Cologne Mani Codex Research Articles

“And the Earth Spoke to Him”

Abstract This article explores the relationships between the various locations in which divine revelation takes place in the Cologne Mani Codex, employing insights from spatial theory and ecocriticism. It argues that the text emphasizes the possibility of revelation from multiple sources, both worldly and otherworldly, and that the accounts of revelation throughout the text can be understood within ongoing apocalyptic discourses in antiquity about natural revelation, raptures, otherworldly journeys, and worldly missions.

Elchasai

Abstract Since the publication of the Cologne Mani Codex, scholars have tended to think about the figure of Elchasai as the “Jewish Christian” past to Mani’s “Christian” future. This article contends that one can also frame Elchasai as the “Jewish Christian” past to a rabbinic future. To make this argument, it focuses on four main points: (1) the concept of piquach nefesh, or the legality of saving a life, (2) prayer toward Jerusalem, (3) the temporality of work in relation to Shabbat, and (4) Gentile ritual impurity. By contextualizing the commandments attributed to Elchasai in relation to early rabbinic law, especially as discussed in the Tosefta, this article suggests that Elchasaites were closer to the rabbis in matters of law than they were with the early followers of Mani.

Mani the Anchorite, Mani the Apostle: The Cologne Mani Codex and Syrian Asceticism

Abstract The Apostle of Jesus Christ, Mani, declares himself to be a “solitary one” (monērēs) no less than three times in the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC). Through a literary analysis that contextualizes the CMC both with contemporary Syrian depictions of anchoritic ascetics, on the one hand, and the hairy mountaineering anchorite (CMC 126.4-129.17) with Mani, on the other hand, this article argues that the redactor of the CMC sought to portray Mani as an anchoritic ascetic. Mani’s declaration to be a monērēs is therefore not incidental, but an essential marker of his identity, even as he sets out into the world as the Apostle of Jesus Christ.

The Power of the Written Word in Manichaeism

Abstract The prominent role books and the act of writing played in the life of the Manichaean Church distinguishes Manichaeism even among other “religions of the book.” This article tackles the question whether the primacy of writing was established by Mani himself or resulted from a development that occurred within the first generations of Mani’s followers. The analysis of the extant fragments of Mani’s own works and early Manichaean texts such as the work of Baraies preserved in the Cologne Mani Codex and the Kephalaia indicate that Mani’s superiority as a writing prophet and the ritual meaning of writing most likely were not part of Mani’s original teaching. Rather, they resulted from the efforts of Manichaean theologians who sought to demonstrate the exceptional status of Mani’s revelation and prophetic mission based on his writings. The Prologue to the Kephalaia of the Teacher played a significant role in this development and contributed extensively to the ritualization of writing in Manichaeism.

Jewish Elements in the Cologne Mani Codex

The purpose of this article is to examine the Jewish and Jewish-Christian (that is, in all likelihood, Elkesaite) elements in Manichaeism, with a focus on the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC). The following concepts, often closely related to Judaism, found in the CMC are discussed: the notion of “His [Mani’s] body”; “the Way” and “the Law”; “the Rest”; Mani’s “immortal” Gospel to be written down; Mani and the Ma’aseh Bereshit; the guardian angel and angels’ conduct; animated matter speaking; the Column of Glory; and some other elements. The article argues especially that Manichaeism cannot be explained by merely unravelling its supposed constituent elements. It is, above all, an original creation of Mani’s prophetic genius. In the present state of Manichaean studies, however, and in particular in the study of nascent Manichaeism, the Jewish aspects seem to deserve our full attention.

The Baptist Followers of Mani: Reframing the Cologne Mani Codex

AbstractFor decades, scholars of religious studies have questioned the anachronism of the category of “religion” for discussing the historical emergence of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Beginning already with Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the 1960s, however, Manichaeism was heralded as an exception to this pattern, and Mani has been understood as perhaps the first to found a new “religion.” This article considers how this model shaped the interpretation of the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC) and offers a fresh reading of its rhetoric of differentiation and identification. It attends to how the CMC frames Mani as a reformer among the Baptists and in continuity with this Baptist past. It ultimately argues that the creators of the CMC did not think of “Manichaeism” as a distinct “religion.” Finally, it aims to recalibrate the study of the Cologne Mani Codex towards broader attempts at situating it within a Syro-Mesopotamian milieu.

