DeConick A.D

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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
their legitimacy? Scholars have suggested a number of options. Early in
the academic discussion of the origins of this religion, Mark Lidzbarski
(1925, vi–xvii) and Rudolf Bultmann (1925) favored a pre-Christian, Palestinian
origin for Mandaeism. The Danish scholar V. Schou Pedersen
(1940) was not convinced, arguing that there has to have been a Christian
stage within the early development of Mandaeism. After World War II,
the view that Mandaeism has Jewish origins again gained momentum, especially
because the Mandaean text Haran Gawaita gives the Mandaeans’
own account of their movement from Palestine into Mesopotamia (Macuch
1957, 1965; Rudolph 1969, 228). Edwin Yamauchi (1973, 140–42),
however, thinks that the origins are Babylonian and can be traced to a
non-Jewish sect, similar to the Elchasaites, who took their form of Gnosticism
to Mesopotamia and blended with a Mesopotamian cult of magic at
the end of the second century CE.
Given the strong Christian parallels and the portrayal of Jesus as lapsed,
which is a reversal of the Christian story, my own research has led me to
conclude that the first Mandaeans were a group of Nazoraean Gnostic
Christians led by a woman seer and priest named Miriam. The origin of
Mandaeism points to the very late first century, when, in the southern
marshes of the Euphrates, Miriam founded a group of Gnostic Christian
baptists. Her fledgling community was mainly Nazoraean Christians from
the diaspora, whose families had fled Palestine around the time of Jerusalem’s
destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. They likely had some connections
with the community of baptizing Gnostic Christians we discussed
earlier in relation to the fourth Gospel.
Other than the fact that her group maintained a Gnostic spirituality, it
would have been quite similar to the Elchasaites who were operating in
the same vicinity. Her baptisms, like Elchasai’s, were therapeutic, healing
for body and soul. Her group, like Elchasai’s, stressed the importance of
cleanliness, both physical and ethical, and prescribed a special diet of properly
washed and prepared food. Any contact with contaminating bodily
fluids such as blood or semen had to be resolved in the waters. Like the
Elchasaites, Miriam’s group performed daily prayers and river baptisms to
sustain the physical and spiritual health of her followers.
Miriam’s authority as priest and her knowledge of the true God came
from her vision of the descent of the exalted angel of light, Manda d-Hiia,