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The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People. By JORUNN JACOBSEN BUCKLEY. Pp. v + 200. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. $45.
Jorunn J. Buckley has become the foremost scholar of the Mandaeans, the sole surviving Gnostic community. Like the great British Mandaean scholar, Lady E. S. Drower, she has not only studied their ancient texts, but has befriended them both in Iraq and Iran, and in the United States, even serving as an advocate for Mandaeans seeking asylum here (p. xi). She was the moving force in organizing the first-ever conference on the Mandaeans, held at Harvard University in June, 1999, which featured the attendance of many Mandaeans and the enactment of their baptisms in the Charles River.
Buckley gives a helpful overview of Mandaean scholarship (pp. 16-17), noting the unique contributions of Lady Drower (1879-1972), who bought fifty-some Mandaic manuscripts for the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and who translated many of them between 1953 and 1963.
Buckley's own special concentration has been the study of the colophons of manuscripts, which has led her to conclude that the scribe who copied the Left Ginza may date to as early as 200 A.D. (p. 4), and to uncover the names of several female scribes (p. 159). These colophons also demonstrate the antiquity of ritual commentaries (p. 15) and provide some unsuspected information for early Islamic history.
Buckley expertly expounds Mandaean beliefs and practices. The Mandaeans believe in a threetiered world, a heavenly Lightworld, a middle earthly world, and a gloomy underworld. The evil Ruha "Spirit," who is the mistress of the detested Jewish God Adonai, produced the...