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature by Moshe Blidstein

Reviewed by: Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature by Moshe Blidstein Shira L. Lander Moshe Blidstein Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 Pp. 294. $100.00. Most treatments of early Christian notions of purity privilege a spiritualized version of the concept. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature challenges this over-generalization to demonstrate "that purity was open for negotiation" through methodically analyzing a vast corpus of securely-provenanced second- and third-century Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Christian texts, both canonical and non-canonical (5). Blidstein has written the most comprehensive treatment of Christian attitudes toward purity and defilement to date. Drawing on recent methodologies that understand defilement as "a biological reaction of disgust towards certain actions and substances" (7), the author employs a "heuristic consisting of 'battle' and 'truce'" to explain how early Christian purity discourse functioned (11). The truce perception portrayed purity and impurity as statuses in order to define "the borders of social groups, spaces, and times" (11). The more prevalent battle perception, by contrast, conceived of purity and impurity as competing moral forces, often aligned with other opposing pairs like "holiness and unholiness, saint and demon, righteousness and sin, flesh and spirit, out-group and in-group" (11). After providing a cursory overview of the historical context for purity discourses in the Greco-Roman East and Judaism in Part I, Blidstein devotes each chapter to various ritual practices which are grouped both chronologically and according to their continuity or discontinuity with prevailing Jewish and Greco-Roman concepts. Thus, diet and death constitute "Part II: Breaking with the Past," while baptism, eucharist, and sexual relations form "Part III: Roots of a New Paradigm: The First Two Centuries." "Part IV: New Configurations: Purity, Body, and Community in the Third Century" examines Christian traditions inconsistent with the trajectories delineated in previous chapters, Jewish-Christian communities, and Origen. In Part II, Blidstein argues that early Christian writers construed dietary- and death-related purity regulations as irrelevant, i.e., annulled by Jesus, in order "to differentiate Christian from Jewish" customs. By detaching the practices' ritual elements from their moral dimension, Christian eating customs, and to a lesser [End Page 133] extent burial rites, were constructed "as representing internal purity, powered by human agency and linked to questions of good and evil" (90). This battle perspective emerged as a chief weapon of anti-Jewish polemics. Other examples of the growing battle perspective appear in Part III. Blidstein demonstrates how baptism, construed as forgiveness of sins, "became a major site for addressing . . . the relationship between ritual and moral purity, between external action and the inner disposition" (131). Attitudes toward sexual purity, on the other hand, exhibit both battle and truce perspectives. Entailing both body and soul, sexual impurity extended beyond illicit sexual activity, as understood in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, to include "sexual contact as a whole, even inside 'legitimate' marriage . . . toward the de-legitimization of sexuality" (180). Thus, Blidstein concludes that the moral dimension of sexuality constituted a battle perspective, while the physical dimension constituted a truce perspective. Unlike the first two Christian centuries of baptismal and sexual discourse, in eucharistic theology, purity was understood as a prerequisite for participation rather than its result (148). Not until the third century is the eucharist understood as purificatory. Part IV examines baptism, sexual purity, and diet in what Blidstein terms "Jewish-Christian writings": Pseudo-Clementine literature, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Cologne Mani Codex, and the Protoevangelium of James. This section also contains an extensive discussion of menstrual impurity in the Pseudo-Clementines. As in some rabbinic circles, menstrual impurity and male genital emissions are connected to demons, menstrual blood and emissions are polluting, and washing rituals serve purificatory roles on both the moral and physical levels (190–91, 196). In the Didascalia Apostolorum, by contrast, menstruation does not require purification because the Holy Spirit has entered a woman's body during baptism and driven out her demons once and for all (195). Blidstein concludes that water purification, including baptism, exhibits continuity with Jewish notions of purification due to the broader context of demonology. Blidstein concludes...

Angels in Late Ancient Christianity by Ellen Muehlberger (review)

