I last heard from Charles G. Häberl in 2013 with "Mandaeism in Antiquity and the Antiquity of Mandaeism", which is what it says it is: an argument for ranking the Mandaeans with authentic Late Antiquity, or not so late. Häberl is still at it, with "Mandaic and the Palestinian Question" (pdf) which I just stumbled into this morn.
Häberl questions how come Christians and Muslims get to claim John the Forerunner, and Mandaeans don't. (I'd butt in here that Mu'awiya amir in Damascus also claimed John, more so than he'd claimed Muhammad.)
"Mandaean is an Oriental Aramaic!" has been our touchstone since Nöldeke first noted that dialect's parallels with the Jewish Aramaic of the Iranian-run Irâq. Häberl doesn't question that; instead he points out - since we do have dialectic drift here - that this phenomenon in this dialect makes ciseuphratian loanwords easy to spot.
Häberl is aware of very early loanwords likely taken into Hellenistic Aramaic under the Seleucia. Some of them weren't even Greek at base; the Greeks could borrow Persian words same as the Aramaeans could, and as the Parthians for that matter. Yes there's a Mandaean word for "paradise". Just about every language has that word now. Häberl, whose focus for loans is on the occident, identifies such Iranaica to dismiss them. (Take a lesson from this guy, Dr Perrin.)
Given all that, Häberl locates evidence that, although the Mandaeans and the Bavli Jews represent survivals of a pre-Syriac linguistic Asorestan, they weren't the same community. At the least, they didn't share religious concerns.
Take the Cross. (So to speak.) The Jews reject the entire New Testament so don't care about how Jesus died nor if he even existed, and where they're aware of John (like Josephus Flavius was) they figure he's yet another false first-century prophet who ended up getting a lot of Jews killed. The Mandaeans, here, more agree with Sura 4. Mandaeans do care about the New Testament; they're struggling for the same theory of baptism independent of the Jewish Temple and circumcision, and the NT is simply the best source for that first-century Jewish theory. Where Mandaeans part ways, as gnostics, is that they believe salvation comes from true knowledge of the next world, not through G-d's intervention through Jesus' body and blood. So, to parallel good Semitic shared Christian Aramaic salib, they mock the Latin crux - and not the Greek stauros, nor anything Iranian.
That implies, at the very least, the early Mandaeans had some data on what the Principate was like for provincial residents before Caracalla's imperium. I doubt Trajan's sojourn in the Mesopotamía can account for all of it.
Also here are Hebraisms, hardly unexpected, but... not the local Jews' Hebraisms. Häberl reads mitgamla as Hebrew mitgimla, for being weaned. Aramaic Jews in the Irâq sequestered the gml root to Hebrew and didn't carry it to their spoken language which has Hsl. The gml is instead found with the Samaritans, in their Targum to Genesis 21:8; maybe with other Westerners.
More relevant to Mandaean dogma would be iaunaita. This, Häberl relates to the yawen of Psalms 40:3 and 69:3, where it is the "mire" from which the Psalmist calls for Divine aid. No Jew (or Samaritan) would say this of our entire world. But a gnostic might!
Häberl further cites the western loanwords about where J. J. Buckley's The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandæan History arranges the earliest "stratum" of Mandaean text. "The Mystery and the Book of the Great Ennosh" gets a callout for a number of archaisms, which Mark Lidzbarski had called back in 1925. (We don't have to discuss Lidzbarski's conclusion, that the Ginza had updated / translated this from Imperial Aramaic. We just care that the text we got is early.) The should-be-more-famous Book Eighteen, effectively the Late-Antique Mandaean Apocalyptic Chronicle, is also here inasmuch as it incorporates earlier material.
Overall I don't know that the Mandaean language owns a Western basis. I actually suspect Lidzbarski is closer to it: Mandaeans and Iraqi Jews together represent a holdover from Antiochus III who re-united all the Aramaic-speaking peoples (albeit under Greek). As various post-Biblical communities settled in Iraq, their Aramaics drifted together. As for the Mandaean abandonment of Jewish praxis, well... the Samaritans meanwhile had extricated their Torah from Jerusalem. I have no idea if the Elephantine "Jews" used a Torah or if they just kept a parallel Psalter like we see in the Demotic fragment. The Nile may even have had Jewish gnostics (although this is debatable). I'd not be surprised if the Mandaeans thought of using the Tigris as their miqvah a full century before John did so at the Jordan.
What we can say is that the protoMandaeans made common cause with John's memory. A good parallel in Christendom is how the Church of the East adopted Nestorius posthumously. Häberl, I think, is basically right.
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