Acta Archelai — Large Print

Introduction

Somewhere in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire, in the turbulent third century after Christ, a bishop sat down to record what may be one of the most consequential theological confrontations in the history of early Christianity. The opponent he faced was no minor irritant, no local eccentric preaching a slightly unorthodox gospel. The man across from him represented something altogether more dangerous: a fully formed, internally coherent, intellectually sophisticated religious system that threatened to peel away the faithful from the Church by the thousands. His name was Mani, and the movement he founded — Manichaeism — would go on to challenge Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Islam across three continents for over a millennium. The bishop was Archelaus, and the record of their encounter, preserved and transmitted under the title we now know as the Acta Archelai, is the document you are about to read.

To open these pages is to step directly into one of history's most underappreciated intellectual battlegrounds. The Acta Archelai — literally 'The Acts of Archelaus' — is a text that has languished in relative obscurity for centuries, overshadowed by the more famous patristic writings of Tertullian, Origen, or Augustine. And yet, in terms of its historical significance and its sheer dramatic intensity, it deserves to stand alongside any of them. For here we have something almost unique in the literature of early Christianity: a sustained, point-by-point theological debate, rendered in the form of a dramatic narrative, in which a Christian bishop confronts the founder of a major world religion and dismantles his arguments before a live audience of judges and citizens. The stakes could not have been higher. The souls of an entire community hung in the balance.

It is worth pausing at the outset to appreciate just how strange and wonderful this document is. Ancient religious texts rarely give us debate. They give us proclamation, commentary, epistle, and homily. They give us the voice of authority speaking downward to the faithful, or the voice of the prophet crying upward to God. What they almost never give us is the cut and thrust of genuine intellectual argument, two opposing systems brought into direct collision, each forced to defend its premises and expose the weaknesses of the other. The Acta Archelai does exactly this, and it does so with a vividness and a dramatic energy that still crackles off the page after seventeen centuries. Reading it, you do not feel like a scholar examining a dusty relic. You feel like a spectator at a trial.

The text was composed in Greek, most likely in the late third or early fourth century, though the precise dating remains a matter of scholarly discussion. The version that has come down to us most completely is a Latin translation, and it is this Latin text — supplemented by Greek fragments — that forms the basis of modern editions and translations. The author identifies himself, or is identified by tradition, as Hegemonius, though almost nothing is known about this figure beyond what can be inferred from the work itself. He may have been a Syrian Christian, writing in or near the region where the events he describes were said to have taken place. He may have been a bishop, a scholar, or simply a learned layman with a gift for theological argument and narrative drama. What is certain is that he was deeply familiar with both Christian scripture and the teachings of Mani, and that he brought both bodies of knowledge to bear with considerable skill.

The structure of the work is itself worth noting before you begin. It opens not with abstract theology but with story — with a narrative of how Mani, or an emissary sent by Mani, arrived in the territory of Bishop Archelaus and began to win converts. This narrative frame is crucial, because it grounds what might otherwise be dry theological disputation in something that feels urgently human. We are not reading a treatise. We are watching events unfold. We see the community react with alarm. We see Archelaus respond with courage and confidence. We see the debate arranged, the judges selected, the crowd assembled. And then, when the arguments begin, we understand that they are not merely academic exercises. They are battles for the hearts and minds of real people, conducted in real time, with real consequences.

The theological content of the debates is rich and multilayered, touching on questions that were among the most pressing of the age. What is the nature of evil? If God is good and omnipotent, why does suffering exist? What is the relationship between the Old Testament and the New? Is the material world the creation of a good God, or the prison of a malevolent one? These were not abstract puzzles. They were questions that kept people awake at night, that drove men and women to abandon the faith of their fathers and seek answers in new religious movements. Mani offered answers to all of them, answers that were seductive precisely because they were systematic and internally consistent. The challenge for Archelaus — and through him, for Hegemonius — was to show that those answers, however elegant, were built on foundations of sand.

To understand why this text mattered so enormously to its original audience, and why it should matter to us today, we need to understand something about the world in which it was written. The third century was a time of extraordinary religious ferment across the Roman Empire and its eastern neighbors. Christianity was still a minority religion, persecuted by the Roman state and contested from within by a bewildering variety of sects and movements. Gnosticism, in its many forms, offered a radically different account of creation and salvation. Neo-Platonism was reshaping the intellectual landscape. Mystery religions competed for the loyalty of the spiritually hungry. Into this already crowded and turbulent scene, Manichaeism arrived like a thunderclap — organized, missionary, and armed with a cosmological vision of breathtaking scope and ambition.