Reviewed by: Angels in Late Ancient Christianity by Ellen Muehlberger Charles Marshall Stang Ellen Muehlberger Angels in Late Ancient Christianity Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 Pp. 296. $73.00. Muehlberger’s book is a welcome and fascinating exploration of the Christian archive of thinking on the nature and function of angels between the third and sixth centuries. Muehlberger discerns in this Christian archive two discourses of angels, which she terms “cultivation” and “contestation,” discourses that in turn reflect two ways of being Christian in late antiquity. The first discourse arises out of the urgent pursuit of holiness, an enterprise in which angels serve Christians as guards and guides. The second is one of polemics and power, in which angels are enlisted to buttress episcopal authority and to fight on behalf of doctrinal orthodoxy. The scene of cultivation is the desert; of contestation, the city. Exemplars of the former include Antony and Evagrius; of the latter, [End Page 130] Athanasius and Augustine. This distinction between discourses is helpful for organizing the sources and for appreciating the very different motivations Christians had for thinking about angels. But like many distinctions (such as that between the desert and the town), it is perhaps “more honour’d in the breach than the observance.” In other words, my only, and minor, objection to the distinction is that certain texts and figures are not fully appreciated as falling within both categories (more on that below). Chapter One opens with an instructional diptych: while Evagrius and Augustine had nearly opposed views of angels, they nevertheless both put angels on center stage of salvation history. Chapter Two explores how angelology was relevant for the Arian controversy. Augustine, nervous that the Old Testament theophanies— traditionally understood as the work of the pre-Incarnate Christ—might be grist for the Arian mill, insisted instead that they were the work of angels, not Christ. Chapters Three and Four are tremendously interesting: Muehlberger traces the development of the notion of a “companion angel” from Origen through the early ascetics of the Egyptian desert (not only Antony, but also Serapis, Ammonas, and Macarius) to Evagrius of Pontus. The “spirit” or “divine power” that Antony speaks of in his letters is not, Muehlberger argues, the Holy Spirit per se, but a personal companion or angelic guide, who in the Apophthegmata is said to appear to Antony as his mirror image (recalling, by the way, Mani’s suzugos from the Cologne Mani Codex). The desert tradition, culminating in Evagrius, understood this companion angel as equivalent to the individual nous, waiting to be awakened. Athanasius tries (somewhat unsuccessfully) to suppress this tradition of the companion angel in his Life of Antony, choosing to identify Antony’s “helper” with “the Lord” himself. Gregory of Nyssa also carries this tradition forward in his Life of Moses, figuring Aaron as the type of angelic “ally” Moses (that is to say, every Christian) can enjoy on his epekstatic journey of contemplation. Chapter Five traces the ascetic trope of “the angelic life,” provoked in part by the different versions of Jesus’s promise that in the resurrection we will live “like angels” (Mark 12.25) or “equal to angels” (Luke 20.36). In Chapter Six, Muehlberger invokes Benedict Anderson’s famous notion of “imagined communities” to appreciate how a Christian minority might appeal to an angelic liturgy in which they are somehow participating, and thereby imagine themselves to be, not an insignificant and beleaguered sect, but instead “part of a universal, heavenly majority.” Whereas Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia imagined Christian liturgy as an imitation of an angelic liturgy performed in heaven, John Chrysostom turned this on its head, and instead imagined angels descending to witness Christian rituals on earth. With this inversion, we become the liturgical center of the universe, and the imagined community of angels comes to us, rather than we to them. My only real, and relatively minor, objection is the handling of Pseudo-Dionysius in the Conclusion. His Celestial Hierarchy is treated as a work of “contestation,” and it very well may be. But whatever polemics might be operating in this treatise or in the entire Corpus Dionysiacum are explicitly in the service of “cultivation...

Misja i monastycyzm manichejski w dolinie Nilu i jego wpływ na tamtejsze chrześcijaństwo na przełomie III/IV wieku

Since the discovery of the substantial corpus of Manichaean writings, espe­cially the Kephalaia (editio princeps Polotsky-Böhlig, 1934-1940), the Cologne Mani Codex (= CMC), and the hitherto incompletely published library from Dachla (Ian Gardner, 2000), there can be no doubt as to the activities of the mis­sionaries of the great Persian gnostic Mani in the Southern Nile Valley and Red Sea regions. This fact not only confirms the views of J. Helderman “that the Mani­chaean missionaries entered Egypt from the South-East, i.e. initially to Upper Egypt” (‘Manichäische Züge im Thomasevangelium’, 483f., note 42), but also the historical observations concerning the origins and development of monasticism. The latter was not without Manichaean influence, not merely in Egypt, but also in Nubia and Ethiopia. A mosaic, seemingly depicting Mani (from the collection of Elie Borowski), testifies to the pictorial needs of the Manichaeans as do the mural paintings from Pachoras/Faras depicting the likeness of Onophrios. These demonstrate the popu­larity of the crinite ascetic”, a figure also found in the CMC. It is imperative to recall the decisive importance of the southern kingdoms along the Red Sea during the Axial Age (Karl Jaspers), in order to kindle his­torical awareness in Europe of this currently overlooked region on the eve of its islamicisation – something which for decades I have noted the importance of in numerous publications (cf. foot-note 40). Here, local Christianity (viewed anachronistically) was marked by a heretical-gnostic diversity from the very be­ginning, which in turn weakened the spread of Christian teaching in the region. Islam was initially seen here by some as a Christian heresy (as pointed out by A. v. Harnack) and which even became accepted (e.g. in Ethiopia or Nubia, as noted by H. Jansen, Muhammed [German ed.: Münich 2008], 141). Thus, the local doctrinal pluriformity of Christianity during the jāhiliyya prepared the way for the later Islamic expansion. Manichaeism belongs unequivocally to the “periphery cultures of the Chris­tian world” (Pogranicza chrześcijaństwa) as well as constituting a part of ex­panding Christianity in the Late Antique world. Manichaeism still holds many secrets, but at the same time their answers, as illustrated by this article. Hence, the gnostic element of Early Christianity is worthy of continued intensive study, something which unfortunately in Poland is still quite inadequate.

