DeConick A.D

306
PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
into Rome, and along the Silk Road into Central Asia and China. Its
founder is a young man by the name of Mani, who was born on April 14,
216 CE, around the time that Hippolytus was active in Rome and Origen
in Alexandria.
Mani’s religion is both revelatory and intentional, created from the
ground up by Mani in response to a series of visions that he had as a
young man (see Klimkeit 1993; Gardner and Lieu 1985, 1994, 1998, 2004;
BeDuhn 2000, 2015; Tardieu 2008; Coyle 2009; Baker-Brian 2011; Colditz
2015). At the age of twenty-four, he set out to establish a religion to
rival the Christian church and all other religions worldwide—every one
of which, according to Mani, was a fake. His religion would be the Holy
Church. It would be the real deal because, unlike the fake religions, his
church would focus on the worship of the transcendent God beyond our
cosmos. He came to know this God directly when he was twelve and began
to have visions of an angel sent by a God who lived outside our world. Mani
recognized this God as the Father who dwelled in the kingdom of light.
Mani grew up as a Christian baptist, living in southern Babylonia, what
is modern-day Iraq. Mani’s baptists were nothing like the American or
Southern Baptists we know today. They followed Elchasai, a well-known
Christian sect leader in antiquity. His name appears to have been a title he
sported. In Hebrew and its dialects, it means “hidden power” and refers
to the incomprehensible God. The name is a blend of the two words h ∙ yl ,
which means “strength” or “power,” and khsy , which means “hidden.” In
the Syriac translation of the ancient Christian Pseudo-Clementines, haylâ
kasyâ in fact refers to the God who is incomprehensible. So Elchasai was
making a big claim with this title, similar to that of Simon Magus, who
called himself the Great Power.
Elchasai composed a book around 100 CE in Parthia, an ancient area
of the Mediterranean that roughly corresponds to the modern-day region
of northeastern Iran. His followers claim that the book fell down from
heaven. Elchasai says that he received it from a gigantic male angel, the
Son of God, and an equally gigantic female angel, the Holy Spirit.
Although we don’t know much about the contents of the book, we do
know something about Elchasaite beliefs and way of life. They believed
that Jesus was born of an ordinary sexual relation between his parents,
Mary and Joseph. He received the Christ Spirit, as other prophets had