MİSYONERSAVAR YAZILAR

Estimated Range of Dating: 105-115 A.D.

Irmscher writes (op. cit., pp. 686-687):

Origin and dissemination: according to his own account (frag. 2) Elchasai came forward with his message in the third year of Trajan (101); he seems to have composed his book during the reign of the same emperor, as is suggested by the prophecy, given in frag. 7 but not fulfilled, of a universal conflict blazing up three years after the Parthian war (114-116) but still under Trajan's rule. The reports about Elchasai's homeland are contradictory; the most worthy of credit are some references in Epiphanius (Haer. 19.2.10f..; 53.1.1ff.), which point to the region east of Jordan. The work was dedicated to the 'Sobiai', the 'baptized' (from [ARAMAIC]), as the adherents of Elchasai called themselves (not a person of that name, as Hippolytus, Ref. 9.13.1-3 = Frag. 1a wrongly assumed). It was however disseminated also among other religious groups, both Jewish and Jewish-Christian, and for this Epiphanius once again affords the evidence (Haer. 19.1; 30.18; 53). It was brought to the congregation of Callistus in Rome about 220, and that in a Greek version, by the above-mentioned Alcibiades of Apamea, who was active as a missonary in the imperial capital. A propagandist advance by the sect to Caesarea in the year 247 is mentioned by Eusebius (HE VI 38). It seems to have met with only slight success, and in any case we cannot speak of a wide diffusion of the sect. The influence of the Elchasaites upon Mani - as we now know from the Cologne Mani Codex - must however have been quite considerable. Down to his twenty-fourth year Mani lved in an Elchasaite community, and his own independent teaching developed in controversy with this baptist group.