Creation according to Mani

After losing the third war against 'Jesus the Splendid', the 'Prince of Pleasure' released two demons, Saclas and his companion Nebroel. Their mission? To fuck! To swallow the light contained in the babies that were born, the Prince of Pleasure devoured them. This sordid villain, also called 'Prince of Sin', fucked Nebroel in turn. Nebroel became pregnant again and gave birth to the first two humans, Adam and Eve! 
This version of creation does not come from the Bible, it comes from the leader of one of the most bizarre sects that Christianity has ever seen in its history: Mani (216-276)! According to Mani history has not one Jesus, but three! As for the historical Jesus of the New Testament (not to be confused with 'Jesus the Splendid') he did not die at the Cross, or only in appearance. Mani's creation is the antithesis of biblical creation in several respects. The idea that human beings are born corrupt, i.e. eternally lost, goes back to him. Unfortunately, St. Augustine (354-430), the most prominent church father in history, who was himself a Manichaean for nine years in his youth before converting to Catholicism, took up this idea and interpreted the biblical creation story in this way.
For those unfamiliar with ecclesial anthropology, click here. For all others, read on:

Creation according to the Bible

According to the Bible, God created Adam and Eve on the sixth and last day of creation not as a copy of Satan, but in his own, divine image. The Bible places the first couple not in a world of demons and devils, but in a paradisiac garden, the Garden of Eden. 'God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.' (Genesis 1:31). 
Only later was Eve seduced by the serpent to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (an apple, Mani claimed). Eve also gave some to Adam, her husband. As a result, the human being became like God (God himself makes this observation) with regard to the knowledge of good and evil. This is what distinguishes animals from human beings. A trout does not know that it is doing something wrong by devouring its own offspring. Thus, no one would think of designating trout as "morally fallen" because they eat other trout. A man, however, who would eat his own children, would be something quite different.
God said: 'The man has now become like one of us.' (Genesis 3:22)
The man has not become like the devil, he has become like God!
Unlike humans, animals act instinctively. The problem with knowing good and evil is that it requires omniscience. For it is impossible to make the right decision if our field of vision, or our knowledge, is partial. But, unlike God, in this area man has remained limited. That is why we suspect evil behind everything that is different: People of another colour, another sexual orientation, another religion, another culture etc. Conversely, people tend to trust what is similar to them. So how do you know that the pastor of your church is not a hypocrite or a deceiver? Of course, his appearance will not allow one to guess. Thus, man relies on what is visible to the eye or to his senses. He pollutes the planet, ignores the warnings of scientists until the day he realises that the climate is changing, that is, until he realises with his own senses that he has triggered a catastrophe. Man lives, to use a biblical term, according to the flesh. The human being is therefore like a three or four year old child who is given a loaded gun: he does not know how to use it and he ignores the consequences of his actions until it is too late. This is how I interpret the symbolic meaning of the knowledge of good and evil. The flip side of this is that man no longer acts instinctively according to his intuition, the inner voice of his heart, or to use a biblical term; he does not live according to the Spirit. That is precisely why the Apostle Paul has such a rotten opinion of the flesh. 
​This limitation, this one-sided view of reality, is easily​ used by man to ridicule those who think differently. Whether in politics, in social media or at work: You just take a sentence that someone else has said, change the context a little, shift the emphasis a little or put the statement in a slightly different light, and you can laugh at the idiocy of the other person. That's how we make cliques, the 'us' and the 'others'. If humans were as ignorant of evil as animals, we would live instinctively (i.e. spiritually). The ‘us’ and the ‘others’ would not exist, and we could not suspect blacks, gays, Muslims, Hindus, etc. of stupidity, perversion, perversity or error. To have knowledge of good and evil without possessing omniscience, can only precipitate us into our own misfortune.
God, aware of the catastrophe that man had just inflicted on himself, expelled human beings from the Garden of Eden: 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever' (Genesis 3:22). The purpose of the expulsion from paradise was that man should not eat of the Tree of Life (from which he would have been allowed to eat before) lest his state be eternal. In the Jewish conception, death was already present, because otherwise there would have been no point in planting the tree of life in the middle of the garden. The existence of death was therefore not the result of disobedience, it was the result of expulsion from paradise. For, once excluded, man could no longer have access to the tree of life. ​I would like to emphasise this explicitly: When God imposed punishments on the serpent, Eve and Adam (in that order), death is not listed, it is only vaguely mentioned. Death was merely an indirect consequence of the expulsion from the garden: 
The exclusion from Paradise was not a punishment, it was a protection. 
​Once the fatal mistake was made, eternal live here on earth would have been dreadful.
​Therefore, death became a deliverance, not a punishment!
Nowhere does Moses text suggest that man became evil! ​Man is not fallen, he is unable to handle his divine gift properly. 

