Here, I turn to the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and read it together with the Cologne Mani Codex. I argue that its anti-Pauline sentiment, which reaches its highest pitch when polemicizing against visionary forms of revelation, is responding to Mani’s claims to be the Apostle of Jesus Christ. I first show that the language of “seminal fluids and blood” of the two prophets in the Homilies is designed to show that the True Prophet cannot be human. The same holds for the cryptic passage about Jesus “changing forms and names,” since only a divine substance - and not a human being - can be the True Prophet. I then turn to the Homilies’ anti-Pauline critique of visionary forms of revelation. I place these together with the Cologne Mani Codex, which presents Mani as a “Second Paul” who acquires prognosis through visionary means. I ultimately argue that the Homilies’ “anti-Pauline” sentiment is directed against Mani (among others).

Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Panayotis S. Katsafados explore images of Hell in churches of the 12th and 14th centuries in Lakonia, the southern Peloponnese, considering the transition of images of sinners from those collectively punished to those individually tormented. After examining the traces of images of Hell in two churches in Mystras and Chrysapha, the authors turn to more humble structures in Epidauros Limera and the Mani, where the representation of sinners is related to village life. The depicted priests, farmers, and women engage in sins that destabilised the village’s agrarian economy and disrupted social order, suggesting that, at a local level, warnings about behaviour in the earthly world were as critical to the community as warnings about salvation in the world to come. Rare images of figures labelled as ‘potion makers’ and ‘witches’ indicate attempts of the Church to regulate dangerous activities that contravened ecclesiastical law and teachings. Representations of usurers, falsifiers of documents, and those who cheat at the scales hint at the challenges that plagued communities in financial hardship. Such depictions continue in the region in the post-Byzantine period, though with increasing complexity, demonstrating a long-term interest in the use of imagery for social commentary.

Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Panayotis S. Katsafados explore images of Hell in churches of the 12th and 14th centuries in Lakonia, the southern Peloponnese, considering the transition of images of sinners from those collectively punished to those individually tormented. After examining the traces of images of Hell in two churches in Mystras and Chrysapha, the authors turn to more humble structures in Epidauros Limera and the Mani, where the representation of sinners is related to village life. The depicted priests, farmers, and women engage in sins that destabilised the village’s agrarian economy and disrupted social order, suggesting that, at a local level, warnings about behaviour in the earthly world were as critical to the community as warnings about salvation in the world to come. Rare images of figures labelled as ‘potion makers’ and ‘witches’ indicate attempts of the Church to regulate dangerous activities that contravened ecclesiastical law and teachings. Representations of usurers, falsifiers of documents, and those who cheat at the scales hint at the challenges that plagued communities in financial hardship. Such depictions continue in the region in the post-Byzantine period, though with increasing complexity, demonstrating a long-term interest in the use of imagery for social commentary.

The ascendancy of the Mazdayasnian priesthood at the court of the Persian king of kings led ultimately to Mani’s trial, imprisonment and death at Gondeshapur under King Bahram I. This was commemorated by the community as his crucifixion and compared to the sufferings of all previous righteous messengers of God. The inter-religious conflict and the dramatic events of Mani’s last days and martyrdom were uniquely significant for the development of religion in Sasanian Iran. This chapter examines the various available sources, and questions the factual and counter-factual memory of the Apostle preserved into the medieval and modern world.

The Foreword by Professor Jason BeDuhn (Professor of Religious Studies, Northern Arizona University) offers an overview of this book’s critical historiography of the life of Mani, based in part on scepticism regarding the previously known sources, and in part on newly available sources. In introducing this book’s approach, BeDuhn follows various depictions of Mani the 'Apostle of Jesus Christ', the 'Doctor from Babylon', the 'Illuminator' and the 'Great Interpreter' within both the Manichaean tradition and in polemical accounts.

This chapter introduces the life of Mani as mediated through the history of Manichaean Studies. It follows the field’s genesis in the confessional polemics of the Reformation to the twentieth century where repeated new and unexpected manuscript discoveries have allowed for an advancement of the field through textual studies and philology. Texts that survive in a wide variety of languages, ranging from Latin and Greek through Coptic, Arabic, various Middle Iranian languages including Parthian and Sogdian, even Uighur and Chinese. This chapter reconsiders the many variations of the life of Mani as depicted in Manichaean, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical and polemical texts in the light of these new discoveries and the scholarship that preceded it.

Chapter 6 examines how later stories about artistic competition, related by al-Maqrizi, Mustafa ‘Ali, and Qadi Ahmad, consider painting in the context of deceptive rhetoric in pursuit of truth, as advocated in Plato’s Phaedrus. The chapter concludes by comparing this understanding of painting with that rooted in a similar story, the competition of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Adopted from antiquity by German Enlightenment thinkers as the paradigm for representation and the disinterested observer, this story establishes paradigms of artistry and mimesis in the Western tradition that cannot account for opposite premises established in Islamic discourses. The comparison between the two narratives underscores the antique tradition as part of a shared Islamic and European heritage diverging through distinct histories of interpretation. Comparison with European theorization of the image uncovers the bias inherent to normative art-historical premises about the social and psychological functions of the image that obscure alternative modes of perception, whether in cultures whose alterity is determined by being in the past or by being elsewhere. The story of the competition of the artists outlines an alternative paradigm, rooted in spiritually trained subjectivity rooted in the heart and resisting the rationalist exteriority of representation presumed in dominant modern models.

Chapter 5 traces the heart as a polished mirror in transformations of the story of the competition of the artists as told by al-Ghazali and retold by Nizami, Rumi, and ibn Khaldun. Following the episteme of inward mimesis established in earlier chapters, the story reveals reflection as an enhancement of representation rather than through the model of deception common to modern interpretations of Platonic thought under the influence of biblical image prohibitions. The parable reflects insights suggestive of Platonic and Buddhist sources. Tropes of the heart and the curtain, metaphors for the heart and revelation, persist in later poetic renditions by Nizami and Rumi. They add the figure of Mani, mentioned already in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, to the story, elaborated through the thought of Suhrawardi and ibn Arabi. Ibn Khaldun reprises the tale to compare science and mysticism as paths to knowledge. The story reflects a relationship with the image not founded in prohibition so much as in its utility as a vehicle of transcendence. Far from the modern assertion of latent secularism in epic poetry and underlying representational painting, the cultural and religious aspects of Islam emerge as indivisible as a reflection and its mirror.