DeConick A.D

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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
Whatever else the Mandaean religion may be, it is a religion that identifies
Judaism and Christianity as Other. The Mandaeans are the only ones
who know the true God. Their name in fact derives from the Aramaic
word manda (knowledge). They are self-designated knowers, or Gnostics.
Three times daily the Mandaeans face celestial north, where they believe
the entrance to the world of light exists, and pray, “In the name of God
almighty, praised be God with pure hearts. Life exists. God exists. Knowledge
of God exists” (Fourouzandeh and Brunet 2001, 13).
This sweeping story of their history is their “official” version of their
past, but it does not help us determine exactly when, where, and why
Mandaeism emerged as a historical religion. What we know is that by
the third century, Mandaeism was an established Gnostic religion with
scriptures that were being copied and preserved by a scribal priestly class.
The manuscripts of their scriptures internally track the history of their
copyists. The earliest scribe of the Left Ginza has been identified as a
woman named Shlama. Even though women cannot be Mandaean priests
today, here we have incontestable evidence that Shlama was a Mandaean
priest living at the beginning of the third century (Buckley 2002, 4).
We also know about the work of a scribe at the end of the third century,
Zazai. He seemed concerned to preserve every Mandaean scripture he
possibly could during the time when Mani was killed and persecution of
non-Zoroastrian religions was on the rise in his locale. He understood
that a community’s written documents often survive when its people
may not.
This hand preservation of texts continues up to the present day, meaning
that it is very hard to fix dates to the original composition of any
Mandaean scripture or to know how much they have been edited and
altered over the years to bring the scriptures in line with current beliefs
and practices. In addition, although Mandaean scriptures show familiarity
with Jewish and Christian writings, they observe these from a distance.
The authors of these scriptures rarely appear to be consulting biblical texts
directly but instead rely mostly on hearsay and secondhand information
about biblical stories, which they then code unconventionally. This means
that the Mandaean presentation of information sometimes can be convoluted,
contradictory, and confusing to people who are used to consulting
biblical texts directly and reading them traditionally.