Talk Gnosis extended audio interview on Manichaeans
https://www.patreon.com/posts/stop-agreeing-me-4225052
Imagined Pasts / Forgotten Futures by Dr. Timothy Pettipiece
Friday, January 29, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
DO CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS WORSHIP THE SAME GOD? A LATE ANTIQUE PERSPECTIVE
In a much publicized recent controversy, Larycia Hawkins, a tenured
political science professor at Wheaton College (a private, Christian
Evangelical institution) is being fired for wearing a hijab—in an act of
solidarity with Muslims—and for suggesting that Christians and Muslims worship
the same God. Predictably, this incident erupted across social media and the blogosphere
in a fire storm of apologetics and arm-chair sermonizing. Much of the
commentary has involved a simplistic dichotomy of “yes” or “no”. From a
historical perspective, however, the answer is more like “yes” and “no”. It
very much depends on who you ask and how the question is framed.
It has become commonplace in recent decades to talk about the “Abrahamic”
religions. Usually, this implies an ecumenically motivated understanding of the
three major monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as
belonging to the same family of faiths. Since they are siblings, then
understandably they squabble over who has the most authentic claim to the
inheritance of Abraham, who biblical tradition presents as the first person
called to worship the “one, true God” (Genesis 12). Moreover, this familial
relationship is underpinned by an inclusive interpretation of Abraham’s
progeny. Ishmael, through Hagar, from whom God promised to raise up a great
nation (Genesis 21), has long been interpreted as the forbearer of Muslims,
while Isaac is seen as the ancestor of the Jews and Christians. In principle,
then, all the descendants of Abraham would worship the same deity, except for
the fact that Jews, Muslims, and Christians conceptualize God in starkly
different ways. In fact, the outliers in this scenario tend to be the
Christians, with their complex Trinitarian theology.
It should be noted, however, that Christians themselves have not always
agreed on what God they worship. To be sure, Jesus is alleged to have spoken of
his “Father,” but for some Christians this did not mean the God of the Jews.
Some Christians, commonly referred to as the “gnostics” (because they claimed
to possess specially revealed “knowledge” [gnosis]), argued that the god
of the Jews was a demonic imposter who created the world out of ignorance as a
prison for human beings. The “true God”, they supposed, was an ethereal Platonic
deity beyond the realm of matter and creation. This being, they said, was the
actual Father of Jesus. “Gnostic” theology, however, with its radical
re-reading of Genesis, even though it gained a certain amount of traction in
the early 2nd century CE, was ultimately rejected by the emerging
Christian orthodoxy as heretical. By abandoning the Jewish God, gnostic
Christians were distancing themselves from their Judaic heritage and thereby confirming
Roman suspicions that Christianity was a new “superstition” not rooted in
ancestral piety. Ultimately, however, Christians do come to agree that they too
worship the supreme creator God of the Jewish Bible. More than that, they
believed that this ancestral God came to visit them in human form and established the Church as the vehicle of salvation for the new chosen people. This imagined
unity, however, was short-lived as Christians spent much of the next 500 years
excommunicating each other over variant formulae about how Jesus could be
defined as both “God” and “man”. As such, arguments about the nature of God are
endemic to Christianity as a religious tradition.
It is precisely this Trinitarian factional infighting that puzzled the
earliest Muslims. The Qur’an makes repeated references to the
fundamental unity of God and counsels its hearers to “say not ‘Three’” (Surah
4.171). The core Christian theological idea that God “begat” a Son is harshly
critiqued (Surah 19.88-92). In fact, anti-Christological slogans adorn
the famed Dome of the Rock, erected in Jerusalem by Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik
in the mid-5th century CE. In spite of this, the early Muslims did
not suppose that Christians (or Jews for that matter) were worshipping a different
God. They were simply thought to be worshipping him incorrectly and elevating
Jesus (who Muslims consider to be a messenger of God) to divine status. Jews
and Christians are clearly acknowledged by Islamic tradition as “People of the
Book”—that is communities that have received divine revelations and therefore
have special status. Whether or not that revelation was properly understood or preserved
is another matter. Surah 3 of the Qur’an says: “Truly among the People
of the Book are those who believe in God and that which has been sent down unto
you.” Thus, for early Islamic tradition at least, it is a non-issue whether or
not Muslims worship the same God as the Christians and Jews. It’s a matter of
how. As the 12th century scholar Zamakhshari wrote, interpreting the
verse “Do not be fanatical in your faith” (Surah 4.171): “The Jews went
too far in that they degraded the position of Christ in regarding him as an
illegitimate child (of Mary). And the Christians went too far in that they
unduly elevated him in considering him a god.”[1]
Yet what did Christians think about this issue when they first
encountered Muslims? Interestingly, one of the earliest names applied by
outsiders to Muslims was “Saracen,” which some interpreters in antiquity gave a
Greek etymology as Sara-kene (“Sarah is barren”)—a reference to the
Abraham story. Others referred to them more explicitly as “Hagarenes” or “Ishmaelites,”
which also implies an acknowledgement of the Abrahamic legacy and, therefore,
common theological ground. In fact, a connection was drawn between Arab tribes
and the descendants of Ishmael even prior to the coming of Islam. The 5th
century church historian Sozomen states:
This is the tribe which took
its origin and had its name from Ishmael, the son of Abraham; and the ancients
called them Ishmaelites after their progenitor. As their mother Hagar was a
slave, they afterwards, to conceal the opprobrium of their origin, assumed the
name of Saracens, as if they were descended from Sara, the wife of Abraham.
