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.
