Composition, Manuscripts and Study

The Book of John as transmitted is a compilation: some seventy six chapters of varied genre, verse homily and prose narrative, gathered under a title that reflects its most celebrated contents rather than a single subject. Internal evidence places the redaction in the early Islamic period, since the text knows the Arab conquest and the new order it brought, while much of the material it arranges is older, drawn from the same late antique world that produced the community's other great books; the Mandaic language and the distinctive script are shared with the Ginza Rabba, and the manuscripts descend through the same priestly copying tradition with its chains of named scribes.

European scholarship received manuscripts from the community from the seventeenth century onward, and the foundational critical work was done by Mark Lidzbarski, whose edition and German translation appeared in 1915 under the title Das Johannesbuch der Mandaer; a full critical edition with English translation, prepared by Charles Haberl and James McGrath, appeared in 2020, renewing study of the book. For historians of religion its interest is double: it is a primary document of the only surviving Gnostic religion of antiquity, and it preserves an outsider tradition about John the Baptist and Jesus that, whatever its date, shows how the figures of the Jordan were remembered in a community that chose John. For Mandaeans it remains scripture, read and expounded by priests, its John the honoured teacher of the way of living water.