Hegemonius

Hegemonius is the name attached to a book called the Acts of Archelaus, written in the first half of the fourth century. Nothing about the man survives; the name comes from Heraclian of Chalcedon, a later writer who had read the work and knew who wrote it. The book stages a public debate. Mani, the Persian prophet who founded Manichaeism, comes to a town in Mesopotamia and is met by the local bishop, Archelaus. They argue before a panel of judges drawn from the town — pagans, chosen as neutral. Mani loses, flees, is pursued, argues again in a second town against a priest named Diodorus, and loses again. Woven into the narrative is an account of where Mani came from and what he taught. Historians generally judge the debate to be a literary construction rather than a transcript. What is not fiction is the doctrine. The Acts preserves the earliest and most detailed Christian description of Manichaean teaching we have: two eternal principles of Light and Darkness; matter as the work of the evil principle; light trapped in the material world and slowly rescued; Christ as a purely spiritual being who never truly had flesh; and a rejection of the Old Testament and its Creator God. Manichaeism was not a fringe curiosity. It ran from North Africa to China and lasted a thousand years. Augustine belonged to it for nine years before he became a Christian, and much of his mature theology — on the goodness of creation, on the nature of evil as privation rather than substance, on free will — is an answer to what he had believed as a Manichee. And nearly every Western Christian attack on Manichaeism traces back to this book. Epiphanius quoted long stretches of it in the Panarion. Cyril of Jerusalem used it. Later Latin writers used it at second and third hand. When the medieval church described dualist heresy, it was largely describing what Hegemonius had written down. The Greek original is lost except in the fragments Epiphanius preserved. The complete text survives in an early Latin translation. Photius read it in Greek in the ninth century and described it in his library catalogue. When Hegemonius lived, where he wrote, and when he died are all unknown. Sources: Hegemonius, Acta Archelai (The Acts of Archelaus), translated by Mark Vermes; Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 66; Photius, Bibliotheca, codex 85; Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China.