The Kephalaia (Chapters of the Teacher)

The Kephalaia, meaning Chapters, is a Coptic compilation of Mani's teaching recorded and expanded by his followers after his death in the third century CE, organised as a long series of discourses in which Mani answers his disciples' questions on cosmology, ethics and the fate of the soul. It survives in two manuscript collections recovered in Egypt in the twentieth century, the larger Kephalaia of the Teacher and the smaller Kephalaia of the Wisdom of My Lord Mani, and stands alongside Mani's own writings, most of which survive only in fragments or in quotation, as a primary window onto Manichaean doctrine. Manichaeism has had no continuous living community since roughly the fourteenth century, so the text is studied today entirely as a historical source rather than read within a living community of practice.