The Last Living Gnostic Religion

Mandaeism is widely recognised by scholars of religion as the only Gnostic religious tradition from late antiquity to survive as a continuously practised, living faith into the present day, with roots most likely in the region of the lower Euphrates and Tigris, predating Islam and holding John the Baptist, though not Jesus, in high esteem, a distinctive feature that sets it apart from most other traditions that emerged from the same broader late antique Gnostic and baptist religious environment of the Near East. Buckley's scholarship documents that the modern Mandaean community, historically concentrated in Iraq and Iran, has been severely reduced and dispersed by war, persecution and displacement since the late twentieth century, with a large share of the once more substantial community now living in diaspora across Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere, making the continued transmission of Hayyi Rabbi and the wider Mandaean textual and ritual tradition, still centred on baptism in living water, an urgent and actively ongoing concern for the community's religious specialists and lay members alike rather than a settled, secure inheritance.