Such being their origin, they practice circumcision like the Jews, refrain from
the use of pork, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs. If, indeed,
they deviate in any respect from the observances of that nation, it must be
ascribed to the lapse of time, and to their intercourse with the neighboring
nations. Moses, who lived many centuries after Abraham, only legislated for
those whom he led out of Egypt. The inhabitants of the neighboring countries,
being strongly addicted to superstition, probably soon corrupted the laws
imposed upon them by their forefather Ishmael. The ancient Hebrews had their
community life under this law only, using therefore unwritten customs, before
the Mosaic legislation. These people certainly served the same gods as the
neighboring nations, honoring and naming them similarly, so that by this
likeness with their forefathers in religion, there is evidenced their departure
from the laws of their forefathers. As is usual, in the lapse of time, their
ancient customs fell into oblivion, and other practices gradually got the
precedence among them. Some of their tribe afterwards happening to come in
contact with the Jews, gathered from them the facts of their true origin,
returned to their kinsmen, and inclined to the Hebrew customs and laws. From
that time on, until now, many of them regulate their lives according to the
Jewish precepts. Some of the Saracens were converted to Christianity not long before
the present reign. They shared in the faith of Christ by intercourse with the
priests and monks who dwelt near them, and practiced philosophy in the
neighboring deserts, and who were distinguished by the excellence of their
life, and by their miraculous works (Church History 6.38 [NPNF]).
According to Sozomen’s account, the Ishmaelites had abandoned the faith
of Abraham, only to be reintroduced to it by later interactions with Jews and
Christians. This places them solidly within the Abrahamic paradigm. Yet, once
the Arab tribes appear as carriers of a new religious message the tone becomes
more polemical. For instance, the earliest Greek reference to Islam (from 634
CE) speaks of a “prophet who has appeared with the Saracens” (Doctrina
Jacobi),[2]
who is later dismissed as false. Around the same time the Christian author John
Moschus noted that “the godless Saracens entered the holy city of Christ our
Lord, Jerusalem, with the permission of God and in punishment for our
negligence.”[3]
John’s account is somewhat ambivalent in that it refers to the Saracens as “godless”
but also as instruments of God meant to punish the Christians for their
constant infighting. A similar sentiment is expressed by Sophronius, the patriarch
of Jerusalem at the time.[4]
Over time, Muhammad is increasingly portrayed by Christian writers as a
false-prophet and his teachings as yet another heresy (see John of Damascus).[5]
Interestingly, some of the first Christians to encounter Muslims
were members of the Syriac churches, who spoke a dialect of Aramaic—the language
of Jesus himself and lingua franca for the entire late antique Near
East. It surprises most people to know that the Syro-Aramaic word for God is alahah,
equivalent to the Arabic allah. Contrary to common misconception, this
is not an Islamic name for a god (like Zeus or Thor) but the basic term for God
used by Aramaic speaking Jews and Christians. Even Jesus himself would have
referred to God in this way! Syriac Christian writers were on the frontline,
culturally and linguistically, of the encounter with the emerging Islamic
tradition. One of the earliest sources from this Syriac perspective, a letter from Isho‘yahb
III, bishop of Nineveh-Mosul (in what remains of modern Iraq), relates that “these
Arabs to whom at this time God has given control over the world, as you know,
they are [also here] with us. Not only are they no enemy to Christianity, but
they are even praisers of our faith, honorers of our Lord’s priests and holy
ones, and supporters of churches and monasteries.”[6]
Bishop Isho‘yahb’s charitable sentiments, however, are not always share by
other writers of the time who express apocalyptic alarm and confusion at the
advancing Arab forces. Still, they are echoed by an 8th century
Syriac chronicle, which portrays the Prophet as leading his people from
polytheism to the worship of the one God:
This Muhammad, while in the
age and stature of youth, began to go up and down from his town of Yathrib to
Palestine for the business of buying and selling. While so engaged in the
country, he saw the belief in one God and it was pleasing to his eyes. When he
went back down to his tribesmen, he set this belief before them, and he
convinced a few and they became his followers.[7]
Thus, we can see that, historically speaking, those Christians who first
encountered carriers of Islamic tradition were unsure what to make of them—as many
are today who haven’t had regular contact with Muslim communities and cultures.
