I am reading "History of Iran" by Axworthy and he really does not like Mani.
Without Mani the teachings of St Augustine would have been very different, if anything at all with things like Original Sin and such may not have made it in such an influential and doctrinal form into the Catholic Church, they were around in some Gnostic sects. Would Pelagius's free will have come about?
So. Let us say Shapur, despite his known tolerance makes an exception for Mani and stops him before his teachings spread far and wide. How does this affect things?
Very important to Iran and the Sassanids the Mazdakites may not have emerged leading to the disastrous civil war of the early 500s.
"it is foolish to attribute all the evils of religion to Mani, but he does seem to have done a remarkably good job if infecting a range of belief systems with the most damaging and depressing ideas about impurity, the corruption of material exsistance, and the sinfulness of sexual pleasure...His thinking was a kind of Pandora's box of malingnity, the particles from which went fluttering off in all directions on their misshapen wings" (pg. 51)
Without Mani the teachings of St Augustine would have been very different, if anything at all with things like Original Sin and such may not have made it in such an influential and doctrinal form into the Catholic Church, they were around in some Gnostic sects. Would Pelagius's free will have come about?
So. Let us say Shapur, despite his known tolerance makes an exception for Mani and stops him before his teachings spread far and wide. How does this affect things?
Very important to Iran and the Sassanids the Mazdakites may not have emerged leading to the disastrous civil war of the early 500s.