Eastern Sages in Roman Egypt: Manichaean Trajectories through a “Global” Late Antiquity

Scholars have long been curious about the transmission of religious and philosophical ideas across Eurasia in antiquity. It is well known that Mani named a number of important figures from “Eastern” religious traditions—such as Buddha and Zoroaster—among his list of prophetic forerunners in an effort to establish his own authority as a religious teacher. Recently published portions of the Dublin codex of the Manichaean Kephalaia provide an additional attestation of this prophetological paradigm in an even more amplified form, as it includes figures not previously attested. Textual analysis of this new testimonium invites us to reflect on how Mani and his early followers imagined their relationships to other religious traditions. It will be shown that, while Manichaean textual traditions were an important conduit of religious information across Eurasia, modern interpreters should be cautious about supposing that ancient readers of Manichaean texts made any meaningful association between the names of these prophetic forerunners and particular doctrines, which by then had been fully naturalized as “Manichaean” teachings.