Mani himself was a genuinely remarkable figure, one of the most original religious thinkers of antiquity. Born in Babylonia around 216 CE, he grew up in a Jewish-Christian baptismal community and absorbed influences from Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism before formulating his own synthesis. He claimed to be the final prophet, the Paraclete promised by Jesus, the seal of all the prophets who had come before him. His cosmology was a grand dualistic drama: two eternal principles, Light and Darkness, locked in cosmic struggle, with human souls as fragments of divine light trapped in the prison of matter, awaiting liberation through gnosis and ascetic practice. It was a system that explained everything — the existence of evil, the suffering of the righteous, the purpose of human life — with a completeness and a coherence that many found irresistible.

The response of the early Church to Manichaeism was, for the most part, fierce and uncompromising. The Manichaeans were condemned as heretics, their books burned, their communities persecuted. But condemnation alone was not enough. What was needed was refutation — a demonstration, conducted on the level of argument rather than mere authority, that the Manichaean system was not only wrong but demonstrably, logically, scripturally wrong. This is what the Acta Archelai attempts to provide, and it does so with a thoroughness and a sophistication that makes it an invaluable document not only for understanding early Christian anti-heretical literature, but for understanding Manichaeism itself. Paradoxically, because the work quotes Manichaean teachings at such length in order to refute them, it has become one of our most important sources for the content of those teachings.

The World That Produced This Text

To read the Acta Archelai without some sense of the historical and intellectual context in which it was produced is to miss much of what makes it remarkable. The Roman Empire of the late third century was a world under pressure from almost every direction. Militarily, the frontiers were under constant strain. Economically, the currency had been debased and trade disrupted. Politically, the empire lurched from one crisis emperor to the next, the throne changing hands with alarming frequency. And spiritually, the old certainties were dissolving. The traditional Roman religion, with its pantheon of gods and its civic rituals, had lost much of its power to satisfy the deeper longings of the human heart. People were searching — for meaning, for community, for a convincing account of why the world was the way it was and what, if anything, could be done about it.

Into this spiritual vacuum came a remarkable variety of movements and teachers. The Neoplatonists, led by figures like Plotinus, offered a philosophical mysticism of great intellectual beauty. The various Gnostic schools — Valentinian, Sethian, and many others — offered esoteric knowledge of the true nature of reality, hidden from the uninitiated. Christianity itself was far from monolithic; it encompassed a vast range of beliefs and practices, from the austere intellectualism of the Alexandrian school to the ecstatic prophesying of the Montanists. And now Manichaeism arrived, carrying with it a prophet's authority, a philosopher's rigor, and a missionary's zeal.

What made Manichaeism particularly threatening to orthodox Christianity was not simply that it offered an alternative account of salvation, but that it did so while claiming to be the true and final form of Christianity. Mani did not present himself as the founder of a new religion opposed to Christ. He presented himself as the fulfillment of Christ's promise — the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth who would lead humanity into all truth. He incorporated Jesus into his system, along with Buddha and Zoroaster, as earlier prophets who had glimpsed the truth but whose teachings had been corrupted and incomplete. His was the final revelation, the one that corrected all errors and completed all partial truths. This was a deeply cunning strategy, because it meant that a Christian who converted to Manichaeism did not feel that they were abandoning Christ. They felt that they were, at last, understanding him properly.

The Manichaean community was also organized in a way that gave it considerable social appeal. It was divided into the Elect and the Hearers — an inner circle of fully committed ascetics who observed strict dietary and sexual abstinence, and an outer circle of lay supporters who provided for the Elect's material needs and earned merit by doing so. This two-tier structure was both practically sustainable and spiritually satisfying. It gave ordinary people a way to participate in the Manichaean project without demanding the impossible of them, while simultaneously providing a visible community of saints whose radical purity could inspire and awe. For someone dissatisfied with the compromises and hypocrisies of everyday Christian life, the sight of a Manichaean Elect living in genuine, disciplined holiness could be powerfully attractive.

It was against this background that Archelaus — if we accept the text's own account — found himself confronted with the Manichaean challenge. The setting described in the text is a city in Mesopotamia, a region that was genuinely a borderland between the Roman and Persian worlds, a place where multiple religious traditions intersected and competed. The choice of this setting is significant. It places the debate at the very frontier of the Christian world, in a region where the Church's hold was least secure and where the appeal of eastern religious movements would have been greatest. Archelaus is portrayed not as a metropolitan bishop backed by the full weight of imperial favor, but as a frontier pastor defending his flock against a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent.

