Mani’s life

Abstract

Mani/Manes or Manichaios/Manichaeus was an Aramaic-speaking visionary, a healer, preacher and public sage. Mani's revelation has spread to every country and is known in all languages, its truth fixed in the divinely inspired books that he himself had written down, and through which the truth of all things could be learnt and would never again be lost or corrupted. There is substantial evidence that eastern Aramaic was his native language and the one in which he wrote the majority of his writings, drawing on a religious culture closely related to those of early Christian Syriac, Mandaic, and Jewish Babylonian sources. Central to the biographical narrative of the Mani-Codex is a certain Pattikios, and it is clear that this is the same person as the Fatiq of Ibn al-Nadim's source material, and that the baptists of the Greek text are the same sect as referred to in the Arabic.