Were they (or are they) harbingers of doom and minions of the Antichrist? Or,
were they (or are they) fellow travellers in the on-going salvation history of
humanity’s relationship to the God of Abraham? It very much depends on the
theological attitudes of those involved. Believers who take an exclusivist view
contend that only they are right. Theirs is the only true understanding of
religion; all others are false. In this sense the adherents of ISIS and radical,
western Christian agitators have much in common. These would say that Muslims
and Christians most definitely do not worship the same God. Yet, if
theirs is a God of violence and hate, then perhaps they ultimately do. By way
of contrast, believers who adopt an inclusivist theological outlook
allow themselves to see the value in other traditions and can recognize that
they are not alone on the journey of faith. They seek a God in common. One
can only hope that the latter group outnumbers the former in contemporary
encounters.
Unfortunately, most discussions of political, cultural, and religious
interactions occur in a historical vacuum. The public has very little awareness
of their own history let alone the history of those they fear. Yet, mining the
past, even a little, can yield some valuable insights.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
THE QUESTION OF QUOTATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY
Citation
and quotation by ancient authors is an issue that remains poorly understood.
All too often, modern scholars tend to assume that the ancients worked and wrote
like we do, with multiple books at hand, scrupulously checking references and
carefully rendering quotations. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely in
antiquity. In spite of the gradual penetration of literacy in ancient
societies, most information continued to be transmitted orally. Even information
that existed in written textual form was most often received aurally. In fact, the
ancient relationship to written text was a unique one, at least from the modern
perspective. At the composition stage, authors tended to dictate to scribes,
while at the reading stage, texts were mostly read aloud. So, for instance,
someone in Alexandria might dictate a letter to a local scribe, the text of
that letter is then transmitted to its addressee in Antioch. The addressee,
when receiving the letter, either reads or has it read aloud to gain access to
its contents. The physical letter itself is simply a vehicle by which an act of
oral communication can be reproduced in another space and time. Even writers
who did not use scribes would often speak the words they were transcribing.[1] As
Paul Achtemeier has put it, “late antiquity knew nothing of the ‘silent,
solitary reader’.”[2]
The same could be said for the silent, solitary scholar. After all, ancient
books and scrolls were cumbersome and difficult to use even for the literate.
The lack of punctuation, paragraph or line division, made reading itself
burdensome, let alone looking up and verifying passages one wanted to cite.
Moreover, ancient memories seem to have been far more robust than our own, with
memory exercises forming a key part of the rhetorical curriculum,[3]
even from the earlies stages of education.[4]
As a rule, Graeco-Roman authors only
cite other writings to criticize them, for instance in philosophical
literature. Otherwise, material that the author agrees with is often recycled
without attribution.[5] At
the same time, authors would sometimes alter the material cited in order to
re-enforce their own arguments. There was little interest in representing the
actual words of either an opponent or an ally. As a result, when an ancient
author uses the verb phēmi, this often amounts to little more than the
attribution of an idea or opinion.[6]
Even instances when the phrase kata lexin is used should be treated with caution.[7] As
Geoffrey Lloyd has written, “when a Greek writer tells us what one of his
predecessors ‘says’, phesi, this has often to be taken not as a record
of what that predecessor wrote, let alone of words that he spoke, but rather in
the sense of what he meant or could be represented as meaning.”[8]
After all, did not the great historian Thucydides famously remark that he
intended to reproduce not what was actually said in his subjects’ speeches but
what “ought” to have been said (1.22)?
