MANICHAEAN LITERATURE 587
your food is of no avail. For this body is defiled and molded from a mold of
defilement. You can see how, whenever someone cleanses his food and par-
takes of that food that has just been washed, it seems to us that from it still
come blood and bile and flatulence and excrements of shame and the defile-
ment of the body. But if someone were to keep his mouth away from this
washed food for a few days, immediately all these offals of shame and loath-
someness will be recognized as lacking and wanting in the body. But if that
one were to eat of food again, in the same way the offals would again abound
in the body, so that it is clear that they swell from the food itself. But if some-
one else were first to partake of food that is washed and cleansed, and then
partake of food that is unwashed, it is clear that the beauty and the power of
the body is recognized as the same in either case. Likewise, the loathsomeness
and dregs of both types of food are seen as not differing from each other, so
that what has been washed, which the body rejected and sloughed off, is not at
all distinguishable from that other, which is unwashed."^19
WHAT PURITY REALLY IS
'"Now the fact that you wash in water each day is of no avail. For having been
washed and purified once and for all, why do you wash again each day? So that
also by this it is manifest that you are disgusted with yourselves each day and
that you must wash yourselves on account of loathsomeness before you can
become purified. And by this too it is clear most evidently that all the foulness
is from the body. And indeed, you also have put the body on.^20
"Therefore, make an inspection of yourselves as to what your purity really
is.^21 For it is impossible to purify your bodies completely, since each day the
body is disturbed and comes to rest through the excretions of feces from it, so
that the action comes about without a commandment from the savior. The
purity, then, which was spoken about, is that which comes through knowl-
edge, a separation of light from darkness, of death from life, of living waters
from turbid, so that you may know that each is different from the other and
you may keep the commandments of the savior, so that he might redeem the
soul from annihilation and destruction. This is in truth the genuine purity,
which you were commanded to do; but you departed from it and began to
bathe, and have held on to the purification of the body, a thing most defiled19- Washing food does not remove defilement. See Gospel of Thomas 14 and parallels.- Washing or baptizing the body does not make it pure. See Gospel of Thomas 29,56,8o, 87,112.
- Part of this paragraph is restored; see Cameron and Dewey, The Cologne Mani Codex, 67.