This chapter introduces the life of Mani as mediated through the history of Manichaean Studies. It follows the field’s genesis in the confessional polemics of the Reformation to the twentieth century where repeated new and unexpected manuscript discoveries have allowed for an advancement of the field through textual studies and philology. Texts that survive in a wide variety of languages, ranging from Latin and Greek through Coptic, Arabic, various Middle Iranian languages including Parthian and Sogdian, even Uighur and Chinese. This chapter reconsiders the many variations of the life of Mani as depicted in Manichaean, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical and polemical texts in the light of these new discoveries and the scholarship that preceded it.

The Christian tradition has regarded Mani as the arch-heretic and seducer of the faithful. His memory has been profoundly shaped by a fascinating counter-biography known as The Acts of Archelaus. This circulated from circa 340 CE and dominated Western knowledge until the reading of new sources from the Islamicate world in the nineteenth century and then the recovery of texts written by the Manichaean community in the twentieth century. The most remarkable of these has been the miniature Mani-Codex written in Greek that preserves an entirely different narrative of Mani’s youth and upbringing in a sectarian Jewish–Christian community of southern Mesopotamia. This chapter discusses and compares various pictures of Mani, including topics such as his origins, name and the religious experiences that he claimed.