How then does this relate to the
question of biblical citation? Presumably the same pattern applies. It is
unlikely that ancient Christian authors used actual textual copies for their
citations of scripture—with the exception perhaps of biblical commentaries. It
is more likely that they relied on their familiarity with key verses and
passages gained through repeated liturgical performance.[9] The
same holds true today for many Christians whose familiarity with the Bible is
derived primarily from liturgical contexts, not personal reading. As a result,
as Achtemeier notes, using biblical citations in early Christian authors as
evidence for variant textual traditions is often an exercise in futility.[10] Moreover,
it is based on an assumption that a definitive canonical text existed in
antiquity, which the church fathers either quoted exactly or deliberately altered
or misquoted. This assumption has driven a fair amount of modern research into
the “text” of the New Testament among early Christian writers and, in my
opinion, constitutes one of the greatest misuses of patristic literature by
biblical scholars. How the texts are used and interpreted is often set
aside.
[1] Paul Achtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament
and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 109,1 (1990) 3-27.
[2] Achtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat,” p. 17.
[3] George A.
Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1994, p. 123-127.
[4] Henri Marrou, A
History of Education in Antiquity, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press,
1982, p. 154.
[5] Geoffrey Lloyd, “Quotation in Greco-Roman Context,” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 17 (1995),148-9. A major deviation from
this patter is Eusebius, who extensively quotes and compiles sources in what
seems to be an attempt to create a “documentary” history of the church.
[6] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 142.
[7] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 143.
[8] Lloyd, “Quotations,” p. 143.
[9] This was
certainly the case in medieval monasteries where authors used “hook words”
drawn from a kind of internal concordance. See Jean Leclerq, The Love of
Learning and the Desire for God, trans. C. Mirashi, New York, Fordham,
1961, p. 74-75.
[10] Achtemeir, “Omne verbum sonat,” p. 27.
LINGUA ABRAHAMICA
According to the Hebrew book of Deuteronomy, chapter 26, when the
chosen people finally take possession of the Promised Land, they are instructed
to gather up the first fruits of the harvest, present them to the priest and
say: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived
there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, might and
populous” (26:5). This declaration invokes Israel’s nomadic, outcast, and even
refugee[1]
origins in Northern Syria and connects the nation to its founding
father—Abraham, whose very name means “Father of the People” and who, called
from his home in Ur of the Chaldeans (an Aramaic speaking people), forged a
religious legacy claimed by billions of believing Jews, Christians, and Muslims
throughout the globe. These peoples, the “children of Abraham,” share a common
lineage, both ideologically and linguistically, which has its roots deep in
Syrian and Mesopotamian soil, where the Aramaic language was spoken as a
cross cultural common-tongue for millennia.
Unfortunately,
however, the importance of this language and its many dialects goes largely
unnoticed and certainly unappreciated in the general history of the so-called
“Western” religions. For instance, while Hebrew serves as the scriptural
language of the Jewish Bible, nearly all of the ancient Jewish commentaries,
interpretations, and expansions were handed down in Aramaic, not to mention the
massive rabbinic effort to record and codify the “Oral Torah” between the 2nd
and 6th centuries CE, resulting in the much adored and deeply
Aramaic Mishnah and Talmuds. Similarly, the 1st century Christians,
as a Second Temple Jewish sect, would have largely conversed in Palestinian Aramaic,
even though their earliest writings are found only in Greek, with texts in the
Syriac dialect of Aramaic appearing only later. Other branches of the
Judaeo-Christian tree, such as the elusive Mandaeans and universally maligned
Manichaeans both used eastern Aramaic dialects as their primary vehicles of
communication, although for the Manichaeans much like the Christians, this
linguistic substratum has largely been erased. Finally, the early Muslims, the
group that tried to close the book on the Abrahamic legacy are
themselves indebted to the Aramaic speaking milieu in ways that are still not
fully understood.
One
would expect then that Aramaic would be a widely studies and treasured tool in
the modern scholar’s linguistic toolbox. Sadly, it is not. Few scholars of
ancient religion outside of biblical or rabbinic studies bother to acquire this
relatively simple tongue, preoccupied as they are with Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic
as the case may be. Still, underneath the surface of many of their most
treasured texts, be it Torah, New Testament, or Qur’an, can be heard
whisperings and hidden voices from the land of Aram.
[1] Alan
R. Millard, “A Wandering Aramean,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol.
39, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), 153-5.
