Mani's Baptists and the Elchasaites

The so-called Cologne Mani Codex (CMC) and the Fihrist (“Catalogue”) of al-Nadim, a tenth-century Islamic encyclopaedia, report that Mani spent his youth in a southern Babylonian community of baptists

Gnostic Interpreters (Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories), Chapter I

This book argues that the intellectuals behind early Gnostic revisions of Genesis stories were second-century Christians with an ideological background in Greek-Hellenistic philosophy, who adapted and reinterpreted biblical narrative materials with a view to exposing the inferiority of the creator-God of Genesis and the ignorance of those Christians who continued to worship this God. The first part examines the possible polemical function, the philosophical thought structure, and the narrative scheme of the Genesis rewritings, and continues with studies of individual episodes of the revisionary Gnostic myth, from the creation of Adam and Eve up to the story of Noah and the Flood.