The figure of Archelaus himself is worth dwelling on. In the text, he is portrayed as a man of considerable learning and unshakeable confidence — someone who welcomes the debate rather than fearing it, who meets his opponent's arguments with scripture and reason rather than mere denunciation. Whether the historical Archelaus was quite the formidable intellect the text portrays is impossible to say with certainty. What is clear is that Hegemonius has constructed him as a model of what a Christian bishop ought to be in the face of heretical challenge: not a man who relies on institutional authority to silence opposition, but a man who can meet the heretic on the field of argument and win. This is itself a significant theological and ecclesiological statement. The truth of Christianity, the text insists, is not merely asserted. It can be demonstrated.

The judges appointed to adjudicate the debate are also a fascinating element of the narrative. They are described as learned pagans — men of education and good faith who have no prior commitment to either Christianity or Manichaeism and who will decide the outcome on the merits of the arguments alone. This is a remarkable conceit. It implies that Christianity's truth claims can withstand the scrutiny of neutral, rational observers — that the faith does not need the protection of a sympathetic audience to make its case. It is a confident, almost aggressive move, and it tells us a great deal about the self-understanding of the Christian intellectual tradition that produced this text. Here is a religion that is not afraid of examination. Here is a faith that invites the skeptic to listen and judge.

The geographical and cultural specificity of the text also rewards attention. The Mesopotamian setting, the references to Persian religious traditions, the detailed knowledge of Manichaean cosmology and practice — all of these suggest an author who was writing from within, or very close to, the world he describes. This is not a Roman bishop writing about exotic eastern heresies from a safe distance. This is someone who knew the Manichaean threat at close quarters, who had perhaps seen its appeal firsthand, who understood why intelligent and spiritually serious people found it compelling. That intimate knowledge gives the text a quality of urgency that more detached anti-heretical writings often lack. Hegemonius is not dismissing Mani. He is taking him seriously, which is the only way to refute him effectively.

The Latin translation through which most readers encounter the text adds another layer of historical interest. The translator, working probably in the early fourth century, was rendering a Greek original for a Western audience that was increasingly alarmed by the spread of Manichaeism into North Africa, Italy, and beyond. By the time Augustine of Hippo was writing his own anti-Manichaean works in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, he was drawing on a tradition of refutation that the Acta Archelai had helped to establish. Augustine himself had been a Manichaean Hearer for nine years before his conversion to Christianity, and his intimate knowledge of Manichaean teaching — combined with his towering intellectual gifts — made him the most formidable anti-Manichaean polemicist the Church ever produced. But the groundwork had been laid by texts like this one, and Augustine knew it.

Why This Text Still Matters

It would be easy to approach the Acta Archelai as a purely historical document — a window onto the religious controversies of a distant age, interesting to specialists but of limited relevance to the modern reader. That would be a mistake. The questions at the heart of this text are not historical curiosities. They are perennial human questions, and the arguments advanced on both sides of the debate have a freshness and a force that transcend their third-century context. Why does evil exist? What is the relationship between the physical and the spiritual? Is the material world something to be embraced or escaped? These are questions that philosophers and theologians are still wrestling with today, and reading this ancient debate can illuminate them in unexpected ways.

There is also the question of what the text teaches us about how religious argument works — and how it fails. The Acta Archelai is, among other things, a masterclass in theological rhetoric. Archelaus does not simply assert that Mani is wrong. He demonstrates it, step by step, using a combination of scriptural exegesis, logical analysis, and historical argument. He shows where Mani's cosmology contradicts itself, where his reading of scripture is selective or distorted, where his claims about the nature of God lead to conclusions that are morally and intellectually untenable. Watching this process unfold is genuinely instructive, not only for those interested in the specific doctrines being debated, but for anyone who cares about how to argue well about matters of ultimate importance.

At the same time, the text is honest enough — or perhaps dramatic enough — to give Mani's position its due. The Manichaean arguments presented in the debates are not straw men. They are real arguments, serious arguments, arguments that had convinced intelligent people across the ancient world. The problem of evil, in particular, is presented with a force and clarity that makes the challenge to orthodox Christianity feel genuinely urgent. If God is all-good and all-powerful, why did he create a world containing so much suffering? The Manichaean answer — that the good God did not create the material world, that matter itself is the work of a dark and malevolent principle — is logically elegant, however theologically troubling. Archelaus's response to this challenge is one of the most interesting parts of the text, and it anticipates arguments that would be developed at much greater length by later Christian thinkers.