The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual (review)

(ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted.) Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual By Jason David BeDuhn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. Pp. xix, 354. $42.50.) Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the study of Manichaeism has been dominated by the study of genuine Manichaean texts discovered from Turfan (in Middle Iranian and Old Turkish), from Dunhuang (in Chinese and Old Turkish) in Central Asia, from Medinet Madi (in Coptic), and more recently from the Dakhleh Oasis (in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac) in Egypt. editing of these texts, some in languages very imperfectly known at the time of their discovery, and their translation and interpretation have inevitably come to occupy a high proportion of Manichaean scholarship. decipherment of the now famous Cologne Mani-Codex in the 1970's also opened a new and controversial direction of research, namely, the Judaeo-Christian roots of Manichaeism. Given the preoccupation of the majority of Manichaean scholars in these specialized activities, a new scholarly contribution to understanding some of the basic tenets of the religion is therefore both unique and timely. title of BeDuhn's work suggests a study of Manichaean anthropogenesis or asceticism or the Mani's equation of parts of the human body with those of the Zodiac in the Coptic Kephalaia. book certainly touches on these issues, but more importantly it is a thorough, and sometimes exhaustive, study of the place of the sacred meal for the Elect in Manichaean doctrine, especially in Eastern Manichaean texts. Manichaeans had an aversion for harvesting and cooking as both actions would damage the Light Particles held captive in plants and animals and the suffering of which is symbolized by the Cross of Light. To avoid starvation, the Hearers, namely, the second rank of the sect, were charged with dire injunctions to attend to the culinary needs of the Elect. Far from being an arrangement of necessity or even of hypocrisy, BeDuhn argues from an impressive survey of both genuine Manichaean texts (especially the Greek Cologne Mani-Codex and the so-called Monastery Scroll in Old Turkish) and writings of the more informative polemicists like Augustine in Roman North Africa and Lu Yu in South China that the meals eaten by the Elect played an important part in both the final liberation of the captive Light Particles and the maintenance of the moral standards of the sect. Earlier scholars like Henri-Charles Puech and Nils Arne Pedersen had drawn attention to the doctrinal importance of the meal in Manichaeism, but BeDuhn's work is the first comprehensive examination of the available evidence and the fullest exposition of the rationale of the rites. Manichaean ritual meal was, according to BeDuhn, an essential part of the religious life of a Manichaean community or cell. Conducted daily, the Hearers delivered their alms to the place of consumption and the table on which the food is placed is a ritual locale. In the author's own words ... Manichaeans participated in a templeless and altarless tradition. While other religious communities carried their offerings into temples, where their priests burned them on altars, the Manichaeans bore their ah-ns to the Elect, who cooked them in their own stomachs (pp. 164-165). Though the Manichaean cosmogony is highly complex and replete with a multitude of deities and demons, the Manichaeans were expert in reducing their main ethical teachings to The Three Seals, The Five Commandments (for the Elect), and The Ten Commandments (for the Hearers). Seal of the Mouth forbids an Elect from eating meat and drinking wine while the Seal of the Breast prevents fornication and marriage and therefore physical procreation which prolongs the captivity of Light, and the Seal of the Hands is the command to avoid injury to water, fire, trees, and living things and hence bans the procurement of food. Through observance of commands like these the Elect purify their bodies as instruments for the purification and liberation of Light. …

