Avenues For Research On The Mandaeans

I’m reading and collecting resources, gearing up to focus on the Mandaean language and Mandaean texts over the summer. I may even have a student who will do some independent research on the same topic over the summer. At present I’m reading Edmondo Lupieri’s The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics, which is a nice brief introduction to their history and texts. When one reads about details like the writing of three sacred names in the sand, or the importance of dawn on the third day, when the unmarked tomb of a deceased Mandaean is opened so that the soul can leave the body and begin its voyage, it is easy to get excited! Yet the danger of parallelomania is real, as is the potential to reverse the most plausible direction of influence. Even the question of whether the group has its origins in Palestine is far from certain. Nevertheless, when one considers their exclusive use of living (= flowing) water, which they call iardna (most likely related to Jordan), and the term nasuraiia (meaning those possessing knowledge, i.e. “Gnostics”), which is so similar to the term “Nazorean” found in early Christian texts, where it seems to represent a well-defined pre-existing group, it is (again) easy to get excited. But there are far more intriguing questions than clear answers.

One interesting line of inquiry would be to compare the details of the Mandaean manda, a form of hut-temple, with the “cave of John the Baptist“. There is a whole site devoted to it, including a photo gallery of the cave, and some will be familiar with it from James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty. It would also be interesting to do DNA testing on the Mandaeans to see whether that can shed light on their relation to other peoples in the Middle East.

Before signing off, let me also draw attention to an interesting discussion on (and between) Ancient Hebrew Poetry and Dr. Jim West about the role of archaeology in dating texts, which will also be of interest to many readers.