The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism by Patricia Crone

Author:Patricia Crone [Crone, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781139516037
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-06-27T19:00:00+00:00

The Manichaeans

Mani was initiated into the Elchasaite sect at the age of four, and gradually withdrew from it after receiving his decisive revelation at the age of twenty-four.94 The divine realm he constructed for himself is somewhat complicated. God, the supreme being known as the Father of Greatness, presided over the realm of light, and from him came a series of emanations. One of these emanations was called the Third Messenger. From the Third Messenger emanated Jesus the Splendour, and from Jesus the Splendour came the Light-Nous. This Light-Nous is the ‘father of all the apostles’;95 and from it emanated the Apostle of Light, who ‘shall on occasion come and assume the church of the flesh, of humanity’ or, as Merkelbach translates, ‘he comes from time to time and clothes himself in the flesh of mankind in the church’.96 This is the conception reported for the Book of Elchasai: a pre-existing divine being – here an emanation rather than a hypostasis of the highest God – periodically descends to this world, putting on a body. Like the Sethians the Manichaeans sometimes called this divine being ‘the Illuminator’ (phōstēr).97

As Mani saw it, all the founders of churches were such divine beings in bodily clothing. Thus an anti-Manichaean text by the name of Seven Chapters, probably by Zacharias of Mitylene (d. after 536), anathematises Mani and his teachers, Scythianus and Bouddas and Zarades (Zoroaster), ‘who appeared before him in the likeness of a man, but without a body, among the Indians and the Persians’.98 Scythianus has been tentatively explained as Śakyamuni, i.e., the Buddha,99 which makes sense given that there are three names, but only two peoples, Indians and Persians. ‘In the likeness of a man (en homoiōsei)’ suggests that the Buddha and Zoroaster had simply assumed the guise of men, or in other words that they came in phantom bodies. That idea was certainly present among the Manichaeans. Augustine, for example, reports them as holding that Jesus did not come in real flesh, merely in a shape that resembled it;100 the Kephalaia seemingly agrees when it says that Jesus Christ ‘came without a body’ and ‘received a servant’s form (morphē), an appearance (skhēma) as of men’;101 and the Seven Chapters anathematises those who say that Jesus ‘was manifested to the world in appearance (only) and without a body in the likeness of a man’.102 But though skhēma could mean appearance as opposed to reality, it did not have to, and van Lindt holds that it was something material that Jesus put on: it was the opposite of reality only in the sense that light is true reality.103 In line with this the Seven Chapters says that when ‘Jesus the Begotten’ – i.e., the son of Mary – was baptised, ‘it was another one who came out of the water’:104 one takes this to mean that the divine being moved into the body of the human Jesus, without becoming identical with him. The degree to which the body he had moved into was conceived as real or illusory seems to depend on the context.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.