Manichaeism: Mani's Synthesis of Persian and Gnostic Thought

Mani (c. 216–274 CE) was born near Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Sassanian Mesopotamia into a family connected to the Elcesaites, a Jewish-Christian baptist sect, and, according to his own later followers' hagiographic accounts preserved in the Cologne Mani-Codex (a Greek text discovered in 1969 and dating to around the 5th century CE), received a series of revelations beginning at age twelve and culminating at age twenty-four from a heavenly "Twin" (Syriac: Taum) who commissioned him to found a new, universal religion superseding and synthesizing what he regarded as the partial and corrupted revelations of earlier prophets, explicitly naming Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus as his predecessors. Mani began preaching publicly around 240 CE and, notably for a religious founder of this period, deliberately composed his own scriptures in writing during his own lifetime, in several languages including Syriac and Middle Persian, rather than relying on later disciples to record an oral teaching, a choice that reflects his explicit ambition to prevent the kind of doctrinal corruption he believed had befallen the teachings of Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus after their deaths.