Читать книгу A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate онлайн

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Marcion represents an earlier and more definitely Christian system which at one time had a very wide extension, and probably was the medium through which Bar Daisan learned Christianity. It was a kind of dualistic system with two powers, the Good God and the Evil One. The Evil One was the creator whom the Jews worshipped as God, and the Good God sent his Son on earth to save men from this delusion: as in Zoroastrianism the two rival powers maintain an unceasing strife until the day of judgment when the good God will be finally victorious. From St. Ephraim we learn that the Marcionites long retained their hold in Northern Mesopotamia side by side with the Bar-daisanites.

Mani shows very much these same views in a Zoroastrian setting, but with a strong element of Marcionite Christianity. Mani’s work came some twenty years later than Bar Daisan, and he, in his early days, had been a disciple of the Mandeans, the Gnostic sect which Justin Martyr calls “the baptists” βαπτισταί (Justin M. Dial. 80) from their frequent ablutions, who were settled in the marsh land between Basra and Wasit on the lower Euphrates. All three, Bar Daisan, Marcion, and Mani, draw largely from the same source the eclectic mixture of old Babylonian religion, of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity, which developed in the lower Euphrates valley, though Marcion claimed to be, and no doubt believed himself, an orthodox member of the Catholic Church, whilst Mani was no less confident in regarding himself as a Zoroastrian. The whole of the different religious ideas of the Euphrates valley were welded together by an element of Greek philosophy of the neo-Pythagorean type, which seems to have filtered in through the Jews who were settled there in force, and had shared in the common life of the Hellenistic world at the time when the neo-Pythagorean school was taking form, and showing marked sympathy towards the various forms of Eastern religious speculation. All this kind of eclectic speculation, half religious and half philosophical, lived on, and was still alive in the third cent. of the Hijra; indeed, it had spread and formed a new centre at Harran, quite distinct in its character, but obviously drawing from the same sources, and, moreover, it quickened into new life when the speculations of the neo-Platonic school were introduced through a Syriac medium. Traditionally all this type of thought prevalent in Mesopotamia was connected with the names of Marcion, Mani, and Bar Daisan, though probably very few Muslims had any clear idea of the respective parts these three characters had played, but simply cited them as heresiarchs of exceptional notoriety.