Theodore Bar Konay's Account of Mandaean Origins

chapter 2 Theodore Bar Konay’s Account of Mandaean Origins (circa 792)

While Muslim scholars relate little of substance about the Mandaeans until well into the ʿAbbāsid period, their existence had long vexed bishops and teachers of the Church of the East, the chief Christian church organization earlier under Sasanid rule, the heartland of which was especially the fertile territory along the length of the Tigris and its tributaries and canals. The account of the Mandaeans known best today, and the only surviving outsider’s account of their origins, was preserved by an author in the same century as Ruʾba, but in Syriac. Theodore bar Konay was a bishop of the Church of the East at Kaškar, in his time one of the three major cities near the edge of the Marshes of southern Iraq (the other two being the Arab cantonment cities Baṣra and Kūfa, on the southern and western sides of the Marshes, respectively). The town had long been the seat of an important bishopric in Sasanian times; its importance grew greatly when al-Ḥaǧǧāǧ, the governor of Iraq, founded Wāsiṭ (founded circa 702–703), as an Arab Muslim city and garrison of Syrian soldiers, across theTigris from Kaškar, on the northeast side of the Marshes. Around 792, Bar Konay wrote his Bookof theScholion, an extensive explanation of the beliefs of the Church of the East in the form of a running commentary on the Old and New Testaments followed by a defense of East-Syrian Christianity against Islam and a heresiographical supplement.1 Preserved in this last section, memrā 11 of the book, is the earliest extant outsider’s description of the Mandaean religion as such. A section on the Mandaeans, along with a few other related groups, is inserted into his big chapter on heresies, otherwise based largely (at some removes) on the Panarion of Epiphanius (wr. 370s). D. Kruisheer has noted that the section on Mandaeism and related sects has its own literary unity, a clear beginning and end.2 It appears therefore that this section is borrowed or adapted from an unknown, lost, earlier source available to Bar Konay. That source was familiar with the reigns of individual Sasanids and so probably wrote under that dynasty’s rule, perhaps in the late sixth or early seventh century. Certainly it was a work by an earlier East-Syrian churchman.

1 Griffith 2008: 43–44 and 81–82. 2 Kruisheer 1993: 152.

For the convenience of the reader, I present a translation of the whole account in Appendix 1 at the end of this work. The Mandaeans come about, in Bar Konay’s account, as a derivative move- ment, arising only after another, related group called the Kentaeans, who in turn emerge from a Babylonian pagan background. It is the Kentaeans, in fact, who receive more attention in this passage than the Mandaeans. According to Bar Konay, the Kentaean (kntyʾ) sect began during the reign of the Sasanid Peroz (457–484). That king’s persecutions of idolaters are supposed to have been a factor in the career of Baṭṭay, Bar Konay’s Kentaean heresiarch.3 Report- edly, the Kentaeans claimed that their teaching came from Abel (Hābel). Bar

3 Yazdgird ii and his son Peroz both persecuted non-Zoroastrian groups; see MacDonough (2006) on the former king’s persecutions. As for Peroz, two apparently independent tenth- century sources suggest that it was not only idolaters with whom this king conflicted, but also Jews of the sort claimed as antecedents by medieval Rabbanites. Šarrirā Gaʾon, the head of the yeshiva of Pembudita (in the tenth century located in Baġdād), in his Iggartā, or epis- tle, on the history of the Jewish schools in Babylonia (generally known as the “Iggeret of Rav Sherira Gaon”), reports punishments leveled by Peroz against Jewish leaders in the 460s and 470s, following the persecution of Jews by his father Yazdgird ii in the 450s. Šarrirā mentions the arrest of specifically named rabbis and the son of the Jewish Exilarch (head of the Jewish community in Iraq) in 468/9, and seven years later the execution of some of these along with the Exilarch himself. He also says that “in the year 785 (Seleucid = 474–475ce), all the Baby- lonian synagogues were closed and the children of the Jews were seized by the Magi,”w-bšnt 785ʾtsrw kl by knštʾ d-bbl w-ʾtnqyṭw bny yhwdʾy l-ʾmgwšy (Rabinowich 1988: 118). The second of the two reports is similar, occurring in the Kitāb Sinī mulūk al-arḍ wa-l-anbiyāʾ (bāb 1, faṣl 4) of Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī (wr. 961), who says of Peroz that he “ordered the killing of half the Jews of Iṣfahān and the submission of their children in the House of Fire of Srōš-Ādurān, of the village of Ḥrwʾn, as slaves, because they skinned the backs of two of the Herbads and then tied them together and treated them to hide-tanning,”wa-amara bi-qatli niṣfi Yahūdi Iṣfahāna wa-islāmi ṣibyānihim fī bayti nāri Surūš-Ādurāna min qaryati Ḥrwʾn ʿabīdan ḥayṯu salaḫū ẓuhūra raǧu- layni mina l-harābiḏati ṯumma alṣaqū aḥadahumā bi-l-āḫari wa-stamaʿlūhumā bi-d-dibāġa. See also Gafni (2006: 800) (who seems to prefer Šarrirā’s to Ḥamza’s account when he para- phrases the enslavement of Jewish children as “forced conversion”); the uncritical account of Widengren (1961: 143); and Neusner (1983: 915–916), who hypothesizes Jewish messianism as the background to Persian suppression. It is, in any case, important to note that other religious groups besides idolaters were affected under Peroz’ reign. And as Wood (2012: 70) notes, this was also an era during which the nascent Church of the East was persecuted, and that “there were no central synods between the years 424 and 485.” We should expect that religious entrepreneurs advocating new movements like those of the Kentaeans and Mandaeans would find followers during a period of decentralization and suppression of existing institu- tions among the religious organizations of Iraqi Aramaeans. I develop this idea in Chapter 11, below.