the Baptist, and the evangelist himself may have once followed John. These early baptists seem to have been heterodox Jews, from whom (or in near proximity to whom) the Mandaeans later developed or emerged. The Mandaean sources, with their dualism and terminological affinities with the Johannine literature, became for Bultmann extremely important documents for understanding the milieu and meaning of the Gospel and Epistles of John. The Mandaeans—whose name, of course, means “knowledge” (or gnostic)