The Elchasaites
The fate of the Elchasaites in
recent scholarship has been prodigious. This is an amazing accomplishment, for
the sources for this movement are scanty and deeply beset with historical
problems. The academic study of Elchasai, his book and the movement named after
him was first attempted systematically by W. Brandt, professor of the history
of religions in Amsterdam, whose main reputation lies in the field of Mandaean
studies. He boldly presented Elchasai as the founder of a new religion, which
he identified as a reform movement within Judaism. Although his views were
contested immediately upon their publication, the fact that no systematic study
of Elchasai was undertaken for seventy years ensured Brandt’s views a lingering
influence for a very long period.
A watershed in academic opinion
about the movement was the publication of the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC), a
miniature parchment codex from Egypt, containing a Greek version of a
Manichaean text on the early history of Manichaeism, in which a few references
to Alchasaios as the ‘leader’ or ‘founder’ of the Law of Mani’s baptists were
found. Since this accorded well with information that had long been known from
the Fihrist of al-Nadīm and appeared to be confirmed by the appearance of the
name of Elchasai (written ’lxs’) in a Parthian Manichaean fragment (without,
however, any recognizable context), a renewed interest in the Elchasaite
movement naturally emerged. This led to the almost simultaneous publication of
two monographs devoted to the subject, with opposing conclusions. In 1984,
Luigi Cirillo, a noted specialist in Manichaean studies, attempted to squeeze
as much information from the sources as he could, chiefly by skilfully
combining the disparate sources and framing them in a harmonic historical
narrative. In 1985, Gerard P. Luttikhuizen published the revised version of his
1984 Groningen dissertation, in which he also scrutinized all the available
sources, but warned strongly against combining them into a single history. To
support this caution, he presented a clear-cut source-critical evaluation of
the main sources (chiefly Hippolytus and Epiphanius), pointing at numerous
discrepancies and manifestly unreliable elements, but he added to this an
unfortunate observation that is unlikely to carry conviction. This was that the
variety in spelling-forms of the name of Elchasai (reported as Alchasaios,
Elchasaios, Elxai and numerous other forms) should not automatically be
interpreted as referring to the same (historical) person. If the point is the
historicity of the person, there is no doubt that he is right: the sources are
excruciatingly vague about his identity, but there can be no uncertainty that
all these names refer to the same ‘authority’ invoked.
Responses to Luttikhuizen’s work,
though generally commending it for its clarity and the fullness of its
treatment of the sources, took on various shapes. Almost immediately, Reinhold
Merkelbach attempted to discredit the main points Luttikhuizen made by simply restating
everything Luttikhuizen had questioned, that is, by again harmonizing
manifestly unrelated traditions. Other scholars apparently preferred to simply
ignore the very real problems Luttikhuizen had noticed, reporting
magisterially, for example, that ‘[c]ontroversies over the existence of
Elchasaios […] have been relegated to the sidelines in Manichaean studies’,
chiefly because of new materials that have emerged from Egypt (but without any
justification of their relevance for this particular question). Thus, the
identification of the baptist community in which Mani grew up with the
Elchasaites of early Christian heresiography slowly came to be accepted as fact
by many, which shows itself frequently in positive statements of the fact that
Mani grew up in an ‘Elchasaite community’.
It is important to stress here
that no such claim can be found in any Manichaean source. There are, in fact,
no primary sources from any ‘Elchasaite community’ and it is extremely unlikely
that a term such as ‘Elchasaite’ was ever used as a term of self-designation.
All we have are reports on purported Elchasaite communities and even this is
far from certain with regard to the CMC. There, the community is referred to
generally as ‘the Law’ (‘our Law’, ‘their Law’ etc.) and as the ‘religion
(dogma) of the Baptists’, individual members are referred to as ‘a baptist’ and
stray indications are given of the hierarchical structure of the community. The
information provided by al-Nadīm in his Fihrist is similar and presumably goes
back to (a version of) the same text; he mentions the sect of al-mughtasilah,
‘they who wash themselves’, i.e. the CMC’s ‘baptists’. In both traditions (CMC
and al-Nadīm), a leader (Greek archēgos, Arabic raʾīs) is mentioned, who can
certainly be identified with Elchasai, but it is unclear what the term here
translated as ‘leader’ really means. All this shows sufficiently that the
community to which Mani’s father belonged, and in which Mani grew up, was one
of the many baptist sects and that the name of Elchasai was known among them.
In most other respects, the information on the baptists’ beliefs is
frustratingly sparse, as opposed to information on their way of life.
The CMC gives information chiefly
on those aspects of the baptists’ Law, their ritual and religious duties and
their way of life, that were rejected by Mani and, as a consequence, in
Manichaeism. Two crucial subjects are highlighted: purity laws (‘baptism’) and
dietary rules, including (significantly) rules governing the way in which food
is procured. Thus, there is evidence for a communal vegetable garden, for the
felling of wood from a (communal?) grove and for the insistence by members of
the community that they bake their own bread in their own (again, most likely,
communal) baking oven. The first two aspects are highlighted because in
Manichaeism, agricultural work (the picking of vegetables, cutting wood) was
forbidden for the Elect (who are supposed to receive their food from the Hearers).
From the text, it emerges that the baptists were vegetarians, who also rejected
a range of (unspecified) vegetables and fruits as forbidden by their Law. The
only foodstuff that is explicitly named as being forbidden is wheat for the
making of bread. The question of ovens seems to be different: in the CMC, the
notion that bread must be baked in a special oven is flatly rejected. How this
ties in with Manichaean practice is unclear, but it is likely that it is to be
connected with the other subject of interest for the CMC: the purity laws. Like
the alimentary rules, the purity laws are chiefly referred to in vague terms.
The only thing that is clear is the practice of baptism, both the repeated
washing of the body in running water and the washing of all vegetables. In
Manichaeism, these washing rituals were rejected as pointless, since true
cleansing could only be brought about by knowledge.
A careful sifting of the evidence
pertaining to specifically Jewish elements in the description of the baptist
community has shown that there is almost nothing in the CMC to substantiate the
claim that the movement was a Jewish-Christian one; therefore, this claim rests
entirely upon the evidence presented by Epiphanius, who traces the influence of
Elchasai in a number of (Jewish-)Christian movements (chiefly the Ebionites),
but remains wholly silent on this influence in his (very long) discussion of
Manichaeism. The Christian background of the community, by contrast, is
explicit: apart from a probable reference to ‘baptism’ as a ritual of
initiation (as opposed to the daily ablutions), there is the clear reference to
the words of the ‘Saviour’ (sōtēr) in a discussion of the eating of (‘Greek’)
bread, followed by allusions to the Last Supper traditions and almost verbatim
quotes from Matthew and Luke. It is thus evident that the Saviour is Jesus, and
that the baptists are represented as Christians. (Albert de Jong, “A Quodam
Persa Exstiterunt: Re-Orienting Manichaean Origins,” in Empsychoi Logoi:
Religious Innovations in Antiquity—Studies in Honour of Pieter Willem van der
Horst, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Albert De Jong, and Magda Misset-Van De Weg
[Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 73; Leiden: Brill, 2008], 83-87)
