Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum

Project Outline

In the third century of our era, Mani, a Gnostic prophet living in the highly syncretistic region of Babylonia, inaugurated the first world religion which contains elements of Judaeo-Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. This highly missionary religion had followers from the Atlantic to the Pacific before the emergence of Islam and survived in South China until the time of Marco Polo. However, severe persecution of this arch-heretical sect by Christian, Zoroastrian, Islamic and Confucian authorities has led to the virtual disappearance of their writings and, until the beginning of this century, only citations of their texts were known to scholars from the anti-heretical writings of Augustine, of Greek and Syriac Fathers, and of Persian, Arabic and Chinese authors. However, the study of the history of this first Gnostic world religion has made enormous progress in this century thanks to a series of remarkable archaeological finds of genuine Manichean texts and of religious buildings, paintings and inscriptions from Central Asia, Egypt, N. Africa and S. China.

Many of the texts recovered from Central Asia and Egypt are in fragmentary condition and some are still unpublished or published only in facsimile form. The plan of the new Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum is to make all this material, hitherto diversely published, available in a series which can be easily consulted by historians of religion, theologians, ancient and medieval historians, orientalists as well as by specialists in the languages in which the documents were composed. The Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum is divided into nine series along linguistic lines (see below). It also has a Series Subsidia comprising the important Bibliographia Manichaica and the Dictionary of Manichaean Texts. The project was adopted by the IUA in 1998 as a Category C project.