Mani combined all the religions which he respected with his own experience of revelation into a new ‘Manichaean’ cult. Like gnostic dualism before it, this provided a convincingly stark account of the world’s suffering, portraying it as the symptom of an unending struggle between matched forces of good and evil. Jesus occupied a very important place in Mani’s scheme of divinity: indeed, he habitually referred to himself as the ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’, as Paul of Tarsus had done before him.
