John the Baptist

The gospels tell us that Jesus started his public career with a visit to the river Jordan to receive baptism by a certain John the Baptist. After the dip Jesus marched out of the waters, a changed man. But only after John’s imprisonment Jesus is said to have stepped forward and was beginning to do his thing in public. John’s companions apparently considered this as an intrusion into their own turf. From his prison the incarcerated John therefore sent messengers with a query whether Jesus was "he that should come, or do we look for another?" (Mt. 11:2-30). How come? Had John clean forgotten the exchange of courtesies at the Jordan, when he told Jesus: “I have need to be baptized by you, and you are coming to me?” or was there nothing to remember? Jesus sent a personal message, which also seems to point to frictions between the two sectarian leaders: “Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.”

Apparently it didn’t break the ice.

John the Baptist’s followers are still among us and the existence of the Mandaeans, as well as the tradition of their holy books - the Ginza and the Qolasta - can be traced back to the 2^nd century AD. in uninterrupted continuity according to the colophons of the copyists. All this time, they have remained fiercely independent and they reject Jesus as a false prophet, and with him Abraham, Moses and of course Mohammed. In their understanding God revealed himself to the first of man, Adam, and that’s the end of the story.

In 73 AD. the Romans got ready for the final assault on Masada, the sicarii’s last nest of resistance. Masada is now an icon for Israeli identity and hallowed ground where the army is swearing in the recruits. In the night before the final assault, the leader of the defenders, Eleazar ben Yair, delivered a moral boosting speech. He said: “From ancient times, our forefathers have corroborated the same doctrine [that] death returns our souls to liberty, and removes them into their own place of purity, where they are insensible to misery. Because when souls are tied down to a mortal body, they participate in its miseries, and really, to speak the truth, they are themselves dead, for the union of what is divine to what is mortal is disagreeable” (Josephus, Wars VII, 323 ff.).

Eleazar’s last address is surely a testimony for courage in face of the inevitable, but it has no resemblance with anything of what we know about Jewish orthodoxy. On the other hand a modern Mandaean would immediately recognize what this Eleazar was referring to.

Mandaeans believe in a supreme entity of undefined characteristics. An immediate emanation of this entity is the demiurge, under whose supervision the world is taking on a dual aspect of light and darkness, the difference of the sexes, left and right. Immaterial archetypes provide the metaphysical cookie-cutter to lick matter into shape, an idea borrowed from Plato. The human soul is a lost spark from the supreme God and lives as an exile who fell prisoner to the material world. Man is exposed to the influences of the stars, which are ruled by the “archons,” and stars are also places of detention in the thereafter. Guardian angels watch over the soul’s journey through life and lead it through the “mysteries” - the sacraments - that aid and purify the soul to ensure her rebirth in a spiritual form so that she may return to the source of origin. John the Baptist is venerated as the supreme teacher and personally I see no reason not to think of him as at least a forerunner of Gnosticism, a man who seemed to have rejected the culture and religion of his upbringing and “when he saw the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism,” liked to give them a hard time: “O generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

However unlike one of John’s contemporaries who could be seen telling off his own mother and who decreed that nobody could be his companion “who did not hate his father, and mother, and wife, and children,” (the strongest indicator perhaps for the Gnosticism of the tradition that has spawned the gospels) the Mandaeans place a high priority upon family life and procreation. Perhaps an other indicator for the Jewish roots of a tradition which had risen from a rejection of Judaism.

At present the events in Iraq have reduced the Mandaean community from over 60,000 to less than 7,000, most of them have fled the country, and there is violence by Islamic extremists against the people who still remain in the country; the women are attacked for not wearing a veil. In Iran the persecution has taken on a more subtle form. The Gozinesh laws from 1985 make the access to employment and education a subject of rigorous ideological screening and discriminate against religious and ethnic groups that are not officially recognized or refuse devotion to the tenets of Islam.