DRAWING FROM THE HIDDEN SPRING
The Children of Abraham, as
“Peoples of the Book,” are by their nature great storytellers. The stories told
by the adherents of these great religious traditions have come to serve as some
of the most enduring and influential in world history, affecting directly or
indirectly a large portion of the population through art, literature, and
liturgy. This is partly explained by the fact that the stories transmitted by
these tellers are more than simply stories, for believers, they carry the added
weight of divine revelation, that is, narratives inspired, sanctioned, and
even, as some of them have argued, communicated by God. The earliest of these
scripturalists, the Jews, have cherished a vivid account not only of God’s
creation of the universe and humanity, but, more importantly, of God’s ongoing
interest and care for one particularly resilient portion of that human
community—their ancestors, the Israelites—a story that is told in a rich and
variegated anthology of sacred Hebrew texts. The early Christians, formerly
Jews themselves, came to argue that the Judaic notion of God’s providential care
and commitment to humanity was most fully manifest in one Jew in particular—Jesus
of Nazareth—who in addition to being human, embodied God’s own aspect of divine
rationality, which they came to call “the Word” (Greek: logos). This
development, they insisted, was already implicit in the Jewish holy books, which
they appropriated and supplemented with their own set of divinely inspired Greek
documents validating their radical reinterpretation of the Covenant. The
Muslims, or “Submitters,” for their part, took issue with a perceived
degeneration in the previously established divine-human relationship and
presented themselves as restorers and guardians of God’s divine will as
originally revealed to Abraham. They bear witness (as many of them would continue
to argue) not simply to an authentic understanding of God’s will, but to God’s
very words, preserved “in clear Arabic” until the Day of Judgement in their
esteemed prophet’s holy “recitation”—the Qur’ān.
Each
of these communities took great care not only to preserve, but to publish,
their claims to spiritual superiority in the form of officially sanctioned
“holy books.” However, these “canonical” scriptures, as they are called,
represent only a fraction of the stories told, transmitted, and eventually
textualized by the dominant factions within each of these religious
communities. In fact, they are merely the most visible tip of a much larger
literary iceberg, one with a relatively consistent texture but with often
radically unfamiliar contours. This literary debris, as it has often been
pejoratively viewed, has come to be known collectively as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.
The former term, Greek for “hidden things,” refers to those Jewish and
Christian writings that were excluded from the official scriptural anthologies
at various points in history: first, when after the destruction of the Second
Temple the early Jewish rabbis began to reconstruct their devastated tradition
and to disavow a set of writings from their bible seen as compromised by the
cultural norms of their Greek and Roman oppressors, and then, when the early
Christians began to refine their lists of new authoritative literature.[1] The
latter term, Greek for “falsely attributed writings,” encompasses a similar
body of Jewish and Christian literature that came to be seen as either forged
or derivative. Religious politics frequently lay at the root of these editorial
decisions, since many of these marginalized writings were rejected on the basis
of the mainstream communities’ perception that they contained dangerous or
simply erroneous ideas. This literature, which can perhaps be better qualified
as parabiblical, can be generally characterized as theologically
motivated writings connected to prominent figures from biblical tradition and
often, but not always, expressed in analogous literary genres. Frequently, as
in the case of Enoch, the motive seems to be a desire to fill in the blanks of
the biblical narrative or to re-imagine an aspect of that normative tradition
in a different way. This means that such traditions tend to be quite fluid and are
easily manipulated for polemical or apologetical purposes.
Modern
scholars have been far more forgiving in their (hopefully) non-theological
evaluation of this literature. Increasingly, it has come to be seen as a vast
reservoir of influential ideas or a testament to continued periods of
creativity and imagination among the literate and scribal classes of these religious
communities. For example, many have been enchanted by the notion that the
so-called pseudepigrapha, in particular, constitute the “missing-link” between
the Jewish Bible and the Christian New Testament.[2]
Those who have adopted this view maintain that most of these writings are
pre-Christian and as such ought to be situated in a corresponding social and
chronological context. More recently, however, it has been suggested that even
though much of this literature “appears” to be Jewish, it was in fact produced
(or at least substantially reworked) by later Christian authors and redactors.[3]
After all, most pseudepigraphal texts (with a few exceptions) have been
preserved in later “versions”[4]
found in the many languages of eastern Christian literature, such as Greek,
Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Georgian. Very little, in fact, has
been preserved in Hebrew or Aramaic and can thereby be situated in a
demonstrably Judaic context, although even Aramaic evidence raises the
possibility, however remote, of Christian transmission.