The text is also important for what it preserves of Manichaean teaching itself. Because so many Manichaean texts were destroyed — burned by Christian emperors, suppressed by Islamic authorities, lost in the sands of Central Asia — we depend heavily on hostile sources for our knowledge of what Mani actually taught. The Acta Archelai quotes Manichaean documents at considerable length, and while these quotations must be read with appropriate critical awareness of the polemical context, they represent genuine evidence about the content of early Manichaean thought. Modern scholars of Manichaeism have found much of value in these passages, and the discovery of actual Manichaean texts in Central Asia and Egypt during the twentieth century has in many cases confirmed the accuracy of the Acta Archelai's account. This is a text that, even when it is trying to destroy its opponent, preserves him.

There is something almost paradoxical about this. The Acta Archelai was written to refute Manichaeism, to arm the faithful against its seductions, to demonstrate once and for all that Mani's system was intellectually and theologically bankrupt. And yet, by engaging so thoroughly with that system, by quoting it so extensively and explaining it so carefully, it has become one of the primary vehicles through which Manichaean ideas have survived into the modern world. This is a reminder of a general truth about intellectual history: the best refutations are also, inevitably, the best preservations. You cannot effectively argue against something without first making it live.

For the general reader coming to this text for the first time, there are several things worth keeping in mind as you read. First, do not be put off by the technical theological vocabulary. The debates in the text deal with some genuinely complex ideas, but Hegemonius has a gift for making abstract arguments concrete, for grounding metaphysical disputes in vivid images and memorable examples. When the arguments become dense, the narrative frame — the drama of the debate, the reactions of the audience, the mounting tension as the confrontation develops — provides a human thread that keeps you oriented and engaged.

Second, pay attention to the biographical material about Mani that appears in the later sections of the text. This material, which purports to describe Mani's origins, his training, and the development of his teaching, is among the most fascinating parts of the work. Some of it is clearly polemical — designed to discredit Mani by portraying him as a fraud and a charlatan. But embedded within the polemic is a remarkable amount of genuine historical information, and the portrait of Mani that emerges, even filtered through hostile eyes, is that of an extraordinary and genuinely original religious genius. The Mani of the Acta Archelai is not a simple villain. He is a complex, driven, intellectually formidable figure, and the text is more honest about this than it perhaps intends to be.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, read this text as what it is: a piece of engaged, passionate, high-stakes theological writing by someone who believed, with absolute conviction, that the truth of Christianity was worth defending with every intellectual weapon at his disposal. Hegemonius is not a disinterested scholar. He is a partisan, a champion, a man who has looked into the abyss of Manichaean dualism and found there not enlightenment but darkness. His passion is part of what makes the text alive. When he is at his best — when the arguments are sharpest, when the drama is most intense, when the theological stakes are most clearly drawn — you feel the heat of a mind fully committed to a cause it believes to be just and true.

The Acta Archelai stands at a remarkable crossroads in the history of religious thought. It is, simultaneously, a document of Christian apologetics, a source for the history of Manichaeism, a specimen of ancient rhetorical and philosophical argument, and a window onto one of the most turbulent and creative periods in the history of human spirituality. It has influenced thinkers from Augustine to the medieval heresiologists to modern historians of religion. And yet it remains, for most readers, an unknown text — a treasure buried under centuries of scholarly neglect and the sheer difficulty of accessing ancient sources.

That is what makes the opportunity to read it, in a clear and accessible modern translation, so valuable. You are about to encounter a text that shaped the course of Christian theological history, that preserved the teachings of one of antiquity's most remarkable religious figures, and that grappled with questions about the nature of God, evil, and human destiny that are as urgent today as they were seventeen centuries ago. The debate it records may have taken place in a dusty Mesopotamian city at the edge of the Roman world, before an audience of judges and curious citizens long since turned to dust. But the arguments it contains are alive, and they are waiting for you.

Open the pages with the expectation of encountering something genuinely surprising. This is not a comfortable text. It does not flatter its reader or offer easy answers. It demands that you think, that you follow arguments to their conclusions, that you take seriously the possibility that the questions it raises have no simple resolution. But it rewards that engagement with something rare in ancient literature: the sense of being present at a moment when the fate of ideas — and through ideas, the fate of souls — hung genuinely in the balance. That sense of urgency, of consequence, of intellectual and spiritual stakes as high as they can possibly be, is what makes the Acta Archelai not merely a historical document but a living text, as capable of challenging and illuminating the reader today as it was when Hegemonius first set it down.

