by the Moslems,
who forced them to retire to Mesopotamia and Babylonia, where they
particularly affected the neighbourhood of rivers in order to be able to
carry out their peculiar baptismal rites.[203]

There can be no doubt that the doctrines of the Mandaeans do resemble the
description of the Johannite heresy as given by Eliphas Levi, though not
by the _Ordre du Temple_, in that the Mandaeans professed to be the
disciples of St. John--the Baptist, however, not the Apostle--but were
at the same time the enemies of Jesus Christ. According to the Mandaeans'
_Book of John_ (Sidra d'Yahya), Yahya, that is to say, St. John,
baptized myriads of men during forty years in the Jordan. By a
mistake--or in response to a written mandate from heaven saying,
"Yahya, baptize the liar in the Jordan"--he baptized the false prophet
Yishu Meshiha (the Messiah Jesus), son of the devil Ruha Kadishta.[204]
The same idea is found in another book of the sect, called the "Book of
Adam," which represents Jesus as the perverter of St. John's doctrine
and the disseminator of iniquity and perfidy throughout the world.[205]
The resemblance between all this and the legends of the Talmud, the
Cabala, and the Toledot Yeshu is at once apparent; moreover, the
Mandaeans claim for the "Book of Adam" the same origin as the Jews
claimed for the Cabala, namely, that it was delivered to Adam by God
through the hands of the angel Razael.[206] This book, known to scholars
as the _Codex Nasaraeus_, is described by Munter as "a sort of mosaic
without order, without method, where one finds mentioned Noah, Abraham,
Moses, Solomon, the Temple of Jerusalem, St. John the Baptist, Jesus
Christ, the Christians, and Mohammed." M. Matter, whilst denying any
proof of the Templar succession from the Mandaeans, nevertheless gives
good reason for believing that the sect itself existed from the first
centuries of the Christian era and that its books dated from the eighth
century[207]; further that these Mandaeans or Nazoreans--not to be
confounded with the pre-Christian Nazarites or Christian Nazarenes--were
Jews who revered St. John the Baptist as the prophet of ancient Mosaism,
but regarded Jesus Christ as a false Messiah sent by the powers of
darkness.[208] Modern Jewish opinion confirms this affirmation of Judaic
inspiration and agrees with Matter in describing the Mandaeans as
Gnostics: "Their sacred books are in an Aramaic dialect, which has close
affinities with that