Archelaus of Carrhae

In the third century a Persian prophet named Mani announced a new religion. It taught two eternal powers, light and darkness, locked in a war that had produced the world; it treated the God of the Old Testament as the enemy; and it claimed Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster as its own forerunners. Manichaeism spread from Persia to Rome to China and lasted a thousand years. Augustine spent nine years inside it before he became a Christian. The church's first great answer to Mani carries the name of Archelaus, bishop of Carrhae in Roman Mesopotamia — the city the book of Genesis calls Haran, where Abraham's family stopped on the way to Canaan. The book is called the Acta Archelai, the Acts of Archelaus. It stages a public debate between Mani and Archelaus before a panel of pagan judges in a Mesopotamian town, with the bishop taking Mani's system apart point by point and Mani finally fleeing. Along the way it preserves a long summary of Manichaean cosmology and a hostile biography of Mani himself. The debate as staged is almost certainly not a transcript. Scholars have questioned it since Isaac de Beausobre in the eighteenth century, and the consensus now is that the work was composed in Greek in the fourth century, probably by a writer named Hegemonius, and that the debate scene is a literary frame. Jerome, listing Christian authors, credited the book to Archelaus and said it had been translated out of Syriac — a detail later scholarship has not been able to confirm. What is not in doubt is the book's weight. It is the oldest substantial anti-Manichaean writing the church produced, and for centuries it was the main thing Greek and Latin Christians knew about Mani. Epiphanius quoted large stretches of the Greek into his own catalogue of heresies, which is why any Greek survives at all; the complete text comes down in an early Latin translation. So the man is thin and the argument is thick. A bishop of a frontier town on the edge of the Persian empire gave his name to the church's first serious reckoning with the religion that nearly kept Augustine. Sources: Hegemonius, Acta Archelai; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 72; Epiphanius, Panarion 66; Samuel N. C. Lieu and Mark Vermes, Acts of Archelaus (Manichaean Studies).