The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics.

• Author: Smith, II, Carl B.
• Position: Book Review

The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics. By EDMONDO LUPIERI. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WM. B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING Co., 2002. Pp. xix + 273, illus. $25.

First published in Italian in 1993, this volume is part of a larger series, Italian Texts and Studies on Religion and Society. The series is edited by the author of the present work and makes available to the wider academic community English translations of the writings of Italian scholars in religious studies. Lupieri, Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Udine, has published widely on subjects related to the Mandaeans, the sole remaining Gnostic community, as well as Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism in the early Christian centuries.

The present text is a fine introduction to Mandaean history and culture and is divided into two main parts. The first is an overview and analysis of Mandaean rituals, history, and literature, and the second provides a topical anthology of selected sacred texts. Between the two sections is a collection of ten illustrations which include original drawings and photographs. The volume provides a glossary to help readers negotiate the many Mandaean terms and proper names found in the text, a general index, an annotated review of primary literature, and a brief bibliography (pp. 53-60).

Lupieri's historical reconstruction of the Mandaeans' past is meticulous. The complexity is caused by conflicting legends, the symbolic nature of Mandaean chronography, the late date and complex transmission history of many crucial manuscripts, prior reconstructions of mixed historical value and accuracy (as well as outright inaccuracy), and the fact that the Mandaeans were a "defeated" people. With regard to the latter, the author sympathetically and reasonably concludes: "In the stories of the defeated, this has to lead us to forgive those aspects of exaggerated, exalted self-esteem, of a somewhat arrogant vainglory, as well as the distortion of events, which we can learn about from different sources. They are defense mechanisms, necessary for the preservation of a cultural identity" (p. 127).

Lupieri argues persuasively against the theory of a Western or Palestinian origin of Mandaeanism, favoring an origin in Mesopotamia, likely in the late second or early third century A.D. In this he counters the historical reconstructions of several prior and contemporary Mandaean scholars, including Reitzenstein, Lidsbarski, Bultmann, Drower, Macuch, and Rudolph. For Lupieri, the...