Mani and the Myth of the Perpetual Foreigner

Abstract: This article argues that the presumed distinction between Christianity and Manichaeism among some scholars of early Christianity replicates an Orientalist fantasy that divides the world into West and East. In this discourse, West and East do not designate relative locations as a matter of convention, but function in an interested way to excise Manichaeism from Christianity. To make this argument, this article traces the persistent surfacing of the West/East binary in a number of academic works about Manichaeism, especially by Arthur Vööbus, Peter Brown, book reviews on Manichaean topics, and a recent introduction of Manichaeism written for scholars of early Christianity. It sharpens the contours of the West/East binary in these works with attention to recent developments in “Asian American” scholarship on the cultural location of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners.” It concludes with a brief “Asian American” reading of a passage from the Coptic Manichaean Psalmbook . This reading attempts to situate the passage within developments in late antique Roman Christianity, rather than as a reflection of some distant moment in third-century Sasanian Mesopotamia, that is, to situate the passage within its contemporary context rather than in relation to Manichaeism’s origins in the East. This article does not argue that Manichaeism is a form of Christianity, but that there is much to be gained for scholars of early Christianity if we considered it as such.