The Acts of the Disputation of Archelaus

Chapter 1

The true Thesaurus: that is, the Disputation conducted in Carchar, a city of Mesopotamia, before Manippus, Aegialeus, Claudius, and Cleobolus, who served as judges.

In this city of Mesopotamia there lived a man named Marcellus, who was held in the highest esteem for his way of life, his pursuits, and his lineage, and no less for his good judgment and nobility of character. He was also a man of abundant means; and, most important of all, he feared God with the deepest piety and always listened with reverence to whatever was spoken of Christ. In short, no good quality was lacking in him, and for this reason he was held in the greatest regard throughout the whole city. He in turn repaid the city's goodwill generously and repeatedly, bestowing gifts on the poor, relieving the afflicted, and helping those in distress. But let this much suffice, lest by the inadequacy of our words we diminish the man's virtues rather than do justice to their splendor. I will turn, therefore, to the matter that is my subject.

On a certain occasion, a large body of captives — some seven thousand seven hundred in number — was brought to Bishop Archelaus by the soldiers who held the garrison in that place. He was tormented with the keenest anxiety over the enormous sum of money the soldiers demanded as the price of the prisoners' release. Unable to conceal his distress, burning as he was with zeal for religion and the fear of God, he at last hurried to Marcellus and laid before him the gravity and difficulty of the situation. When that model of piety, Marcellus, heard what he had to say, he went into his house without the slightest delay and provided the full price demanded for the prisoners, according to the value set on them by those who had taken them captive. He threw open the storerooms of his wealth and at once distributed his gifts of piety among the soldiers, with no labored reckoning of numbers or distinctions, so that the payments seemed more like presents than purchase money. The soldiers were filled with wonder and admiration at the greatness of the man's piety and generosity, and were struck with amazement and moved by this example of compassion, so that very many of them were added to the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ and laid aside their military belts. Others withdrew to their camp taking scarcely a fourth part of the ransom, and still others departed without accepting even enough to cover the expenses of the road.

Marcellus, as might well be expected, was deeply gratified by all of this. He summoned one of the prisoners, a man named Cortynius, and asked him the cause of the war and how it had come about that they were overcome and bound in captivity. Given leave to speak, the man began in these words:

My lord Marcellus, we believe in the living God alone. We observe a custom, handed down to us by the tradition of our brothers in the faith and kept by us faithfully to this day, of going out beyond the bounds of the city every year, together with our wives and children, to offer supplications to the one invisible God, praying him to send rain upon our fields and crops. While we were observing this practice at the usual time and in the usual manner, evening overtook us as we lingered there, still fasting. We were thus enduring two of the most trying things a person can bear — fasting and want of sleep. But around midnight sleep crept upon us, unwelcome and ill-timed, and with necks drooping and unstrung and heads hanging down, it made our faces fall against our knees. This happened because the hour had come when, by the judgment of God, we were to pay the penalty due to our deserts, whether we had offended in ignorance or whether, knowing our wrong, we had not abandoned our sin.

At that hour a multitude of soldiers suddenly surrounded us, supposing, as I judge, that we had posted ourselves there in ambush and were men experienced and skilled in battle. Without making any careful inquiry into the reason for our gathering, they threatened us not with words but immediately with the sword. Though we were men who had never learned to harm anyone, they wounded us mercilessly with their missiles, ran us through with their spears, and cut our throats with their swords. They killed about one thousand three hundred of our number and wounded five hundred more. When daylight came, they carried off the survivors as prisoners to this place, and they did so with utter pitilessness. They drove us ahead of their horses, spurring us on with blows from their spears and pressing us forward with the horses' heads bearing down upon us. Those who had the strength held out; but very many fell down before their cruel masters and breathed their last on the ground. Mothers, their arms exhausted and utterly powerless under their burdens, and maddened by the threats of those behind them, let the little ones hanging at their breasts fall to the earth. All those on whom old age had come sank one after another to the ground, overcome by the ordeal and spent from lack of food. The proud soldiers enjoyed this bloody spectacle of men dying one after another as though it were a kind of entertainment. They watched some stretched out on the soil in helpless collapse; they watched others, consumed by fierce thirst, their tongues utterly parched, lose the power of speech; they watched others with eyes constantly glancing back, groaning over the fate of their dying little ones, while those children in turn cried out ceaselessly to their most unhappy mothers, and the mothers themselves, driven frantic by the brutality of their captors, answered with lamentations — which was indeed the only thing left to them to do freely. Those whose hearts were most tenderly bound up with their children chose voluntarily to share the same premature death with them; those who had some capacity for endurance were brought here as prisoners along with us. And so, after three days during which we were never permitted any rest, even at night, we were conveyed to this place, and what has since taken place here you yourself know better than I.

