Mani’s Living Gospel: A New Approach to the Arabic and Classical New Persian Testimonia

Abstract

In order to reconstruct the contents of the most famous work of Mani, <em>Living Gospel</em> (written originally in Syriac), we have to use the Arabic and Classical New Persian texts containing accounts and even indirect quotations of this book. One of the most remarkable points in these accounts is that they clearly show that an important part of the <em>Living Gospel</em> contains the Manichaean “Myth of the Creation," the topic which is usually supposed to have no relation with Mani's <em>Gospel</em>. The Coptic Manichaean <em>Synaxeis</em> also supports the hypothesis that there were thematically some basic similarities between the <em>Living Gospel</em> and the <em>Ewangelyōnīg</em> hymns. According to the Arabic and Classical New Persian sources, some of the more important subject matters of Mani's <em>Gospel</em> were the Land of the Light and of the Darkness, the Mixture and process of the <em>liberatio</em> of the Aeons. These are some of the themes in Mani's <em>Gospel</em> that can also be seen in the <em>Ewangelyōnīg</em> hymns. In this article, some of the previous interpretations in this regard have been critically analyzed and challenged.