The Haran Gawaita (Mandaic "Inner Haran") is a Mandaean text which purports to tell the history of the Mandaeans and their arrival in Iraq as "Nasoreans" from Jerusalem.
Contents
Text, dating and authorship
The text is in Mandaic language and script, dated to around the 4th-6th centuries and of unknown authorship. An English translation was published in 1953 by Lady E. S. Drower.
Content
According to the Haran Gawaita, John the Baptist was baptized, initiated, and educated by the patron of the Nasirutha ("secret knowledge"), Anuš (אנושׁ) or Anuš-ʼuthra, the hierophant of the sect. This research was conducted by the Oxford scholar and specialist on the Nasoraeans, E. S. Drower, who concedes that John’s name may have been inserted at a later date (it appears as Yahia, which is Arabic, not Aramaic). Drower also asserts that the Church Fathers Hippolytus and Eusebius describe Simon Magus, the Samaritan sorcerer of biblical fame (Acts 8:9ff), as a Nasoraean and a disciple of John the Baptist. The author of the pseudo-Clementine Homilies (Bk. II, xxiii-xxiv), also describes Simon Magus as a disciple of John the Baptist and a Nasoraean. The Homilies also state that the immediate successor to John was another Samaritan named Dositheus, elected as leader because Simon happened to be in Egypt at the time of the martyrdom of John the Baptist. Homily (Bk II, xxiv) recounts that when Simon returned from Egypt, the two quarreled. Simon’s authority was proved by miracles and Dositheus ceded his position as head of the sect and became Simon’s pupil.
As a result of efforts to bring the sect back into the folds of Judaism they also disparaged the Christian books as fiction, regarding Jesus as the literary invention (mšiha kdaba "false prophet") of Paul of Tarsus, but eventually they emerged towards the end of the 1st century as the Mandaeans although others actually managed to shape the anti-Torah development of Pauline Christianities like Marcionism.
The term mandai is an Aramaic equivalent of the Greek gnosis ("knowledge"). Besides the Mandaeans, they have been frequently been connected with groups known as Naaseni, Naasenians, Naassenes.
According to Drower, the Mandaeans were one of the earliest key Gnostic sects. Drower surmises that the Nasoraean "hatred for Jews" originated during a period in which they were in close contact with orthodox Jewry, and when the latter was able to exercise authority over them.
Many of the original "Nasoraeans became Christians. In Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic (nasrani) and Hebrew (notzrim) the terms for Nazarenes simply mean Christians.
Modern scholarship
Many preeminent specialists in Mandaean studies, including Rudolf Macúch, Lady Drower, Kurt Rudolph, and Edmondo Lupieri, argue for an origin of Mandaeanism in Palestine or environs, but pre-Christian origins are now generally rejected.