The Gospel of Mani

"The Living Gospel", also known as "The Great Gospel", "The Gospel of the Living" and "The Gospel of Manes", was a 3rd century Gnostic gospel written by, or at the very least attributed to, Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, who lived from around 216 to 274 CE, in Persia.

Originally written in Syriac, which is a dialect of Aramaic, and called by yet another name - "The Evangelion"¹ - it is regarded as one of the seven founding documents of Manichaeism. The Moslem scholar al-Biruni (973-1048) possessed a copy of the text, which he regarded as a "gospel of a special kind" - a statement not to be ignored, given that al-Biruni was very much the Einstein of his day.

In brief, the Manichaeans rejected all other versions but their own of the Jesus story, insisting that they misrepresented his teachings and mission. The book came in twenty-two parts, each labelled by a different letter of the Aramaic alphabet; Aramaic, like Yehudit, uses letters as numbers, and there are twenty-two letters in its alphabet; so really this is just a standard numbering system. The first part deals with the nature of the "King of the World of Light" who resides at the "Navel of the World" but is also present on the whole Earth, "from without as from within... having no limits except where his earth borders on that of his enemy", which is the "Kingdom of Darkness".

Sadly not so much as a burned and damaged fragment of the text is now in existence, so we cannot speculate what the remaining parts might have contained; however, we do have more-than-sufficient information about Manichaeism that we can make a safe deduction.

Mani himself was born near Babylon in 216 CE, in what was then politically the Persian kingdom of Parthia, into a family that had joined the Jewish-Christian sect known as the Elcesaites, a local clan of the Ebionites, whose own gospel is among the forty-seven in our list of the "forbidden", "the lost" and the "fake". As it happens, the Elcesaites also produced a "holy book", not a Gospel as such, but it includes names and details that throw considerable light, and both Jewish and Gnostic non-Christian light at that, on the Gospels, both Canonical and prohibited.

His birth-name was almost certainly not Mani, but rather Mani was the one that he adopted when he began his "mission" - Mani (Persian: مانی‎), is thought to mean "eternity", (though my sources for "The Gospel of Scythianus" insist that it means "discourse", and the Persian link here tells us that no one really knows anyway). At the age of twelve, and again at twenty-four, he experienced visions of a heavenly twin, who called him to leave his father's sect and teach "the true message of Christ".

In 240 he traveled to Afghanistan, which in those days was predominantly Hindu, where he studied both Hinduism and the area's very Hellenised form of Buddhism. He returned home in 242, joined the court of Shapur I, Shapur the Great, the second Sassanid Emperor of Persia, to whom he dedicated his "Shabuhragan", which should properly be called and pronounced "Shāpuragān"; his only work written in Persian, the remainder all being in Aramaic.

Shapur was a Zoroastrian, and he rejected Mani's new ideas, but his successor Hormizd I found them to his taste. Unfortunately Hormizd (the name is a dialect variation of the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda) died within the year, and his successor, Bahram I, was a follower of the Zoroastrian reformer Kartir; Mani and his followers were persecuted, Mani himself imprisoned, in Gundeshapur, in western Persia, a town renowned as a centre of learning, for its teaching hospital, and for its library; but not, it would seem, for its open-mindedness to contrary opinions. He died in prison within a month, in 274, probably not through ill-health.

One of the oddities of "The Gospel of Mani" lies in the fact of its existing at all. Mani's world, as we have seen, was Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian; geographically it began in Babylon, which is already a thousand miles east of Yeru-Shala'im, and then journeyed further eastwards, through Persia to Afghanistan, so there was no physical or intellectual contact of any kind with what would become western, or Roman, or even Greek Orthodox Christianity; and yet his version of Christ owes everything to the Egyptian Gnostics, whose starting point was the Greek Pythagoras.

The answer probably lies in "The Gospel of Scythianus" - the tale is told in my page at the link, so I shall not repeat it here. Suffice it to say that the similarities between Manichaeism and Egyptian Gnosticism are extremely close... but no, it does not suffice; it is necessary to demonstrate it. Let me try to do so, as briefly as I can:

Where western Christianity is tritheistic (the father, the son and the holy ghost), and Judaism is Omnideistic (all gods are really the same One god), Manichaeism, like Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism, is dualistic, defining the existence of Good and Evil in the world as nouns rather than adjectives, and anthropomorphising them as God and the Devil, though they did not use these particular names. In their terms, the world of light is the essence of Goodness, while the world of darkness is the essence of Badness, and this concept can indeed be found in the approved Gospels: it is there when Jesus says "I am the Light, I am the Way": he is expressing an idea that was commonplace amongst the Zoroastrians and Manichaeists of Persia, and which had entered the Yisra-Eli world in a minor key, as "yetser ha tov" and "yetser ha ra", during the latter years of the Babylonian captivity, when Zoroastrian Persia defeated Babylon; though in the Jewish version, "good" and "evil" remain as adjectives, and human beings thereby remain responsible for their own actions: a fundamental difference.

However, it is also precisely here that we can make the educated guess as to what "The Gospel of Mani" would likely have contained. In Manichaean terms, through the developments of human history, and in the realms of human behaviour as well as science and technology, the darkness is gradually removed from the world of matter, and returned to the world of light from which it came, paving the way for the final and total state of enlightenment which is the defeat of noun-Evil and the apotheosis of humankind as metaphor-God: the mystical idea of the Moshi'a in Hassidic Judaism, as opposed to the political idea of the Mashiyach which began with King David and was central to the aspirations of the Jewish Zealots in Jesus' time.

Because "The Gospel of Mani" has been lost, it is impossible to say what it contained, but the likelihood is that it told the story of a prophet in the style of Zoroaster, a Gautama-like figure who made manifest in his own being the mystical attainment of Heaven.

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¹ Not to be confused with  the Proto-Evangelion, for which see my page on "The Gospel of James"

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