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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
into the modern period as religions. The competition with Christianity,
Zoroastrianism, and then Islam proved to be too much, especially given
the political power that the leaders of these other religions were able to
exert to oppress and persecute their rivals.
That said, Islam has long operated from a position of religious tolerance
for “People of the Book,” so that religions like Judaism and Christianity,
which have ancient holy scriptures and prophetic leaders such as
Moses and Jesus, generally have been tolerated. This is probably the main
reason that the Mandaeans, a group of Gnostics who settled in today’s
Iran and Iraq, in the southern marshes of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers,
have survived from the ancient world to the modern (see Drower 1937,
1960; Deutsch 1995, 1999; Lupieri 2002; Buckley 2002, 2006).
When Islam first became dominant in the region, the Mandaean leader
led a delegation of Mandaeans to visit the Muslim authorities—or so their
story goes. They showed the authorities their old holy book, the Ginza,
and declared that John the Baptist, a prophet known to Muslims, was
their prophet. Convinced, the Muslim authorities granted them the status
of People of the Book and recognized their religion as legitimate. The
Muslims called them subba (baptizers).
Who were these people? Where did they come from? The Mandaeans
understand human history to have started with Adam and Eve, but although
this first couple started it all, the actual hero and ancestor of the
Mandaean community is the biblical Shem, Noah’s son. The Mandaean
community traces its origins back to Shem, whom they consider the only
legitimate son of Noah and his wife. Noah’s other three sons, considered
illegitimate, are the ancestors of everyone else in the world.
This understanding means that their legends turn upside down the
conventional understanding of biblical history, a hermeneutic that is characteristic
of other Gnostics we have discussed. For instance, according to
Mandaean lore the first false prophet is Abraham, who serves the Jewish
God, a solar deity. Moses is the second. Their stories about the exodus
from Egypt identify the Mandaeans with the Egyptians. In their folk
memory, the Egyptian pharaoh is the Mandaean leader of this period, the
enemy of Moses and the Jewish people. The pharaoh, however, becomes
the unfortunate victim of the Jews and their false God when many of his
people are killed in the Red Sea. The third false prophet is Jesus, who appeared
during the time of Pontius Pilate.