, or that contradict established doctrinal positions within the work, are examined as possible survivals from earlier layers. In this way, theological tensions within the text become clues to its inner history.

Comparative reading across the wider Purāṇic and epic corpus deepens this picture. Shared myths, genealogies, and cosmological schemes are mapped against parallel versions in other Puranas, the Mahabharata, and related literature, to see where the Vishnu Purana preserves a simpler form and where it appears to rework inherited material in a more explicitly Vishnu‑centered direction. When stories are duplicated with differing emphases, or when cosmological and ritual details are harmonized with broader Purāṇic norms, scholars infer editorial efforts to integrate diverse traditions into a single devotional vision. The result is an understanding of the Vishnu Purana as both scripture and process: a text whose authority has been continuously renewed through the very acts of redaction, selection, and reinterpretation that shaped its present form.