What is
particularly striking, however, is the degree to which this vast reservoir of parabiblical
traditions continued to be used and reused, redacted and revised, often in
parallel with canonical material, from the Second Jewish Commonwealth through
to the late Roman and early Islamic periods. Frequently the use of parabiblical
material occurs at two distinct, though interrelated phases, first, discourse
formation, during which a new (or at least restated) religious claim is being
propagated, and second, discourse revision, during which this new
religious claim is refined or elaborated. For instance, while certain Jewish
sectarian groups made use of parabiblical material in addition to the Torah, as
evidenced at Qumran , the rabbis of Babylon continued to mine
it in support of their oceanic exegetical project culminating in the Talmud.
Similarly, while early Christian movements drew considerable inspiration from
these malleable traditions during the second and third centuries CE, in
particular Gnostics and Manichaeans, later proponents of orthodoxy also made creative
and often surprising use of parabiblical material. Finally, while a certain
amount of parabiblical material appears, in a typically enigmatic way, in the
Qur’ān, later Muslim commentators made (sometimes reluctant) use of “Israelite
tales” (Israiliyyat) in their exegetical and apologetic endeavours.
Although many
are content to point at this trajectory as evidence of mere borrowing or
derivation (read: unoriginality and inferiority), the real story to be read
concerns the ways in which late antique religious groups used this
material. What did they do with it? How did they draw from this well of
tradition and water their own branches?
[1] Much
later, during the Protestant Reformation, some European Protestants also
decided to exclude these works their bibles, while Catholics held on to
them,
[2]
Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament, 11.
[3] See
Davila, The
Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other?; also Piovanelli,
“Le recyclage des textes apocryphes,” 277-295.
[4] In fact,
the tendency to call these works “versions” is problematic, since it
re-enforces the stereotype that they are derivative of earlier, more
“authentic” models.
MANICHAEANS IN LATE ANTIQUITY
Old habits are hard to break. In an age
that seems increasingly preoccupied with religious questions such as the nature
of creation, the parameters of love, regulation of the body, and religiously
motivated violence, one can easily be surprised at the resiliency of these theologically
charged debates. After all, aren’t we living in a post-religious, secular age of
technology and enlightenment? So goes the narrative of modern “western”
society. But, religious voices appear to be louder and more influential than
ever, not least in the United States. They have ever larger and more far
reaching platforms and media of communication. Religious issues are often at
the center of public policy debates and as human beings experience unprecedented
rates of social and technological change, more and more individuals seem to be
turning to religion—especially Christianity and Islam—as a way to cope and as a
source of stability. While Friedrich Nietzsche may have famously proclaimed the
death of God at the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the
21st, on a bright sunny day in September, the world was reminded
that religion is most definitely not. Ever since that day, the global community
has been keenly aware of the persistence power of religious ideas and
discourses.
Ours is not the first and
likely won’t be the last age to experience such dynamics. With widespread
economic instability, political upheaval, climate and social change, we are in
an age of profound transformation, some might even say decline. A similar set
of adjectives have often been applied to the somewhat oxymoronically named
period known as “Late Antiquity.” This chaotic and transformative age, which
marks the end of the classical world and the emergence of the medieval, has
been the subject of intense study by scholars over the last several decades. Spurred
on by the influential work of Peter Brown, historians, classicists, and
scholars of religion have engaged in a prolonged effort to re-interpret and
re-imagine an age which the 18th-century English historian Edward
Gibbon famously dismissed as representing the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. Like many today, Gibbon saw religion—Christianity in particular—as
a pernicious and contaminating influence that had brought down one of the
world’s great civilizations and plunged “the West” into a dark age dominated by
un-enlightened bishops, priests, and monks. Few scholars today would accept
Gibbon’s bleak and largely anti-Catholic caricature. The later Roman Empire is
now seen largely as a period of profound change and transformation, when
old—often very old—institutions and belief systems gave way to a new set
of paradigms involving increasingly centralized forms of governance and a
narrowing of worldviews around a relatively small set of religious themes. Gone
were the democratic and dialectical ideals of 5th-century BCE Athens
or the pragmatic politics of Republican Rome. The new age was one of emperors,
kings, and prophets, all under the rule of an all-powerful supreme God. It was
also an age when theological debates took center stage as ancient peoples
grappled with the implications of the rapidly changing world around them.