The Origin of Evil according to the Bible

But if the fall only resulted in man's inability to handle a divine gift, where did the evil come from? Moses related the existence of evil to another event described a few chapters later. In Genesis 6 (verses 2-4) we read that the sons of God (fallen angels) incarnated and married human women, unions that gave birth to the giants. Immediately afterwards (verse 5) there is mention of human decay and the flood as punishment. The first book of Enoch, a pseudepigrapha written no later than the second century BC (but perhaps earlier), imaginatively describes the evil that the incarnated fallen angels would have brought upon the earth based on the short summary of Genesis. For example, the descendants of these 'sons of God' are said to have been the first to wage war. The book 1 Enoch did not find its way into either the Jewish or the Christian canon (with the exception of the Ethiopian church). But it was known at the time of Jesus, accepted and quoted as a scripture by the early church until the time of St. Augustine. This scripture was eventually rejected because the church refused the idea that angels could become incarnate, even though angels in human form are found in both the Old and New Testaments. It was therefore necessary to find an explanation for the account in Genesis 6, which Saint Augustine didn't take long to develop: All one had to do was to humanise these divine beings. The sons of God in Genesis were simply the righteous sons of Seth who married the daughters of the wicked Cain, Augustine found out. 

In any case, the first book of Enoch appears in the Ethiopian church Bible to this day. What interests us here is that the New Testament takes up ideas from the first book of Enoch about a hundred times, notably by Jesus and the apostles. The epistle of Jude (verses 14 and 15) quotes it and Revelation uses a series of images from this pseudepigrapha. Moreover, when reading it, one cannot help but think of many other biblical books such as Daniel, Isaiah or Ezekiel, for example. Among the sacred books of the New Testament that had the most difficulty in being canonised by the church in the first centuries are the writings of Jude and the Apocalypse of John. Some believe that it was the similarities with the first book of Enoch that almost caused Revelation to be rejected as canonical. The reason why I go into so much detail about this is the following: The idea that fallen angels could become incarnate is certainly not popular today, either among Christians or Jews. But it was popular in Jesus' time!
It is an anachronism to interpret the New Testament writings in the light of 'man goes to hell'. Jesus‘ heavy accusations against the fierce opposition of very well-informed people (’your father is the devil’ John 8:44) were later read by the Church as being addressed to any human who would oppose Christ (even those who had only the most rudimentary knowledge of him). However, from the Henoic point of view, they were probably addressed to fallen spirits incarnate. 
The Hitlers of yesterday and today, a form of incarnation of demonic spirits.​
Where does the idea that man is fallen and destined for hell come from? It came from Mani, was taken up by Augustine and via him by the Church. Even though Augustine later rejected and fought against Mani's fanciful stories, he retained the idea that Adam and Eve would be fallen, and therefore eternally lost, since they were excluded from paradise. Thus, Augustine saw the human race as a 'lump of damnation'. Paula Frederiksen, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem summarises Augustines thought in her book Augustine and the Jews as follows: 
'Reasoning backward from the universal necessity of salvation in Christ to the condemnation of all persons – even infants – unless baptism intervene, Augustine concluded that the reason for this condemnation could only have proceeded from Adam, the origin of the entire race and, thus, the font of original.'
In trying to avoid a small problem (angels cannot become incarnate), Augustine created a much bigger one (man is born fallen to go to hell). For if evil on earth does not come from incarnate fallen angels, it can only come from man himself. Augustine was convinced that, after the Fall, man still had a soul, but that he no longer had a spirit. Every human being was therefore spiritually dead. Thus, St. Augustine went so far as to teach that babies who die before being baptised are eternally lost, even if the parents are Christians! At the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, Protestants and Catholics alike claimed to be followers of Augustine and perpetuated the teaching that one had to become a good Christian (having a genuine relationship with Jesus for Protestants, or a true relationship with the Church for Catholics) to escape eternal punishment and enter into perpetual beatitudes.​ 

To become a true Christian, however, a person had to regain the spirit that Augustine believed had been lost in the Fall. 
This is ecclesiastical science fiction. When God saw the wickedness on earth (after the Sons of God married human women, the perversity of man is mentioned for the first time), he regretted having created human beings. One of the two consequences was that God limited man's lifespan to 120 years. The second was the flood. Before her, humans reached an age of over 900 years. Methuselah is even said to have lived for 969 years. Here is God's conclusion:
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהוָ֗ה לֹֽא־יָד֨וֹן רוּחִ֤י בָֽאָדָם֙ לְעֹלָ֔ם בְּשַׁגַּ֖ם ה֣וּא בָשָׂ֑ר וְהָי֣וּ יָמָ֔יו מֵאָ֥ה וְעֶשְׂרִ֖ים שָׁנָֽה

‘God said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”’
The translators of our Bibles believe that the verb yadîn should be yadôn. They replace the letter waw (ו) with a yota (י), thus obtaining the verb ‘to judge’ (דין) instead of the verb ‘to remain’ (דון)*. Even King James, the most beloved translation of right-wing evangelical Christians, the translation reputed to be the best literal one, renders the text with 'My Spirit shall not strive with man forever'. Of all the Bibles I have consulted, only the Elberfelder in German translates this text without modifying the Hebrew. This is revealing, because for a Christian theologian, it is inconceivable that the Spirit of God would rest on every human being, in this context even on the wicked. This text is interesting because it describes man after what the church calls ‘the fall’. Translating Genesis 6:3 correctly has a cascade of consequences that are inconceivable to any Christian theologian, which is why the translators of our Bibles have to tinker with it a bit. 
*Strictly speaking, Bible translators consider the verb yadôn to be an irregular conjugation of the verb dîn. Since God's Spirit cannot dwell in fallen human beings, the Hebrew text must logically refer to a different verb than it appears to according to normal grammatical rules.  
By Chris Zürcher. Page updated on 4 August 2024