This book provides an anthology of sources highlighting Manichaeism, a gnostic religion which flourished largely clandestinely in the Near East, Central Asia, and China until the beginning of the seventeenth century. It translates and discusses the importance of a number of Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew testimonies for a proper understanding of the cultural importance of what most scholars consider to be the first 'world religion.' Many of these sources are translated here into English for the first time.

A work entitled the ""Book of Giants"" figures in every list of the Manichaean canon preserved from antiquity. Both the nature of this work and the intellectual baggage of the third-century Persian prophet to whom it is ascribed remained unknown to scholars until 1943, when fragments of several Middle Iranian versions of the Book of Giants were published by W. B. Henning. Twenty-eight years later, J. T. Milik discovered several copies of a fragmentary Aramaic work at Qumran which is unquestionably the precursor of the later Manichaean recension. One other important work, Mani's autobiography, the so-called Cologne Mani Codex, was brought to scholarly attention in 1970 with evidence that Mani spent his youth among the Elchasaites, a Judeo-Christian sect that observed the Sabbath, strict dietary laws, and rigorous purification practices. Although leading Orientalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have consistently stressed the Iranian component in Mani's thought, Reeves argues, in the light of evidence drawn from the above-mentioned discoveries and from a rich panorama of other textual sources, that the fundamental structure of Manichaean cosmogony is ultimately indebted to Jewish exegetical expansions of Genesis 6:1-4. Reeves begins with an examination of the ancient testimonies about the contents of Mani's Book of Giants. Then, using documents from Second Temple Judaism, classical Gnostic literature, Christian and Muslim heresiological reports, Syriac texts, and Manichaean writings, he provides a detailed analysis of both the Qumran and Manichaean rescensions of the work, demonstrating additional interdependencies and suggesting new narrative arrangements. He addresses a series of quotations from an unnamed Manichaean source found in a paschal homily of the sixth-century Monophysite patriarch Severus of Antioch and a narrative from Thoeodore bar Konai. Reeves demonstrates that the motifs of Jewish Enochic literature, in particular those of the story of the Watchers and Giants, form the skeletal structure of Mani's cosmological teachings, and that Chapters 1 to 11 of Genesis fertilized Near Eastern thought, even to the borders of India and China.

Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism provides an annotated anthology of primary sources highlighting Manichaeism, a dualist religion emerging in Mesopotamia in the third century and which spread rapidly throughout the Roman and Sasanian empires until it was violently suppressed by both polities. It nevertheless continued to flourish - largely clandestinely - in the Near East, Central Asia, and China until it finally disappeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This book translates and assesses the importance of a number of Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and even Hebrew language testimonies for a better understanding of the cultural importance of what many scholars characterize as the first 'world religion'.

The themes of this volume encompass the lifelong interests of one of the most eminent and learned Jewish scholars of our time: Qumran, Hellenism, Rabbinics and chronography. The contributors, leading scholars in these fields, have produced what is a benchmark of modern scholarship of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman period.>

The Bible and the Qur'an share a common discourse based on stories and legends associated with certain paradigmatic characters like Noah, Abraham, and Moses. Yet most biblical scholars are unfamiliar with the rich contents of Islamicate scriptural lore. The nine essays in the present volume, all from scholars who center their research on the intersections of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literary traditions, explore various aspects of the textual and behavioral connections discernible among these three major religious communities. The book will appeal to students and scholars of Bible and biblical lore, particularly in diverse exegetical contexts; Biblicists interested in the reception history of Bible within the Islamicate cultural sphere; specialists in ancient and medieval Jewish literary history and folklore; scholars of eastern Christian history and literature; Islamicists with an interest in the Jewish and/or Christian textual and exegetical elements visible in early and medieval Islam. "The Qur'an and the Bible: Some Modern Studies of Their Relationship. Reuven Firestone "A Prolegomenon to the Relation of the Qur'an and the Bible. Vernon K. Robbins and Gordon D. Newby "Some Explorations of the Intertwining of Bible and Qur'an, John C. Reeves "Israel and the Torah of Muhammad, Brannon M. Wheeler "On the Early Life of Abraham: Biblical and Qur'anic Intertextuality and the Anticipation of Muhammad, Brain M. Hauglid "The Prediction and Prefiguration of Muhammad, Jane Dammer McAuliff "The Gospel, the Qur'an, and the Presentation of Jesus in al-Ya'qubl's Ta'rikh, Sidney H. Griffith "Abraham's Test: Islamic Male Circumcision as Anti/Ante-Covenantal Practice, Kathryn Kueny"De-Paganizing Death: Aspects of Mourning in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Islam, Fred Astren