Scholars of both the Bible and Rabbinic literature will be familiar with discussions of the Eighteen Benedictions (Shemoneh Esreh) and the debates about the history and original form of the “birkat ha-minim”, the “blessing (i.e. cursing) of the heretics”. Many New Testament scholars have intersected with this subject as it has been discussed in connection with the setting of the Fourth Gospel.
Eventually, Christianity did indeed become a significant enough factor for Judaism to need to interact with it in a major way. But just how much of a problem was Jewish Christianity in the first few centuries? In fact, the number of specifically anti-Christian polemical passages in early Rabbinic literature is relatively small.
I’ve argued in an article I wrote about “two powers heresy” that the original focus of this designation was Gnosticism, and only later it came to be applied to Christian beliefs. It may well be that Gnosticism was a more serious issue for Judaism in the earliest period.
If so, and if as seems likely the Mandaeans originated as a Jewish Gnostic sect, then could the condemnation of the heretics in some forms of the Eighteen Benedictions have singled them out? Could the (mostly Gentile) Christians who assumed they were important enough to be singled out for cursing in the synagogues have had an exaggerated sense of their importance to Jews?
The rabbis have always loved puns. Perhaps it is time to seriously consider whether the curse on the “minim” and “nosrim” may not have been aimed at the “mandaiia” (Gnostics/Mandaeans) and “nasuraiia” (Gnostics/Nasoreans), two key self-designations of the Mandaeans.
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