Mailbag: The Bible in Manichaeism
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 6/13/2007 1:25 AM 
Categories: Dualism, Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, The Bible, Mandaeism, Gnostic Gospels
Categories: Dualism, Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, The Bible, Mandaeism, Gnostic Gospels
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I've asked my helper if there's anything I ought to know from the cogs of this website, and I've learned two things 1) a lot of people come to this site looking for a picture of a gold coin (or while looking for pictures of gold coins, in general?) No one's ever stopped to explain why, perhaps they kept moving in search of something more appropriate... 2) One browser arrived here after a search for "Bible of Manichaeism." 
I'm going to turn that into a question they didn't ask: what was the role of the Bible in Manichaeism?
Ans: Very slight.
Manichaeism was founded by a man named Mani who lived from 216 to about 274 C.E. He grew up in a little-known religion that emphasized ritual purity and frequent immersions in water. (Mani forbid bathing in water to his followers — not quite so terrible when you realize most Romans cleaned themselves with olive oil and a squeegee-like implement called a strygil.)* If you want to read about his upbringing and disaffection, I recommend the Cologne Mani Codex for its short and vivid account. The religion Mani founded referred to many other religions: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism (Mani went to India looking for converts), Christianity, the religion he'd grown up in,* and Judaism. Manichaeism had a great regard for Jesus Christ and it used the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas — but not, so far as I can recall, either the Christian or the Jewish Bible. (Although it did use a version of a text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Giants.)
* The internet doesn't have everything: I can't find a decent picture of a strygil, nor any decent webpages on the Elchasites.
These two non-canonical gospels were not the primary scriptures of Manichaeism: instead, Mani wrote seven books (we discovered most of them, they were moved to Berlin for study and safekeeping ... and no one's seen them since WWII — they were probably destroyed.
) These seven books included a collection of Mani's letters, basic explanations of the new religion's doctrines, and a book of illustrations (Mani was remembered as an artist well into the Islamic era.)A great deal of para-scriptural literature also emerged: it's much easier to find in print than what little we have of Mani's own writing. Almost nothing is left of the scriptures of Manichaeism. (I've heard one scholar went looking for them in Berlin and elsewhere, but there's been no announcement of any results.)
Note: Mani set forth a policy that his religion should be taught in terms of whatever local religions he or his missionaries encountered: Manichaean literature (from Egypt to China) is quick to point out the similarities between its doctrines and local beliefs, and to use local names for Manichaean divinities and concepts. A Manichaean in a Christian context would have spoken in terms of Christian theology and quoted the Bible to show how Manichaeism was so — since Mani taught that all prior religions were partially-correct revelations that had been distorted by their later followers. (Helped, he argued, by the fact that most founders, like Buddha and Jesus, had never written anything, themselves.)
This fact may make it look like Manichaeism used the Bible — but no more than it used Taoist and Buddhist scriptures in China (see Samuel N.C. Lieu's books on this.) Manichaeism had its own body of scriptures, and many works of its own church history, its own prayers, its own psalms, its own holidays, its own artwork.
Second Note: Mani used the imperial administrative language of the Persian Empire, Aramaic, for all his scriptures — but missionaries translated Manichaean liturgy and literature into the local language within one generation (whether it was Coptic or Uighur or Chinese.) That said, Mani thought that Aramaic was the best lingua franca of his day: for a man that lived on the edge of the Roman Empire it's always intrigued me that he didn't use Parthian, Greek, or Latin. It's one of those unexpected reality-checks from the past.
I know Manichaeism has passed into our language to simply mean "dualist, someone who sees things in stark black-and-white terms"; this isn't quite correct. Like its elder, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism held that Good and Evil were separate, that Good could never do evil — and never permitted it or condoned it. But Manichaeism was a religion focused on redemption: its scriptures and worship services focused on the Good and the religion understood itself and the entire cosmos as an elaborate machine for distilling the Good enmeshed in creation and returning it to God. It did not dwell on the fact of Evil: it described the mythological reasons for the need for its system of refining of Good from Evil — but I've read mainstream Christian texts that were far more focused on Evil as an entity and phenomenon.
-Kushana
P.S. Part of why I love Manichaeism is most other forms of Gnosticism survive only as texts. (Except Mandaeism, which is a whole living religion
) A Manichaean shrine stills stands in China, and its central figure is revered as the Buddha (the locals have taken the very Buddha-looking statue of "Moni" (Mani) for "Muni" (Sakyamuni) since Manichaeism died out there at least 600 years ago. Manichaean frescoes and church banners still exist, including depictions of a central Manichaean holiday (the death of Mani). We have paintings of actual Manichaeans (men and women, clergy and laity). With most other forms of Gnosticism, I wouldn't recognize one of their adherents or services (even with a time machine and a far better grasp of dead languages than I currently have) — unless they quoted a particular text I recognized. (I don't even know if they quoted texts, much ... we know that little about how the various branches of Gnosticism worked, as religions.) Manichaeism and Mandaeism are the sole exceptions.Imagine all we had of your tradition was its central stories or a few essential scriptures: now think of your religion as you experience it, the people, the celebrations, the commemorations, the disagreements, how you teach your kids, the decorations, the music (if any of either), the traditional foods, the social and political concerns.... That's how much is missing from our understanding of Gnosticism.
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9/23/2008 2:00 PM
banner of history wrote:
I’ve just finished Frederik Woudhuizen’s The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples , in which he lays out the case, among other things, that most if not all of the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egyptian records of the 19th and 20th dynasties, were speakers of various Indo-European languages. He argues that the biblical Philistines should be equated with the Pelasgians of Greek sources, associated with the Greek mainland but later uprooted by Bronze Age migrations and spreading out to western Anatolia and Crete. This is not a new idea. In fact, it is one that is somewhat commonplace. What is somewhat distinctive is that he advocates the apparently minority view that these Pelasgians were Indo-Europeans. Originally, he says, they spoke a pre-Hellenic language related to Thracian and Phrygian. Later they adopted a dialect of Luwian when they departed Greece for Anatolia and Crete.
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