DeConick A.D

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PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
which she must have originally identified with Jesus. Although there is no
evidence that she saw herself as the Great Power, like Elchasai, or as the
Paraclete, like Mani, she did assume Jesus’ role as the “vine” from the
fourth Gospel (John 15), a Gospel with which she appears to have been
familiar. She believed that she had been appointed by the exalted angel of
light to be the spiritual mother and founding priest of a new community.
She conceived of her community as the kingdom of God that Jesus foretold
in his parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31–32; Mark 4:30–32;
Luke 13:18–19), which had become a bush to shelter, feed, and nurse the
birds who roosted there.
In the second century, Miriam’s group began experiencing severe persecution
at the hands of other Christians. The animosity between these
Nazoraean Gnostics and other Christians was serious enough that it caused
an inseparable rift between the communities. The more the Nazoraean
Gnostics interacted with other Christians and their prescriptive proclamations
about Jesus, the more the Nazoraean Gnostics distanced themselves
from the Christian Jesus. Rather than argue that their understanding of
Jesus as the Knowledge of Life or Manda d-Hiia was right and the Apostolic
Catholics’ view of Jesus was wrong, the Nazoraean Gnostics pulled
away from Jesus altogether, feeling strongly that the Christian Jesus was a
fraud. In this context emerged the story of Anush, the rival of the Christian
Jesus, and Jesus became a lapsed Mandaean.
In this vortex of communal soul searching, Miriam became associated
with Jesus’ mother, but not as the Christian story remembers her. The
Mandaean memory of Miriam is as a Mandaean convert alienated from
Judaism, a mother who could not stop her deceitful son Jesus from starting
the false religion Christianity. In the end, the Nazoraean Gnostics
turned away from both Judaism and Christianity, and from this estranged
interface emerged Mandaeism, a new Gnostic religion with its own Gnostic
identity and its own Gnostic reformulation of history.
Soul Vessels
In the second century, the Mandaeans were conceptualizing God in ways
very similar to what Mani would propose a century later. In the Mandaean
scheme, the world of light exists above the celestial sphere. This is the