Date of Composition
The earliest manuscript of the Book
of John is Codex Sabéen 10, which was copied by Zehrun bar ādam in Basra, on October 13, 1616 CE.
That copy was already in its thirtieth generation, according to Zehrun’s reckoning.
Lidzbarski notes that the hand of the first 16 pages (from the dedication to ln.
24 of chapter 4) and the late 4 pages (lns. 35-51 of chapter 76) is different
from that of the remainder of the manuscript, which he claims to be older.
Clearly, the original text on which these copies were based must have been much
composed much earlier, but how much earlier? Jorunn Buckley’s study of these colophons
(lists of scribes who had made previous copies of the manuscript suggest that
the transmission of the text can be traced back to the early Islamic period.
It may be that the discovery of the
Nag Hammadi texts led to the current relative neglect of Mandaean sources. When
one has manuscripts from the fourth century, manuscript copies which date from
the seventeenth century—more than a millennium more recent—may seem less
significant. Yet the Book of John is clearly much more ancient than our
oldest manuscripts. This would seemingly fit the claim that the Mandaeans
produced a book (as opposed to scrolls, the format of many other
Mandaean texts) around the time of the rise of Islam in the region, in order to
secure their status as a “people of the book.”
The contents of the Book of John cannot,
however, have been composed in a single time period. The text itself is
eclectic, bringing together materials from multiple sources. (Charles G. Häberl
and James F. McGrath, “Prefatory Remarks,” in The Mandaean Book of John:
Critical Edition, Translation, and commentary [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020], 4-5)
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