The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (American Academy of Religion Books)

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The Mandaeans are a Gnostic sect that arose in the middle east around the same time as Christianity. What little study of the religion there has been has focused on the ancient Mandaeans and their relation to early Christianity. Buckley examines the lives and religion of contemporary Mandaeans, who live mainly in Iran and Iraq but also in New York and San Diego. She provides a comprehensive introduction to the religion and shows how its ancient texts inform the living religion, and vice versa.

The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (American Academy of Religion Books) Review

While the Mandaeans are something of an arcane topic, and have received less popular attention than other Near Eastern religious traditions, this book is not arcane nor is it unsuitable for a broad audience. Most books on the Mandaeans tend to focus on specific aspects of their culture: their ancient and moribund language, their unique literature and religion, and their numerous connections to some of the Near East's more familiar cultures, such as Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism of a Jewish or Christian persuasion, and Islam. No one would deny that all of these are important parts of the Mandaean tradition, and contribute much to our understanding of the Mandaean community past and present. Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, on the other hand, has managed to present the Mandaeans in a light that they have thus far eluded: as a modern, living tradition, surviving in a world that has changed greatly from the days of Macuch and Drower, her scholarly predecessors.
In this book, Buckley provides a thorough introduction to the texts most important to the Mandaean community. Interspersed within this introduction, alternating chapter per chapter, are vignettes of today's Mandaean communities in America and Iran. Her intent is to reveal how this written tradition is not merely a source for the scholarship of philologists and the historians of religion, but a hallmark of world literature, which forms the basis for a living tradition, and which continues to inform the widespread community that still celebrates it.
I would recommend this book for any person interested in the Mandaeans, but I feel that it would especially suit individuals who have spent years studying such traditions, who would benefit greatly from seeing how they are practiced today. This book fills an information vacuum, which might otherwise be occupied by ignorance and misinformation.

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