It is easy to forget that
today’s most influential and contentious religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam—were forged and reached their definitive shape during this so-called
Late Antiquity. To be sure, Judaism has deep roots in the pre-classical
cultures of the ancient Near East, but it only reached its definitive and most
enduring form in the Rabbinic academics of Palestine and Babylonia from the 2nd
to 6th centuries CE—long after the temple in Jerusalem had been torn
down by the Romans. Similarly, Christianity, although firmly rooted in the
literary and intellectual environment of the Graeco-Roman world, only reached
theological maturity after the rise of the emperor Constantine in the early 4th
century. Finally, though Islam emerged from the relative obscurity of south
western Arabia, its adherents soon inherited many of the cultural and religious
paradigms of the Graeco-Roman and Near Eastern worlds in the 8th and
9th centuries. It is equally easy to forget that each of these
traditions, which are often characterized as “western” today, were born in a
distinctively Near Eastern cultural milieu, far from what anyone today would
consider “the West.”
Therefore, if we seek to
understand the roots of our own religious heritage, we must look back not only
to the scriptures of these great spiritual movements, but to their respective
traditions of interpretation and their struggle to make sense of and articulate
the meanings of their revelations. Simply reading their scriptures doesn’t tell
the whole story. For instance, the Exodus story tells us nothing about the life
experience of Babylonian Jews, just as the New Testament tells us nothing about
conditions that led to Christianity’s 300 year rise to an imperial religion. Similarly,
for all that the Qur’an reveals, very little of its content reflects the
context in which it was recited, let alone the environments that shaped Islamic
civilization in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. If we want to truly understand
a religion, of for that matter, a group of inter-related religions, we need to
get a sense of how they adapted to their social and political environments over
time. This allows us to appreciate why certain some questions were asked and
others were not, why some answers were accepted and others abandoned. In the
long and complex process by which a religious tradition establishes its normative
perspective—what is usually termed its orthodoxy—it must encounter,
confront, and frequently suppress alternate points of view that it sees as
unviable or counter-productive. These theological dead-ends are often caste as heresy
by the champions of the emerging consensus. It is important to recognize,
however, that orthodoxy by its very nature is largely reactionary. It responds
to new and often bold theological challenges and adjusts itself accordingly. In
fact, some of the most daring and creative theologians are often tossed into
the dustbin of heretical debris. Their writings are suppressed and their
memories fade into obscurity or are overwritten by the hostile judgments of
their opponents. It is only which great and judicious effort that such figures
can be recovered and appreciated by modern scholars. Yet by doing such
detective work, we get a far more accurate picture of the debates which led to
theological positions that most considered normative.
One such perspective, which has
had to be carefully recovered and reconstructed is the Manichaean movement,
which began in 3rd century Persia and spread westward into Roman
territory and east into central Asia and China, where it eventually died out
sometime in the 14th or 15th centuries. Although likely always
few in number, Manichaeans were productive missionaries and prolific creators
of religious books. In fact, Manichaean scribes have been credited with the
production of both the largest—the Coptic Psalm-book—and smallest—the
Greek Cologne Mani Codex—manuscripts from antiquity. It is precisely
such books that have allowed us to gain a far better picture of their beliefs
and the widespread influence of those beliefs over several centuries.
For generations, Manichaeism
was considered little more than one of the many Christian heresies that
threatened to undermine the early church. Most of what we knew about them came
from hostile Christian commentators and polemicists who railed against their
evil and pernicious doctrines. Even Augustine, the most famous Manichaean of
all, went to great lengths to distance himself from his former co-religionists.
Largely thanks to Augustine, there are more anti-Manichaean writings than for
almost any other pre-Nicene Christian sect. In the 18th and 19th
centuries, however, when European scholars began to take more of an interest in
classical Islamic literature, Manichaeans kept appearing in the writings of
Muslim scholars from the Abbasid period, testifying to the on-going presence of
Manichaeans in the medieval Islamic world. Then, at the beginning of the 20th
century, European expeditions in central Asia uncovered a significant amount of
fragmentary Manichaean manuscripts at the Turfan oasis in western China. These
texts, written in a variety of Middle Iranian dialects, revolutionized the
study of Manichaeism by giving scholars access to some of their original
sources. The Turfan manuscripts were augmented by Chinese discoveries at
Dunhuang as well as a library of Coptic Manichaean codices from Medinet Madi in
Egypt. Since then the miniature Greek Cologne Mani Codex and the texts
from the Dakhleh Oasis have been added to the growing corpus of original
Manichaean literature.
We can now hear the Manichaeans
speak in their own voices and not only through the hostile filters of Christian
and Muslim writers. We can also appreciate the degree to which Manichaeans
influenced the traditions with which they came into contact. As it turns out,
Manichaeans were great carriers of ideas between cultural and geographical contexts.
But not only that. They answered some of the key theological questions of the
late antique period in unique and often surprising ways. As a result, they
challenged their rivals to answer the same questions in an equally compelling
way.
