“The Great Hymn of Wisdom. The First Manichaean Manuscript Fragment Unearthed in Iran“, in ZUR LICHTEN HEIMAT. Studien zu Manichäismus, Iranistik und Zentralasienkunde im Gedenken an WERNER SUNDERMANN, ed. by a Team “Turfanforschung“, Wiesbaden, IRANICA 25, 2017, pp. 637-654. (original) (raw)
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Religious Inquiries, 2021
The editing, reconstruction, translation and commentary upon all the extant fragments of two Parthian Ewangelyōnīg bāšāhān (the ‘Hymns of the Gospel’) from the Manichaean Middle Iranian collection found in Turfan, Xinjiang, China, i.e. M88/II/, 91/I(?)/, M92, and M898, under one umbrella, is the most important goal of this article. We have tried to answer the substantive question of why the Ewangelyōnīg hymns had nothing to do at all with Mani’s Living Gospel itself, namely the actual prose text of the Living Gospel; in fact, Ewangelyōnīg hymns present a poetic description of the New Testament, as Mani saw it. We have argued that the Manichaean hymnology and tradition of writing ‘hymns’ and ‘psalms’ is not an Iranian tradition, although there was poetry in the Iranian tradition, like the poetry in Avestan and Pahlavi texts. This contribution is an attempt to shed light on the contents of the Ewangelyōnīg hymns, both thematically and structurally.
The Coptic Synaxeis, wherein come the twenty-two chapter titles of each logos (chapter) of the Living Gospel, found in Egypt (Fayyum), contains only page-headers and is only partly legible. It helps us to reconstruct parts of the contents of Mani’s Living Gospel. Although the remaining text of the Middle Persian version of the Living Gospel contains only a part of the first chapter, the Synaxeis containing 22 logia lets us know that at least the ‘second Meeting’ (synaxis) of its sixth Discourse (logos, i.e. chapter) dealt with the Great Builder (Syr. bn rbʾ; MP rʾz ʿy wzrg) and that the content of the ninth chapter was about ‘the coming of Jesus the Christ’. The new editions of the codex are of enormous value, giving us new, previously unimaginable information.
“ʿymyn ʾʾhynd: the Beginning of Mani’s Psalm Wuzurgān Āfrīwan in Parthian and Middle Persian”
The seventh book of the canonical works ascribed to Mani, 1 believed to have been composed in his mother tongue, an Aramaic dialect, appears to be, in the Coptic lists, a collection of prayers and two psalms. 2 In the most extensive of these lists (Homilies, 25.2-6) 3 the seven canonical books are "the Gospel and the Treasure of Life, the Pragmateia and the Book of the Mysteries, the Book of the Giants and the Epistles, the Psalms and the Prayers of my Lord," followed by the Image and other texts, while the two references to Mani's scriptures given in the Coptic Psalms (Sarakoton 2, 4 and Bema Psalms) 5 refer to ⲡⲥⲛⲉⲩ ⲯⲁⲗⲙⲟⲥ "the two Psalms." Moreover, in the list in the third article of the Chinese Compendium of the Doctrines and Styles of the teaching of Mani, the Buddha of Light, after the Epistles the Prayers are mentioned, quoted in Chinese script as a-fu-yin, which represents Middle Persian āfrīn "blessing." 6 Although none of Mani's prayers can be identified, a caption in a Sogdian text in Sogdian script establishes that a long hymn-cycle called 1 During the compilation of the final version of the present paper I greatly benefited from Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst's (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Turfanforschung) collaboration and work on these texts, in view of a full edition of the fragments of the Middle Iranian versions of Mani's Psalms which we are preparing, and which will soon be published (Durkin-Meisterernst & Morano forthc.). To him and to all the staff of the Akademienvorhaben Turfanforschung my warmest thanks for the kind hospitality they gave me in Berlin. I am very grateful to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy and to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz for their kind permission to consult and edit the Turfan fragments of their collection.
In order to reconstruct the contents of the most famous work of Mani, Living Gospel (written originally in Syriac), we have to use the Arabic and Classical New Persian texts containing accounts and even indirect quotations of this book. One of the most remarkable points in these accounts is that they clearly show that an important part of the Living Gospel contains the Manichaean ―Myth of the Creation,‖ the topic which is usually supposed to have no relation with Mani‘s Gospel. The Coptic Manichaean Synaxeis also supports the hypothesis that there were thematically some basic similarities between the Living Gospel and the Ewangelyōnīg hymns. According to the Arabic and Classical New Persian sources, some of the more important subject matters of Mani‘s Gospel were the Land of the Light and of the Darkness, the Mixture and process of the liberatio of the Aeons. These are some of the themes in Mani‘s Gospel that can also be seen in the Ewangelyōnīg hymns. In this article, some of the previous interpretations in this regard have been critically analyzed and challenged.