John the Baptist

Every Sunday, in Ahvaz and Baghdad and now in Sydney and Stockholm, people in white linen walk down into moving water and let a priest press their heads under three times. Afterwards there is a small wreath of myrtle, a mouthful of bread, a swallow of river water, and a handclasp. They do this because of a man who stood in the Jordan two thousand years ago while the crowds thickened on the bank behind him, and because he told them the water had to be alive.

The Mandaeans call him Iuhana Masbana, John the Baptizer, and also Yahia-Yuhana, and Yuhana bar Zakria after his father. They are the only Gnostic community of late antiquity still practising, and he is the greatest prophet they have. He is not, however, their founder, and they are firm about that. Their faith runs back past him to Adam, and John’s job in it was to renew something that had gone slack, which makes him a reformer rather than a beginning. Portuguese missionaries in the seventeenth century met them, heard the name, and called them the disciples of John the Baptist. The label stuck in European books for two hundred years and was never quite right.

The Mandaean Book of John runs to seventy-six chapters, and sixteen of them belong to him. Chapters nineteen through thirty-three all begin with the same couplet: Yahya teaches in the nights, Yuhana in the evenings of the night. It is a strange, sleepless refrain, and it sets the register for everything that follows. His section opens with a chapter titled “A Child was Transplanted from on High.” His mother is named there as Enishbai, whom Christians know as Elizabeth, and his father as Zakria, the priest. In Luke’s telling that priest is struck mute in the temple for doubting the angel and spends nine months unable to say what he has been told.

Then there is Anhar. The Mandaeans hold that John was married, to a woman with that name, and that he had children. It is a small detail with a long reach, because it quietly dismantles the gaunt celibate of Christian imagination and replaces him with a working priest who went home at night.

Josephus, writing for a Roman readership around the end of the first century, describes him without a single miracle. He was a good man, the passage says, who told the Jews to practise virtue toward one another and piety toward God and then to come to baptism. The washing was not for the remission of sins. It was for the purification of the body, the soul having already been cleaned by righteous living. Crowds came, and they were moved by what they heard, and Herod Antipas grew frightened of a man that many people would do anything for. So Herod sent him in chains to Machaerus, the fortress on the ridge above the Dead Sea, and had him killed there. Josephus mentions no dancing girl and no platter. The Gospel of Mark supplies those, along with Herodias and the rash oath at the birthday feast, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.

He was a man who stood in a river telling people to be better, and a king killed him for it.

The Qur’an gives him a different weight again. He is Yahya, and God tells Zakariya that no one before has borne that name. He is granted wisdom while still a child, made dutiful to his parents and neither arrogant nor rebellious, and the verses close over him with a threefold peace: on the day he was born, the day he dies, and the day he is raised alive.

The Mandaean death is the one nobody else tells. In the fifth book of the Right Ginza, Manda d-Hayyi, the Knowledge of Life, comes down to the Jordan disguised as a small boy, three years and one day old. John baptizes him, because that is what John does with whoever comes to the water. In the act of baptizing the child, his soul is lifted away into the World of Light with Manda d-Hayyi, and his body goes into the river and becomes one with it. There is no fortress, no oath, no executioner. He is simply taken mid-work, and the water he spent his life standing in keeps him.

His powers follow from the same source as everything else about him. He is a messenger of light, nhura, and of truth, kushta, holding the full gnosis that the Mandaean soul needs in order to find its way up past the watch-houses after death, and the texts credit him with healing. The authority is real but narrow: he can put a person into living water and change what happens to them afterwards. He cannot make a king afraid of God rather than of crowds. His limits are the ordinary limits of a man with no army and too many listeners, and in the Mandaean version there is a further one, quieter and stranger. When the child comes to the bank, John does not know what he is holding, and he cannot refuse him.

One chapter of his book is titled “Who Told Jesus?”, and the Mandaean texts are frank about their view of the man from Nazareth, whom they treat as a false messiah who took John’s baptism and misrepresented it. Their honesty about this deserves matching honesty in return. The Book of John reached its present shape no earlier than the Islamic conquests, and its critical editors note that the name Yahya is the Qur’anic form while Yuhana is the older one, and that the book’s elevation of John may have served, in part, to secure the community’s standing as People of the Book under Muslim rule. That does not make John a late invention. Scholars from Lidzbarski to Drower to Buckley have argued that the Mandaeans really do descend from his original disciples, and the question of whether these texts preserve anything historical about the Baptist himself remains open. It has been open for a century and shows no sign of closing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is John the Baptist in Mandaeism?

He is the greatest prophet of the Mandaeans, known in Mandaic as Iuhana Masbana, John the Baptizer, and as Yahia-Yuhana. Mandaeans do not consider him the founder of their religion, which they trace back to Adam, but a renewer and reformer of a faith already ancient in his lifetime. Sixteen chapters of the Mandaean Book of John are given over to his teaching.

How did John the Baptist die?

The traditions disagree. Josephus says Herod Antipas, fearing John’s influence over the crowds, had him imprisoned at the fortress of Machaerus and put to death there, and the Gospel of Mark adds the birthday feast, the dance and the head on a platter. Mandaean scripture tells it completely differently: Manda d-Hayyi came to the Jordan disguised as a boy of three years and one day, and while John baptized him his soul was carried up to the World of Light and his body became one with the river.

Was John the Baptist married?

Mandaean tradition says yes. His wife is named Anhar and he is said to have had children with her, which sets the Mandaean picture of him apart from the celibate desert ascetic of Christian tradition. No Christian or Islamic source records a marriage.

What is John the Baptist called in Islam?

He is Yahya ibn Zakariya, a prophet of God. The Qur’an says that no one before him had been given the name Yahya, that he was granted wisdom as a child and was dutiful to his parents, and it pronounces peace upon him on the day he was born, the day he dies and the day he is raised alive.

Why do Mandaeans baptize every Sunday?

Because baptism, the masbuta, is the central rite of their religion and it follows the practice John taught. It must be performed in flowing water, called a yardna or Jordan, and involves threefold immersion, a myrtle wreath, bread, a drink of the river and a ritual handclasp. Mandaeans believe all living water ultimately flows from the world of light.

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Hayyi Rabbi, Abatur, Ptahil, Ruha, Anush, Ur, Jesus, Mary, Adam, Eve, Noah, Moses