When Marcellus, that man of consummate piety, heard this account, he burst into tears, moved with compassion for misfortunes so great and so varied. Without a moment's delay he set about preparing food for the sufferers and waited on the weary with his own hands, imitating in this our father Abraham the patriarch, who, when he once entertained angels as his guests, did not content himself with merely ordering his servants to bring a calf from the herd, but went himself, old as he was, hoisted it onto his shoulders, carried it in, prepared the food with his own hands, and set it before them. In the same spirit Marcellus had the captives seated as his guests in groups of ten; and when all seven hundred tables had been laid, he refreshed the entire company with such generous abundance that those who had strength enough to survive what they had endured forgot their hardships and put all their sufferings out of mind.

When the fifteenth day came, and while Marcellus was still liberally supplying everything the prisoners needed, he decided that all of them should be given the means to return to their own districts, except those who were kept back by wounds that still required attention. For these he provided the proper remedies, and he sent the rest home to their own country and friends. Nor did Marcellus stop even there, but added still greater acts of piety to all these charities. Taking a large company of his own people, he went out to see to the burial of those who had died on the march, and for as many of their bodies as he could find, of whatever rank or condition, he secured a fitting burial. When that work was done he returned to Charra, and gave the wounded leave to return to their native country once their health was sufficiently restored, providing them also with generous supplies for the journey.

The account of all this added magnificently to the reputation Marcellus already enjoyed for noble deeds. Throughout that whole region the fame of his piety spread so widely that great numbers of people from various cities were fired with an intense desire to see him and know him personally — and most especially those who had never before had occasion to experience poverty, for to all such this remarkable man, following the example of a Marcellus of old, gave help with the most open-handed generosity, so that everyone declared there was no one of more illustrious piety. All the widows who believed in the Lord came to him for support; the infirm could count on receiving from him whatever help their circumstances required; and orphans of every kind were maintained by him, so that his house was known as a refuge for the stranger and the destitute. And above all this, he held fast in a singular and remarkable degree to his devotion to the faith, building up his own heart upon the rock that cannot be moved.

As his fame spread ever more widely through different regions and had now reached even beyond the river Stranga, the honorable report of his name was carried into the territory of Persia. In that country there lived a man called Manes, who, when this reputation reached him, spent a great deal of thought on how he might entangle Marcellus in the snares of his doctrine, hoping to make him a champion of his teaching. He reckoned that he could make himself master of the whole province if he could first attach such a man to himself. Yet his mind was troubled by the question of whether he should go to Marcellus in person at once, or first try to reach him by letter, for he was afraid that by appearing suddenly and unexpectedly on the scene some mishap might befall him. In the end, following the more cautious course, he resolved to write. He summoned one of his disciples, a man named Turbo who had been instructed by Addas, handed him a letter, and told him to go and deliver it to Marcellus. Turbo received the letter and carried it to the person to whom Manes had commissioned him to deliver it, completing the entire journey within five days.

Turbo had indeed traveled with great speed, and in the course of the journey he endured very considerable hardship and trouble. Whenever he arrived, as a stranger in foreign parts, at one of the inns — establishments that Marcellus himself had provided through his great hospitality — and was asked by the keepers where he had come from, who he was, and by whom he had been sent, he would reply that he was from the district of Mesopotamia but had come most recently from Persia, sent by Manichaeus, a master among the Christians. The keepers were by no means ready to welcome a name unknown to them, and would sometimes drive Turbo out of their inns, refusing him even drinking water. Having to endure things like this every day, and things even worse than these, at the hands of those in charge of the mansions and hostels along the way, Turbo would have met his death on the road had he not at last shown that he was carrying a letter to Marcellus.

On receiving the letter, Marcellus opened it and read it in the presence of Archelaus, the bishop of that place. The following is a copy of what it contained:

Manichaeus, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and all the saints who are with me, and the virgins, to Marcellus, my beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace be with you from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ; and may the right hand of light keep you safe from this present evil world, from its calamities, and from the snares of the wicked one. Amen.