John the Baptist, called Yahya Yuhana, is the central prophetic figure of Mandaeism and has a book of his own. He is presented as the great teacher of the true baptism, born to elderly parents, raised apart, and baptising in the Jordan. Mandaeans do not regard him as their founder in the sense of an originator, since the religion holds itself to be older than any of its teachers, but he is its exemplary priest.
Jesus is treated as a false prophet. In the Mandaean texts he is a disciple of John who took the baptism and then corrupted it, taught error, and led the nations astray. This is stated plainly in the literature and should be reported for what it is: a doctrinal position of a small religious community, held for as long as its texts have existed, and not a polemic developed for modern purposes. Abraham and Moses are treated similarly as false prophets, and Mandaeism is equally distinct from Judaism, Christianity and Islam despite sharing figures with all three.
What makes Mandaeism remarkable is that it is still here. The gnostic religions of late antiquity are known almost entirely from texts: from what their opponents wrote about them, and since 1945 from the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. Their communities ended. Manichaeism, which once spread from Rome to China, has no living adherents. Mandaeism is the sole exception, a gnostic religion of the ancient Near East that has maintained a continuous community, priesthood, liturgy, scripture and language into the present. For the study of ancient religion this is not a curiosity but a unique control case, the only place where such a system can be observed being practised rather than reconstructed.
It is also why the community's situation carries weight out of proportion to its size. The Iraqi Mandaean population, tens of thousands strong at the start of this century, was largely killed or driven out after 2003, and most Mandaeans now live in Australia, Sweden, the United States and elsewhere, far from any river they recognise. Nothing about the survival of the tradition is secure, and the community itself does not describe its position optimistically.