A “Hymn of the Gospel” about the Manichaean Concept “Three Great Days” With an Approach to the Origin and Nature of the Manichaean Hymns Based on Turfan Manuscript Fragments in the Berlin Collection

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant professor, University of Religions and Denominations

Abstract

In this new study presenting for the first time some of the Manichaean Manuscript fragments which are preserved in the Berlin collection entitled Ewangelyōnīg bāšāhān, ‘Ewangelyōnīg Hymns’ or the ‘Hymns of the Gospel’ introduce. These hymns that are composed by Parthian-speaker writers in Khorasan and Transoxania and their most important topic is about the “myth of the Manichaean Creation” are composed in the abecedarian and alphabetic order respectively. The article deals with the background of the hymns before Mani and the forming of them before him as well the Manichaeans. The present article tries to show why these texts are called Ewangelyōnīg, in addition, to answer whether the hymns show the same ‘concepts and motifs’ that Mani’s Gospel needed. Here we attempt to show to what extent Mani could have been influenced by Psalms of David and by Bardesanes’ style of hymnology. Additionally, Identification of one of the hitherto-unpublished Turfan Manichaean fragment in this article proves that there was a melody of Mani’s Living Gospel that it sung in the Manichaean church of Central Asia. Here, we have read and reconstructed two Manichaean Turfan manuscript fragments to represent an example of a “Hymn of the Gospel”.

Keywords

References

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Religious Research
Volume 4, Issue 7
August 2016
Pages 99-118

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