The Old Testament in Manichaean Tradition (CFM Biblia Manichaica 1, Brepols 2017). (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Old Testament in Fourth-Century Christian-Manichaean Polemic
Journal of Late Antiquity, 2018
There exists an entrenched notion among modern scholars, which is supported by both Christian and Manichaean texts, that Manicheans rejected the Old Testament as a product of Satan, and yet Manichaean writings also contain numerous loans of various kinds from the Old Testament. The question about the status and role of Jewish scripture in Manichaeism, then, is more complex than is commonly assumed. This article discusses the origin of the Manichaean rejection of the Old Testament in the anti-Manichaean polemic of orthodox Christian authors in the first half of the fourth century. In particular, it analyzes their reaction to Manichaean biblical exegesis and proposes possible sources of their knowledge about the Manichaean position on the Old Testament. Above all, this article argues that the wholesale rejection of the Old Testament as the devil's handiwork reflects less Mani's original teaching than it does later developments in the Manichaean tradition.
Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: the Book of the Giants
review of John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the ‘Book of Giants’ Traditions, Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press 1992, in: Vigiliae Christianae. A Review of Early Christian Life and Language 48(1994)92-94;
Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire
2004
Founded by Mani (c. a d 216-76), a Syrian visionary of Judaeo-Christian background who lived in Persian Mesopotamia, Manichaeism spread rapidly into the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries ad and became one of the most persecuted heresies under Christian Roman emperors. The religion established missionary cells in Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Rome and has in Augustine of Hippo the most famous of its converts. The study of the religion in the Roman Empire has benefited from discoveries of genuine Manichaean texts from Medinet Madi and from the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt, as well as successful decipherment of the Cologne Mani-Codex which gives an autobiography of the founder in Greek. This first ever single-volume collection of sources for this religion, which draws from material mostly unknown to English-speaking scholars and students, offers in translation genuine Manichaean texts from Greek, Latin and Coptic. dr iain gardner is Chair and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Studies in Religion, Sydney University. He has published widely in Coptic and Manichaean studies, including the standard The Kephalaia of the Teacher (E. J. Brill, Leiden 1995). He is also editor for the newly found Manichaean texts from the Dakhleh Oasis.
In this study, we have seen that the Apocalypse of John, the only book of the New Testament divided into twenty-two chapters containing the statement (Rev. 1:13) “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, what thou seest, write in a book,” and the corresponding passage in the Book of Henoch, speaking of twenty-two letters that created “both the spiritual and the material worlds,” have played a role for Mani, as the expression of Jesus is reflected in a Manichaean document as the ʾʾlyf nxwyn ʾwd tʾ ʿstwmyn “the first aleph and the last tau.” It is very likely that this actually happened, in particular, because both works are apocalyptic (this is of importance to me, because the theme could be compared to the apocalypse of Zarathushtra, of Vištaspa, and of Kerdir in Iran) and strongly related to astronomy. We should also keep in mind that Bardaiṣān (Bardesanes), from whom Mani has immensely borrowed, was an astrologer as well as a theologian. The influence of the sixth book of the Jewish Memar Midrash, which is in fact a midrash of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, was probably well known to Mani. Some Manichaean documents show that the creation of divinities and the spiritual world in Manichaeism as a continuation of the old Jewish and Christian concept (which continued in Islam too) has been accomplished by “voice” and “word.” In fact, the idea of “cosmic potency of the letters and word” is obviously attested in the Turfan Manichaean texts concerning the Manichaean myth of the creation of the world. Here, we have tried to show that “the number 22,” related to Christ’s acts mentioned in the Greek Mysteria Litterarum, has also a parallel in a Manichaean text. My studies on this subject also conclude that the origin of the division of Mani’s Gospel into twenty-two mēmrē should be searched for in Babylon itself. This type of division of the Gospel, wherever they may come from, was so attractive to the greatest enemy of Manichaeism, Augustine, that he wrote his De Civitate Dei (The City of God) with twenty-two books to be (as said by Böhlig) “a consciously (introduced) counterpart” of the Manichaean Gospel.