Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered

Nicholas Baker-Brian is a scholar of late antique religion, and this academic book, published by the academic press T&T Clark, is a survey of Manichaeism, the ancient dualist religion founded by the prophet Mani, drawing on the considerable primary source material recovered over the twentieth century in multiple ancient languages. Its strength is synthesizing a scattered and multilingual primary source base, including texts only rediscovered relatively recently, into a coherent modern account of Manichaean belief and practice. Its limit is that, because so much Manichaean primary material survives only in fragments or through hostile later critics, even a careful modern synthesis like this one necessarily involves some degree of reconstruction, a limit the book is explicit about rather than concealing.