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I turn to analyze three passages on prophethood from the two Manichaean codices known as the Kephalaia. I suggest that kephalaia are rhetorical-literary units and must be contextualized alongside other contemporary developments. I first turn to the “Introduction” to the Kephalaia, which features Mani recounting his travels around the Sasanian Empire. Rather than mining this for historical data, I argue that the whole point of this peculiar rendition of Mani’s life is to naturalize the form of the two codices of Kephalaia as anthologies, thus showing each kephalaion to be a discrete shard of Mani’s single revelation. I next argue that the so-called “Chain of Prophets” in the first kephalaion is an argument against prevailing Christian notions for a single glorious “Apostolic Age” in the past. Rather than a single Apostolic past, this kephalaion argues that God sends apostles regularly to provide humanity with a way to salvation. In the final section of this chapter, I show how another kephalaion is invested in Sasanian Imperial vision of geography and space, thus bridging the gap between the Sasanian Empire as an institution and the Manichaeans who live within it.
For more than five centuries, Christian communities lived without a comprehensive body of written law. Thus, in the early church, canon law as a system of norms that governed the church or a large number of Christian communities, was not present. Early Christian texts share several characteristics. Their authority derived from their apostolic origins, not from ecclesiastical institutions. Although church fathers, especially John Chrysostom, did justify conciliar assemblies on the basis of Acts 15, modern scholars have concluded that the assembly described in Acts 15 at Jerusalem cannot be described as a council or synod. During the course of the fourth century, two sources of authoritative norms emerged in the Christian church: the writings of the fathers of the church and the letters of bishops, particularly the bishops of Rome. John Scholasticus' Synagoge of 50 titles is the first important collection of canon law in the East. All later Greek canonical collections were based on it.
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