Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony

chapter 33 Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony

Review of John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony. Studies in the ‘Book of Giants’ Traditions, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press 1992, XII + 260 pp.*

As early as 1734, the famous Huguenot Isaac de Beausobre suggested that Mani’s Book of Giants could have been influenced by Jewish Enochic literature (His- toire critique de Manichée et du Manichéisme, I–II, Amsterdam 1734–1739 [repr. Leipzig 1970], I, 429). Although some later scholars (e.g. Ferdinand Christian Baur in his still valuable 1831-study Das manichäische Religionssystem nach den Quellen neu untersucht und entwickelt) also called attention to supposed fea- tures of this enigmatic Bookof Giants that has a prominent place in nearly every list of the Manichaean canon preserved from antiquity, it took two centuries until De Beausobre’s insights could be corroborated. In 1934 W.B. Henning published his study ‘Ein manichäisches Henochbuch’ (SPAW 5, 27–35), followed by his ‘Neue Materialien zur Geschichte des Manichäismus’ (ZDMG 90, 1936, 1– 18) and his in this context most important ‘The Book of the Giants’ (BSOAS 11, 1943, 52–74). In these articles, fragments of several Middle Iranian versions of Mani’s Book of Giants discovered at Turfan in Central Asia since the beginning of this century were collated and published. On the basis of these and some other Manichaean texts (e.g. the Coptic texts from Medinet Madi), Henning could suggest that the Book of Giants was a free literary creation of Mani based upon a series of extrabiblical legends gathered around the events summarized in Genesis 6:1–4. More precisely, he claimed that Mani’s immediate source for his reworking of these narratives was apparently an Aramaic version of Enoch, the well-known Jewish pseudepigraphical work of the Second Temple period which enjoyed an extensive circulation within both Jewish and Christian cir- cles. With Henning’s impressive investigations both the zenith and the limit of the source criticism of Mani’s canonical work seemed to have been reached. In 1971, however, J.T. Milik surprised the scholarly world with his reports of the Aramaic fragments of 1Enoch he had discovered among the Qumran texts: frag-

* First published in Vigiliae Christianae. A Review of Early Christian Life and Language 48 (1994) 92–94, slightly revised.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004417595_034 jewish lore in manichaean cosmogony 479 ments, moreover, which turned out to bear close resemblances to the remains of Mani’s Book of Giants (‘Turfan et Qumran. Livre des Géants juif et mani- chéen’,TraditionundGlaube [FS K.G. Kuhn], Göttingen 1971, 117–127; ‘Problèmes de la littérature hénochique à la lumière des fragments araméens de Qum- ran’, HTR 64, 1971, 333–378). In subsequent publications Milik could refine his observations that this Jewish apocryphon from Qumran seems to be the literary ancestor of Mani’s Book of Giants. And, since 1970, the year of the preliminary report on the Cologne Mani Codex by A. Henrichs and L. Koenen, it has been established that an ‘Apocalypse of Enoch’ was indeed known by the Jewish- Christian sectarians in Babylonia amongst whom Mani spent his formative years (cf. CMC 58,6–60,12). All these and several other facts prompted John C. Reeves to write his Jew- ish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony. This study, a ‘thorough revision’ of the author’s 1989-dissertation submitted to Hebrew Union College—Jewish Insti- tute of Religion, is without a doubt a stimulating, profound and important book. After a short introduction, the author examines in his first chapter the ancient testimonies about the contents of Mani’s Book of Giants and also accu- rately presents modern opinions concerning the nature of this work. Then, in his second and most extensive chapter entitled ‘The Qumran Fragments of the Book of Giants’ (51–164), he analyzes the contents of both the Qum- ran and Manichaean fragments. Actually, this chapter is the core of the book and in his emphasis upon the continuity of motifs within the two recensions of the Book of Giants Reeves displays an impressive knowledge of, inter alia, many Jewish documents of the Second Temple period, classical Gnostic literature, Christian and Muslim heresiological reports, Syriac texts and, not least, the multilingual Manichaean texts from East and West. Chapter 3 addresses a series of quotations from an unnamed Manichaean source found in a paschal homily of the sixth-century Monophysite patriarch Severus of Antioch, quotations which in the author’s view do not stem from Mani’s Book of Giants. In Chapter 4 Reeves outlines that the fundamental structure of Manichaean cosmogony is ultimately indebted to Jewish exegetical expansions of Genesis 6:1–4 as found in e.g. 1Enoch 6–11. In his fifth chapter he then summarizes his most important findings. Considering and reconsidering the vast amount of facts and texts provided by the author, one is indeed led to the conclusion that heterodox Jewish thought was a powerful stimulus in the formulation of Mani’s cosmogonic teachings. In the light of the CMC it even becomes highly probably that Mani encountered an Enochic Book of Giants of some sort during his sojourn among the Jewish-Christian sect of his youth and early manhood. The question of whether there always is such a direct nexus between the Qumran and Turfan