Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

every clod of earth is the flesh and blood of the Lord

Mani grew up in a Jewish-Christian Gnostic sect. The Cologne Mani Codex recounts his youth among the Elchasaites and his break with them.

From this source we also know of the view according to which Mani calls the earth ‘flesh and blood of the Lord’.

In this work he attributes this view to Elchasai: ‘Elchasai took dust from the earth which had spoken to him, wept, kissed it, placed it in his bosom and began to say: That is the flesh and blood of my Lord.’ This idea is to be found, as we shall see later, both in the Roman Empire in the West and in China in the East. The fact that this does not appear so prominently in the earlier strata of the myth, in which it is nevertheless present, is caused by the rather varied form of expression of the myth, in which fundamental problems can be allotted to individual mythologumena and thus furnish a multi-coloured picture.