A prophet who wrote his own scripture, mostly gone

Claim (verbatim)

Mani (216-274) did what almost no founder did: he fixed his own canon in writing, seven scriptures meant to be copy-controlled against the corruption he blamed for every earlier revelation — the Living Gospel, the Treasure of Life, the Pragmateia, the Book of Mysteries, the Book of Giants, the Epistles, and the Psalms and Prayers — flanked by the Shabuhragan and the illustrated picture-book. A religion that spread from the Atlantic to the Chinese coast and lasted a millennium in the east should have left those seven books everywhere. Not one survives complete. What we have are fragments from three accidents — the Iranian Turfan manuscripts in Berlin, the Coptic codices of Medinet Madi, the Chinese scrolls of Dunhuang — plus hostile summary, above all the booklist and paraphrase in Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist. The mechanism is that an author-fixed canon is maximally vulnerable precisely because it is closed: successive proscription (Roman, Zoroastrian, Muslim, and Chinese in turn) targets the named books, and no reforming sect keeps re-editing them, so the more sacred and specific the title, the cleaner its erasure. The surviving Manichaean word is thus disproportionately hymn and homily — the para-canonical, community-copied layer — while the seven named scriptures show up mainly as titles and quotations in other people's writing. Prediction: auditing every identified Manichaean text-witness across the Turfan, Coptic, and Chinese corpora against Mani's seven canonical titles, no single one of the seven will be represented by as much as a quarter of its original extent in continuous text, and more of each canonical work will be recoverable from testimonia and quotation (led by the Fihrist) than from direct manuscript witness (primary clause: the under-a-quarter survival ceiling for every one of the seven; a single canonical work surviving above that threshold falsifies it). Kill: the Berlin Turfan Manichaica in the Berliner Turfantexte series and the Manichaean sections of the Fihrist (Fluegel; Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadim, 1970), with the Coptic Medinet Madi codices (Polotsky, Boehlig, and the Chester Beatty editions) as the Western control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: auditing every identified Manichaean text-witness across the Turfan, Coptic, and Chinese corpora against Mani's seven canonical titles, no single one of the seven will be represented by as much as a quarter of its original extent in continuous text, and more of each canonical work will be recoverable from testimonia and quotation (led by the Fihrist) than from direct manuscript witness (primary clause: the under-a-quarter survival ceiling for every one of the seven; a single canonical work surviving above that threshold falsifies it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Berlin Turfan Manichaica in the Berliner Turfantexte series and the Manichaean sections of the Fihrist (Fluegel; Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadim, 1970), with the Coptic Medinet Madi codices (Polotsky, Boehlig, and the Chester Beatty editions) as the Western control.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That none of Mani's seven canonical scriptures survives complete, and that they are known largely through titles and quotation (above all the Fihrist) while the community-copied hymn-and-homily layer survives better, is textbook Manichaean studies (Gardner-Lieu; the Berliner Turfantexte; the Medinet Madi Coptic codices). But the primary clause is a per-work quantitative audit - each of the seven below a quarter of its original extent, and testimonia outweighing direct witness for every one - and the original extents of most of the seven are themselves unknown, so no published work runs this exact ceiling-and-comparison title by title. The qualitative answer is in print; the specific arithmetic is not.

• Iain Gardner & Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• Bayard Dodge (trans.), The Fihrist of al-Nadim (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970)
• Berliner Turfantexte, Manichaica volumes (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.