REVIEW of Gardner, BeDuhn, and Dilley, MANI AT THE COURT OF THE PERSIAN KINGS
Iain Gardner, Jason
BeDuhn, and Paul Dilley, Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings: Studies on
the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 87;
Leiden: Brill, 2015).
This latest volume in
Brill’s on-going Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies series provides a
fascinating preview of the work currently being undertaken by the authors to
finally edit and publish the second volume of Manichaean Kephalaia
discovered in 1929 at Medinet Madi, Egypt. Volume one of the Kephalaia
(the Berlin Codex) has been the subject of magisterial work by Polotsky (1940),
Böhlig (1940, 1966) and Funk (1999, 2000), while volume two (the Dublin codex)
has long languished in obscurity. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the
text preserved on the papyrus is largely illegible, making reading and
reconstruction of the manuscript incredibly difficult. With the exception of
some articles by Funk (1990, 1997) and Tardieu (1988), almost no use has been
made of this material. Nonetheless, Gardner, BeDuhn, and Dilley have persevered
and as a prelude to the forthcoming publication of their edition of the codex,
they have offered some of the first fruits of their study in the current
collection of studies.
The Manichaean Kephalaia
represent a collection of “question-and-answer” literature in which Mani
addresses doctrinal questions posed by various interlocutors. One of the most
remarkable aspects of the Dublin Kephalaia, however, is its decidedly
“Iranian” character. This is explored in several chapters of the book: Chapter
3 “Parallels between Coptic and Iranian Kephalaia : Goundesh and the
King of Touran (BeDuhn); Chapter 5 “Also Schrieb Zarathustra? Mani as
Interpreter of the ‘Law of Zarades’” (Dilley); Chapter 6 “Iranian Epic in the
Cheaster Beatty Kephalaia” (BeDuhn), and Chapter 8 “‘Hell Exists, and We
have Seen the Place Where It Is’: Rapture and Religious Competition in Sasanian
Iran” (Dilley). Much of the exchanges and discussions in the Dublin codex take
place at the Sasanian court and Mani’s interlocutors include a number of
prominent Iranian personages (p. 16-17). These discussions, the authors
suggest, fit into a larger context of court disputations between rival
religious factions (p. 50-51) and indicate an interest in apocalyptic visions
by the ruling elite (p. 214). Moreover, the Dublin Kephalaia contain a
number of references to Iranian epic and religious tradition, which is somewhat
startling given the text’s provenance in a Coptic manuscript from Roman Egypt.
In fact, this means that Manichaeans can be seen as key transmitters of Iranian
traditions from Persian to Roman territory. For those interested in
cross-cultural transmission in Late Antiquity, these chapters will be of
particular interest.
Also of interest, perhaps more to
Manichaean scholars specifically, is the information contained in the Dublin Kephalaia
about the “Last Days” of Mani. In Chapter 7, with the help of the newly
analyzed Dublin material, Gardner attempts to make sense of the various textual
fragments relating to the end of Mani’s life. As such, he offers the intriguing
suggesting that Mani might have spent time exiled in Armenia before being put
on trial. Hopefully, the publication of the edition of the text will help
resolve some of the vexing questions relating to the chronology of Mani’s life.
Finally,
Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings, will also be useful to those
with more theoretical interests related to the academic study of religion,
particularly Chapter 9 “Mani and the Crystallization of the Concept of
‘Religion’ in Third Century Iran” (BeDuhn). In this very insightful chapter
BeDuhn undermines the “tautological” truism, so commonplace in academic
seminars lately, that “religion” is a purely modern construct. BeDuhn makes a
persuasive argument that the idea of religion as system of beliefs and
practices detached from culture and ethnicity, to which one may voluntarily
adhere, reaches its full expression with the dēn founded by Mani himself…in
antiquity! BeDuhn suggests that “Manichaean texts consistently and exclusively
employ…terms to refer to entities recognizable as ‘religions’ rather than
ethnic or political institutions” and that with “Mani, a ‘religion’ category
has displaced ethnicity as the primary marker of identity” (p. 270). This, in
turn, established a paradigm employed by early Islamic scholars (p. 274). What
is so refreshing about this discussion is that it is based on actual historical
and textual evidence, as opposed to being simply reflecting on the concept of
“religion” in a theoretical vacuum.
In general, Mani at the Court of
the Persian Kings is a well-written and solidly researched set of studies
that raise important historical, cultural, and theoretical questions for
specialists and non-specialists alike. It is highly recommended.
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