The Mandaean Book of John: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary.

• Author: Buckley, Jorunn J.

The Mandaean Book of John: Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary. Edited by CHARLES G. HÄBERL and JAMES F. MCGRATH. Berlin: WALTER DE GRUYTER, 2020. Pp. vii + 467. $218.99.

In part, the many years of work needed to create this hefty edition of The Mandaean Book of John (henceforth JB) was supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a grant from Rutgers State University Research Council. The contents are: prefatory remarks; an introduction by April D. DeConick; edition, translation (with Mandaic and English on facing pages); commentary; conclusions by Charles G. Häberl; bibliography; indices (in five sections, the last of which includes words and phrases in Akkadian, Middle Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and Mandaic). There are 1478 footnotes.

A compendium, the Mandaic text is translated into readable, modern English, which is an especially refreshing feature, as one recalls Mark Lidzbarski's 1915 stilted German translation and edition. It needs to be noted that Lidzbarski's division of the Mandaic text into thirty-seven tractates was his choice, not a feature of any of the original manuscripts he had at hand. Häberl and McGrath follow the sequence of the text, without the tractate division. The authors base their work on eleven manuscripts, three of which are partial. The consulted texts do not include the old lead volume of JB, which I saw and handled in Ahwaz, Iran in 1973, when the local priest took the heavy object from its white cotton bag. (Where the lead book, inscribed with a stylus, is now, remains uncertain.)

To read JB with understanding, it helps to be familiar with Mandaean technical terms, mythologies, rituals, central historical and other-worldly figures, cosmology, ethics, polemics, sense of humor, and, not least, the Mandaean love of word-plays, alliterations, and associations based on phonetics. A relevant example of the latter: even in fairly recent decades, back in the 1950s and 1960s, Iraqi Mandaean schoolchildren used a special technique when the schoolteacher, in front of the entire class, demanded to know whether the pupils were Sunni or Shi'i. As members of a suspect minority religion, and therefore belonging to neither of the two safe categories, Mandaean children pointed silently to their teeth (sing, shenna, in Arabic dialect).

In terms of the delicate question of Mandaeans qualifying as monotheists, Häberl and McGrath say that the religion is "not incompatible with...