Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus (review)

In recent years there has been a growing interest in anti-Manichaean literature, which was an important branch of the heresiological genre. One of these texts, the fourth-century Acts of Archelaus (AA) by the otherwise unknown Hegemonius, appeared in a new English translation by Vermes in 2001 which gave the impetus for Frontiers of Faith.

Frontiers of Faith consists of a preface and eleven chapters with bibliography, table of biblical references, and indexes. It is a very successful achievement which, as the first book-length study of AA, deserves to be used and discussed in future studies of Manichaeism. The first chapter, by the editors themselves, attempts to contextualize AA and discusses its provenance, structure, and sources in connection with an introduction to the subsequent chapters. A main characteristic of both this and the other contributions is to see Manichaeism in its roots and self-understanding as a “Christian” movement. I share this view, which is becoming increasingly common, though there is not yet a consensus within the scholarly community.

BeDuhn and Mirecki subscribe to the more convincing part of the “Bauer Thesis” that the original Christianity of eastern Syria was of a “heterodox” character. They also accept the late Drijvers’s additional argument that Addai, the legendary Christian missionary to Edessa, was a fictional imitation of the Manichaean Adda. This theory, however, now seems less convincing in the light of Addai’s appearance in the First Apocalypse of James. BeDuhn and Mirecki convincingly suggest that the “heterodox” character of eastern Syrian Christianity should be linked to the cultural and linguistic separateness of the region. I would add that since other parts of the Bauer Thesis seem less convincing—e.g., that Colin Roberts could show that the literary remains of early Egyptian Christianity were not predominantly “heterodox”—we should probably not follow Bauer in linking regional differences with the emergence of early “catholic”/“proto-orthodox” and “heterodox” diversities of Christianity in the rest of the Roman Empire, where early Christians used Greek as their medium. These diversities are better explained by assuming that house-churches and lack of well-organized offices in first-century Christianity stimulated the emergence of fractions and differences.

Coyle sharply characterizes the polemical character of AA, while Sala, by means of structuralism and narratology, challenges the scholarly tradition of assuming that a monolithic and somehow logically coherent entity lies behind the largely fragmentary Manichaean sources. This is a most welcome contribution, since too often there has been little attention to the diversity in Manichaeism. It seems, however, less persuasive when Pettipiece, in a study of competing ideas of kingship in AA, argues that a dichotomy exists between Manichaean ideas of the kingdom of Light as non-violent and Archelaus’s idea of Christ as a triumphant king. Pettipiece thinks that the Manichaean view is the older one, closer to the New Testament, and he assumes that the different ideas can be connected to diverging views about authority and response to suffering and persecution. Hegemonius’s arguments, however, seem so bound up with the polemical context that it is unsound to assume too much about his more complete views. It is a fact, moreover, that the Manichaeans also used military metaphors. Kaatz deals with the “two natures,” free will and scriptural evidence in AA.

Other contributions treat the sources of AA, the use of rituals in AA (Mirecki) and the Basilides fragment (Bennett). Gardner compares Mani’s Letter to Marcellus in AA with fragments of other Mani Letters and establishes convincingly that this Letter is either by Mani himself or is a close imitation of him; it may be at least partly authentic. On this basis BeDuhn attempts to find more remnants of the Letter in AA. This contribution is at the same time an interesting and careful study of Manichaean biblical interpretation. Elsewhere BeDuhn argues that the...