Along the lower rivers of Mesopotamia, in the marshes where the Tigris and the Euphrates come together before the sea, there has lived for many centuries a people who wash in flowing water as the center of their worship. They call themselves Mandaeans, from a word for knowledge. Their priests, and those initiated into the deeper teaching, they call Nasoraeans. They speak, or once spoke, a form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus and of John. They honor John who baptized as one of the great teachers of their faith. And they call every flowing river in which they baptize by one name: the Jordan.
A student who has read the rest of this room will understand why they have their own page. But the fellowship must begin with a caution, and we would rather begin with it than end with it.
A Living People
The Mandaeans are not a relic, a puzzle, or a lost tribe. They are a living people with their own scriptures, their own priesthood, their own calendar and feasts and prayers, and their own understanding of who they are, which is not ours to correct. They number perhaps a few tens of thousands. In our own time war and persecution have driven most of them from the rivers where their ancestors lived, and they now baptize in the rivers of Sweden and Australia and the Americas, wherever their families have been scattered.
The fellowship has no connection with them and claims none. Writers on the Essenes have sometimes treated the Mandaeans as a museum in which the ancient rites can still be watched. We do not want to do that. What follows is what they say of themselves, what scholars have debated about their origins, and why a fellowship that honors the Nazarenes cannot pass them by in silence. It is offered with respect, and with the knowledge that a people's faith is its own.
The Washing
At the heart of Mandaean worship is the masbuta, a baptism by full immersion in running water, given by a priest, received not once but again and again throughout a life, on Sundays and at the feasts and after any grave defilement. The water must be living, flowing from its source; still water is dead water and will not do. The baptized wear white. They are signed on the forehead, crowned with a wreath, and given the river's water to drink, and they come up from it, as they understand it, cleansed and joined again to the world of light. There are daily washings too, of face and hands and body, done by each person alone before prayer.
A reader of the history pages will hear the echoes. The Essenes immersed themselves daily in the stepped pools fed by the winter rains. The daily bathers in the bishop's catalogue held that there was no life without washing every day. John washed in the Jordan. The Ebionites washed daily and after defilement. The valley of the Jordan in the first centuries was full of baptizing movements, and the Mandaeans may be the last living branch of that whole family. Whether they descend from any one of the others, no one can say.
John and the Light
The Mandaean scriptures include a Book of John, in which John who baptized appears as a righteous priest who baptized multitudes in the Jordan. They do not honor Jesus; their books speak of him as a deceiver who led people from the true washing, and they look no more kindly on Moses or the Law. This is the first great difference between them and every group the fellowship has called Nazarene. The Nazarenes of Syria and the believers east of the Jordan kept the Law and followed Jesus. The Nasoraeans of the rivers keep neither.
Their teaching speaks of a World of Light above, from which the soul came, and a world of darkness below, through which it must pass; of the Great Life, the first and hidden source; of beings of light who descend to teach and to rescue; and of the soul's ascent at death through the watch-houses of the heavens back to its home. The righteous among them are spoken of as sons of light. A student who has read the teaching on the Children of Light will recognize the language, and the fellowship notes only that the language is older than either of us and was spoken by many.
Their Own Story
One of the Mandaean books tells of their beginnings. In it the Nasoraeans lived in Jerusalem and were persecuted there, and left, in the days of a king named Artabanus, for the hills of Media and the region of Harran, and later came down into the lands of the rivers. If the story preserves a memory, it places their departure in the first century, from the same city and perhaps under the same pressures that sent the believers of the Way across the Jordan.
Scholars are divided, and the fellowship will not pretend otherwise. Some accept a core of memory in the story and trace the Mandaeans to the baptizing sects of the Jordan valley in the time of John. Others think the religion took its present form much later, in Mesopotamia, with only distant roots in the west, and some think the Nasoraeans and the Mandaeans were once two distinct peoples who became one. A century ago some scholars took the Mandaeans for the surviving remnant of the Nazarenes of the church writers; that view is now generally abandoned, since the Mandaeans reject the very Law and teacher the Nazarenes held to. Others have wondered whether they might be connected with the older Nasaraeans in the bishop's catalogue, who also lived east of the Jordan, also kept a law not quite Moses's, and also bore nearly the same name. That too remains a question.
The Name Again
The Mandaeans themselves explain the name Nasoraean as the keepers or the guardians: those who keep the secret rites and the hidden knowledge. That is the meaning the Name page found in the Hebrew root natsar, to keep and to guard. Whatever the history, the meaning has traveled. A people who have guarded their washings and their books for more than a thousand years, through conquest after conquest, have earned the title of keepers whatever its origin.
The historian says that an Essene, at his entry, swore to keep the books of the community and the names of the angels and to reveal them to no one. The Mandaean priests keep their books and their names of the beings of light in the same way. The fellowship does not draw a line between the two. We only notice that the vow to keep is an old one, and that it has been kept.
What the Fellowship Takes
We take nothing of their rites, which are theirs. We take one idea, which belongs to everyone who has stood in a river: that flowing water is alive, and that a person who goes down into it is joined to something that came from far away and is going far away still, and that cannot be held. Every river is a Jordan to those who go down into it with a turned heart. The fellowship's practice of the Washing in Living Water grew in part from thinking about this, and that page says how.
And we take a lesson in faithfulness. The Mandaeans have been told by every empire that has ruled them that their washings were superstition and their teacher a lesser prophet. They have gone on washing. A student who wonders whether her small daily practice matters in a world that does not notice it might think of a priest in white, waist-deep in a cold river in a northern country far from home, saying the old prayers over a child in a language almost no one around him understands. He does not wonder whether it matters. He keeps it.