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I had been raised with the story of John the Baptist found in the canonical gospels. Simple story: he was the son of Mary's relative Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah, making him the cousin of Jesus. He started his own ministry, which included (shocker!) baptizing. He foretold Christ's coming and even baptized Him, later his execution was ordered by Herod after being seduced by his wife's daughter. His head was presented to her on a silver platter, at which point his disciples went to follow Jesus.
I never gave too much thought to John, nor to many other figures in the gospels, as they sort of took a backseat to the Main Event as it were. But the "Did jesus actually exist?" thread made me curious, and I did some quick online research into John the Baptist from a gnostic standpoint. I found this almost immediately.
Fascinating stuff. Dig it:
The Mandæans (lit. Gnostics—mandā = gnōsis) of the lower Euphrates are the only known surviving community of the ancient Gnosis. That they have survived to our own day is a remarkable testimony to the strength of their convictions and of loyalty to a tradition which they claim to go back to pre-Christian days, The documents call them Nāzōræans. The Arabs generally refer to them as Sūbbā's or Baptists, while the first Portuguese Jesuit missionaries of the Inquisition erroneously introduced them to Europe in the early part of the 17th century as the 'Christians of St. John.' But Christians they certainly are not; on the contrary they have ever been strenuously opposed to Christianity, though they may have sometimes so camouflaged themselves to avoid Moslim persecution in the first place and the Inquisitional methods of the missionaries in the second.
The Mandæan religious literature (for of secular literature there is none) supplies us with the richest direct sources of any phase of ancient Gnosticism which we possess; these documents are also all the more valuable because they are purely Oriental without any Hellenistic immixture. Indeed our only other considerable direct sources, that is sources not contaminated or rendered suspect by transmission through hostile hands, are the Trismegistic literature, the Coptic Gnostic documents and the recent Manichæan finds in Tūrfān. The Mandæan language is little used by the faithful except for religious purposes. The M. communities in general have for long used Arabic as their common speech, though one or more groups speak Persian. Mandæan is a South Babylonian dialect of Aramæan, its nearest cognate being the Northern Babylonian as in the Babylonian Talmūd. Their graceful script is peculiar to the Mandæans; the vowels are in full lettering and are not indicated by points or other diacritical marks.
Their literature was once far more extensive; for what we possess is manifestly in the form of extracts collected from manifold more ancient sources, which are no longer extant.
The chief existing documents are as follows:
1. The Sidrā Rabbā (Great Book) or Genzā p. 31 (Treasury), which is divided into Right and Left pages, for the living and the deceased respectively, it is said, but I am told that in some copies the alternate pages are reversed and in some ceremonies read simultaneously by two readers facing each other. It consists of sixty-four pieces or tractates,—theological, cosmological, mythological, ethical and historical. This collection is indubitably prior to the Mohammedan conquest (cir. 651 A.D.), and its sources are of course far more ancient.
2. The Sidrā d'Yahyā (Book of John), also called Drāshē d'Malkē (Discourses of the [Celestial] Kings). A considerable number of its pieces, which can be listed under thirty-seven headings, deal with the life and teachings of John the Baptizer. Yahyā is the Arabic form of John, the Mandæan Yōhānā, Heb. Yoḥanan; the two forms, Arabic and Mandæan, alternate and show that the collection was made, or more probably redacted, after the Moslim conquest.
3. The Qolastā (Quintessence or Selections called also the Book of Souls)—Liturgies for the Baptismal Ceremony, the Service for the Departed (called the 'Ascent'—Masseqtā and for the Marriage Ritual. These hymns and prayers are lofty, though most of them are presumably not so ancient as those in the Genzā.
4. The Dīvān containing the procedure for the expiation of certain ceremonial offences and sketches of the 'regions' through which the soul must pass in its ascent.
5. The Asfar Malwāshē (Book of the Zodiacal Constellations).
6. Certain inscriptions on earthen cups and also pre-Mohammedan lead tablets.
Now, this was all written back in 1924, so the claim that The Mandæan religious literature (for of secular literature there is none) supplies us with the richest direct sources of any phase of ancient Gnosticism which we possess... cannot be taken at face value, as I'm sure we are all aware of gnostic literature found some twenty/thirty years later in some earthen jars in a cave in the middle of effen nowhere.
Even so, this "Mandæan stream" goes back quite a ways and its roots reach all over the place. About halfway down section I, titled "John the Baptizer and Christian Origins", there's some good stuff on the fish/fisher symbolism and even further down, the question of who and how many of John's followers turned to Christ after his martyrdom (obviously the Mandaeans emphatically did not) is addressed.
All in the all, the work linked to above was both meaty and illuminating, not just from a gnostic view but historical as well. It's worth checking out, I promise. |
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