The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People.

• Author: Yamauchi, Edwin M.
• Position: Book Review

The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People. By JORUNN JACOBSEN BUCKLEY. Pp. v + 200. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. $45.

Jorunn J. Buckley has become the foremost scholar of the Mandaeans, the sole surviving Gnostic community. Like the great British Mandaean scholar, Lady E. S. Drower, she has not only studied their ancient texts, but has befriended them both in Iraq and Iran, and in the United States, even serving as an advocate for Mandaeans seeking asylum here (p. xi). She was the moving force in organizing the first-ever conference on the Mandaeans, held at Harvard University in June, 1999, which featured the attendance of many Mandaeans and the enactment of their baptisms in the Charles River.

Buckley gives a helpful overview of Mandaean scholarship (pp. 16-17), noting the unique contributions of Lady Drower (1879-1972), who bought fifty-some Mandaic manuscripts for the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and who translated many of them between 1953 and 1963.

Buckley's own special concentration has been the study of the colophons of manuscripts, which has led her to conclude that the scribe who copied the Left Ginza may date to as early as 200 A.D. (p. 4), and to uncover the names of several female scribes (p. 159). These colophons also demonstrate the antiquity of ritual commentaries (p. 15) and provide some unsuspected information for early Islamic history.

Buckley expertly expounds Mandaean beliefs and practices. The Mandaeans believe in a three-tiered world, a heavenly Lightworld, a middle earthly world, and a gloomy underworld. The evil Ruha "Spirit," who is the mistress of the detested Jewish God Adonai, produced the twelve zodiac spirits and the five planets. There are two aspects to Adam, Adam Kasia, the hidden Adam who is a Light-world being, and Adam Pagra, the bodily Adam. The transcendent god, The First Life, sends three [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or envoys, Hibil, Sitil, and Anos so that Mandaeans can ascend to the Lightworld. Another prominent envoy is Manda d-Hiia "Knowledge of Life."

When the Portuguese first discovered the Mandaeans in the sixteenth century they mistakenly called them "Christians of St. John" because they venerated John the Baptist. In a work composed in the Islamic era, known from the German translation by Mark Lidzbarski, Das Johannesbuch, Jesus is denigrated (pp. 13, 150-51), whereas his mother Miriai is honored as a true Mandaean (chap. 5).

Buckley gives brief but helpful expositions of...