This book explores the shifting discourses of prophethood and prophecy in the late antique Near East. It rejects the “Cessation of Prophecy” metanarrative that frames prophecy as perpetually in decline, and charts instead a novel trajectory for understanding prophethood and prophecy as discourse. It does so by working through a number of texts from the late antique Near East, including Manichaean literature, the classical rabbinic corpus, early Jewish mystical literature, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and Neoplatonic literature. It argues that we should read these communities’ developing notions of prophethood and revelation alongside and against one another, on the one hand, and within broader developments in the late antique Near East, on the other.

This chapter shows the limits of political Manichaeism with reference to the career of Maximilien Robespierre and his fellow Jacobin leaders during the French Revolution. It criticizes the use of litmus tests and the search for purity in political life, it also engages with the rhetoric of key members of the Claremont Institute whose radical agenda shows disturbing similarities with that of the Jacobins.

This chapter analyzes the dangers posed by the politics of warfare by drawing on concrete examples from contemporary politics. It focuses on the controversial “Flight 93” essay by Michael J. Anton and shows how the rhetoric of warfare politics informed its theses and recommendations. It warns that this type of destructive politics, fueled by an apocalyptic rhetoric and Manichaean view, has become all too common in American society, and suggests a few way to fight against it.

Chapter 4 argues that Augustine reaches a theologically coherent articulation of the resurrection in Contra Faustum Manicheum. At this culminating moment, Augustine defends human flesh and its resurrection against the Manichaean repudiations of both. Despite the Manichaean claim to promote the spiritual resurrection, Augustine diagnoses their mental captivity within their ideological constructs of an alternative reality and of a phantom and deceptive Christ as deriving from their disbelief in Christ’s true flesh and fleshly resurrection. Augustine shows how the risen Jesus and Scripture testify to the enduring substance of the flesh in its resurrection, whereby God vindicates his creation and accomplishes our salvation. Augustine progresses to a more sophisticated reading of key scriptural verses by distinguishing between the flesh’s substantial constitution and its qualitative conditions of corruption and incorruption. Moreover, in elevating believers’ hope and by transfiguring their sacraments, Christ’s fleshly resurrection has advanced them towards the kingdom of God.

The most famous subject on which Bayle has been claimed to be either a fideist or an atheist is his discussion of the problem of evil in the ‘Manichean’ articles of the Dictionnaire and in subsequent writings. This chapter contextualises those writings so as to outline Bayle’s sources, and to show that he was engaging in a tripartite polemic about the theological doctrine of predestination. From Gassendi, Bernier, and others Bayle had learnt to argue that the problem of evil had no full solution: a purely rational (pagan) philosophy led to a deterministic fatalism. Gassendi, Bernier and others had used this point to insist on the necessity of adopting a Molinist doctrine of free will. Bayle argued the opposite: while it was indeed impossible to reconcile predestination and free will, history had shown that this did not lead to moral laxness. At the same time, the predestinarian position was more rational than the Molinist one, since it best accorded with the idea of unitary, omnipotent deity (which all sides agreed was rational). It is shown that Bayle adopted this argument from several Reformed theologians with whose writings he was well familiar: his teachers Louis Tronchin and Francis Turretin, and above all Jacques Abbadie and his then-friend Pierre Jurieu. But for Bayle this conclusion also had a political pay-off that put him at odds with Jurieu: that the difficulties of theological doctrine should lead to mutual toleration of differing opinions, rather than to a destabilising odium theologicum.

While Manichaeism and Existentialism would seem to be two very different topics, they are intricately connected in Mailer’s work. Though as a young man Mailer maintained atheistic beliefs, his ideas shifted in the mid-1950s, and his evolving theory of existentialism became intricately tied to his developing spiritual ideology, which by the 1960s was shaping most of his writing. While he borrowed ideas from famed existential theorists like Kierkegaard and Sartre, Mailer formulated his own unique brand of existentialism, one that included the possibility of a God. The crux of existentialism in Mailer’s mind, as this chapter explains, was the ability to face down the unknown with courage, which in turn meant confronting the Manichaean idea that an imperfect God was constantly at war with the Devil.

The ascendancy of the Mazdayasnian priesthood at the court of the Persian king of kings led ultimately to Mani’s trial, imprisonment and death at Gondeshapur under King Bahram I. This was commemorated by the community as his crucifixion and compared to the sufferings of all previous righteous messengers of God. The inter-religious conflict and the dramatic events of Mani’s last days and martyrdom were uniquely significant for the development of religion in Sasanian Iran. This chapter examines the various available sources, and questions the factual and counter-factual memory of the Apostle preserved into the medieval and modern world.

The Foreword by Professor Jason BeDuhn (Professor of Religious Studies, Northern Arizona University) offers an overview of this book’s critical historiography of the life of Mani, based in part on scepticism regarding the previously known sources, and in part on newly available sources. In introducing this book’s approach, BeDuhn follows various depictions of Mani the 'Apostle of Jesus Christ', the 'Doctor from Babylon', the 'Illuminator' and the 'Great Interpreter' within both the Manichaean tradition and in polemical accounts.

The complexity of its themes and concerns suggests that Augustine anticipated multiple audiences for the “Confessions,” including his critics within the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa and his former compatriots among the Manichaean community. For the former, it served as an apology, demonstrating the authenticity of his spiritual development away from his Manichaean past. For the latter, it served both as a polemic, cleverly criticizing Manichaeism in the guise of self-condemnation, and as a protreptic, offering himself as an exemplar of a path to conversion commensurable with those spiritual values he could appreciate in the Manichaeans, despite their heresy.

This chapter introduces the life of Mani as mediated through the history of Manichaean Studies. It follows the field’s genesis in the confessional polemics of the Reformation to the twentieth century where repeated new and unexpected manuscript discoveries have allowed for an advancement of the field through textual studies and philology. Texts that survive in a wide variety of languages, ranging from Latin and Greek through Coptic, Arabic, various Middle Iranian languages including Parthian and Sogdian, even Uighur and Chinese. This chapter reconsiders the many variations of the life of Mani as depicted in Manichaean, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical and polemical texts in the light of these new discoveries and the scholarship that preceded it.

The Christian tradition has regarded Mani as the arch-heretic and seducer of the faithful. His memory has been profoundly shaped by a fascinating counter-biography known as The Acts of Archelaus. This circulated from circa 340 CE and dominated Western knowledge until the reading of new sources from the Islamicate world in the nineteenth century and then the recovery of texts written by the Manichaean community in the twentieth century. The most remarkable of these has been the miniature Mani-Codex written in Greek that preserves an entirely different narrative of Mani’s youth and upbringing in a sectarian Jewish–Christian community of southern Mesopotamia. This chapter discusses and compares various pictures of Mani, including topics such as his origins, name and the religious experiences that he claimed.