In this chapter, I contextualize the discourse of orality as the privileged medium of revelation through three corpora; rabbinic idea of Oral Torah, the Manichaean claim that the Kephalaia contain Mani’s Oral Revelation not found in his Written Revelations, and the Pseudo-Clementine’s argument that only Orality (not vision) can guarantee prophetic truth. I ultimately argue that all three drew from a common fund of discursive tools to thematize orality as a privileged site of revelation. After a summary of contemporary discussions on rabbinic Oral Torah, I show how the Kephalaia itself emerged from an “Oral Performative” contexts that was largely independent of textual exegesis of Mani’s books. I argue that, like the rabbis, the Manichaeans privileged the orality because it allowed them to claim that they were simply continuing the revelation that Mani had begun. I then turn to the Ps.-Clementine Homilies and show it thematizes orality in ways that are surprisingly congruent with both the rabbis and the Manichaeans.

I turn to analyze three passages on prophethood from the two Manichaean codices known as the Kephalaia. I suggest that kephalaia are rhetorical-literary units and must be contextualized alongside other contemporary developments. I first turn to the “Introduction” to the Kephalaia, which features Mani recounting his travels around the Sasanian Empire. Rather than mining this for historical data, I argue that the whole point of this peculiar rendition of Mani’s life is to naturalize the form of the two codices of Kephalaia as anthologies, thus showing each kephalaion to be a discrete shard of Mani’s single revelation. I next argue that the so-called “Chain of Prophets” in the first kephalaion is an argument against prevailing Christian notions for a single glorious “Apostolic Age” in the past. Rather than a single Apostolic past, this kephalaion argues that God sends apostles regularly to provide humanity with a way to salvation. In the final section of this chapter, I show how another kephalaion is invested in Sasanian Imperial vision of geography and space, thus bridging the gap between the Sasanian Empire as an institution and the Manichaeans who live within it.