Manichaean Books: Literary Texts and Textual Community

Abstract

The above citation is taken from a letter fragment discovered in House 3, alongside the other documentary papyri of the Pamour family. It is clearly a very different type of letter than those of Pamour III, Pekysis, or even Makarios, however, and should probably be assigned to one of Mani’s ‘canonical’ letters, deriving from a small collection of his Epistles of which a few codex leafs have been discovered in House 1–3. It demonstrates the importance of the written word, and not least of the books he produced, to Mani’s sense of mission and self-conception. Yet, the importance of Manichean texts, even those of Mani, to his lay followers has been a matter of some controversy among scholars. The present chapter examines the remains of the Epistles, as well as other Manichaean literary texts from House 1–3, in order to illuminate this question and integrate them into the analysis of religious practice and identity at Kellis. The investigation is conducted in two steps. First, we continue the discussion from Chapter 5 concerning the ‘Manichaeanness’ of lay identity at Kellis, now looking at what the literary papyri tell us. It was argued in that chapter that the documentary letters contain cues that indicate the authors’ participation in a consciously Manichaean community. Yet it was also seen that, apart from some notable exceptions, most of these cues do not draw on specifically Manichaean myths or concepts, which has been taken to imply an absence of a distinctive ‘Manichaeanness’ among the laity. Scholars have taken the literary texts to point in the same direction. It has been proposed (although not argued in extensio) that the literary finds indicate that Manichaean ideas were of little interest to or even unknown to the people of House 1–3, supporting a depiction of the laity as adhering to a ‘superior Christianity’ rather than what is taken to be ‘Manichaeism proper’. The current chapter examines these texts in order to consider the presence or absence of Manichaean ideas more closely.