Apocalypses Real and Alleged in the Mani Codex

AbstractThe florilegium of revelations that Mani adduces as proof of his own authority in the Cologne Mani Codex has stimulated research into the circulation and influence of Jewish apocalypses among the various Jewish-Christian sects of late antiquity. But it has also proved frustrating, since not one of the apocalyptic “texts” that Mani quotes matches extant apocalypses in the name of Enoch, Adam, Seth, or Enosh. Considering the breadth of the Enoch literature now known from textual and patristic sources, including Manichaean literature, the absence of a parallel for Mani's Enoch-“quotation” may be reason to suspect that Mani invented this quotation as well as the others. This paper proposes an interpretation of Mani's apocalyptic florilegium that depends not on the historical existence of the putative texts but on Mani's own distinctive scheme of prophetic lineage and authority. It is argued that Mani's universalist view of mission and religion led him to revise existing schemes of Jewish revelatory heroes that were traditional to Jewish and Jewish-Christian sects and that invoked the patriarchs constitutive of Jewish identity, like Abraham, Moses, and Elijah. In contrast, Mani promotes his relevation's ecumenical appeal by casting himself in a line of biblical figures who in the late antique world had especially universalist significance: Adam, Seth, and Enoch (all antediluvian and therefore pre-covenantal) and Paul (Mani's model of an ecumenical missionary).

Transformation through Vision in Jewish Gnosticism and the Cologne Mani Codex

Transformation through Vision in Jewish Gnosticism and the Cologne Mani Codex

Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony. Studies in the 'Book of Giants' Traditions

A work entitled the of figures in every list of the Manichaean canon preserved from antiquity. Both the nature of this work and the intellectual baggage of the third-century Persian prophet to whom it is ascribed remained unknown to scholars until 1943, when fragments of several Middle Iranian versions of the Book of Giants were published by W. B. Henning. Twenty-eight years later, J. T. Milik discovered several copies of a fragmentary Aramaic work at Qumran which is unquestionably the precursor of the later Manichaean recension. One other important work, Mani's autobiography, the so-called Cologne Mani Codex, was brought to scholarly attention in 1970 with evidence that Mani spent his youth among the Elchasaites, a Judeo-Christian sect that observed the Sabbath, strict dietary laws, and rigorous purification practices. Although leading Orientalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have consistently stressed the Iranian component in Mani's thought, Reeves argues, in the light of evidence drawn from the above-mentioned discoveries and from a rich panorama of other textual sources, that the fundamental structure of Manichaean cosmogony is ultimately indebted to Jewish exegetical expansions of Genesis 6:1-4. Reeves begins with an examination of the ancient testimonies about the contents of Mani's Book of Giants. Then, using documents from Second Temple Judaism, classical Gnostic literature, Christian and Muslim heresiological reports, Syriac texts, and Manichaean writings, he provides a detailed analysis of both the Qumran and Manichaean rescensions of the work, demonstrating additional interdependencies and suggesting new narrative arrangements. He addresses a series of quotations from an unnamed Manichaean source found in a paschal homily of the sixth-century Monophysite patriarch Severus of Antioch and a narrative from Thoeodore bar Konai. Reeves demonstrates that the motifs of Jewish Enochic literature, in particular those of the story of the Watchers and Giants, form the skeletal structure of Mani's cosmological teachings, and that Chapters 1 to 11 of Genesis fertilized Near Eastern thought, even to the borders of India and China.

Manicheïsme: Nieuwe ontdekkingen, nieuwe visies*Dit overzichtsartikel wil wat monografieën betreft volledig zijn. Artikelen worden slechts vermeld indien daar speciale reden voor is. Naar studies wordt verwezen door middel van de naam van de auteur; alleen indien de bibliografie van een auteur meer dan een titel bevat wordt de titel in verkorte vorm toegevoegd. Voor verdere bijzonderheden zie de bibliografie. Initialen

Thanks to several important discoveries, the study of Manichaeism flourishes as never before. This article gives an overview of the most important recent discoveries (e.g. of the Cologne Mani Codex) and studies, asks for their implications to interpret the Manichaean worldreligion as a Gnostic-Christian worldreligion and also introduces one of the most recent finds: the hitherto unpublished texts from the Dakhleh-Oasis (Egypt).

The ‘Elchasaite’ Sanhedrin of the Cologne Mani Codex in Light of Second Temple Jewish Sectarian Sources

The ‘Elchasaite’ Sanhedrin of the Cologne Mani Codex in Light of Second Temple Jewish Sectarian Sources