(RNS) — As the morning sun of Central Texas burned off the lingering crispness of a recent autumnal Sunday, Valid Ebadfardzadeh, an older man with a long white beard who was dressed in a stark white cotton turban and robe, lifted his hands in prayer.
To his right stood a bespectacled man with a salt-and-pepper beard, dressed in identical attire, with a golden ring on his pinky and a wooden staff resting against his shoulder. He stooped slightly, silently reading ancient words from a tattered book.
The two men are priests belonging to an ancient Middle Eastern sect known as the Mandaeans, one of the world’s smallest and least known religious groups. Consisting of about 60,000 members worldwide, Mandaeans are considered by scholars to be practitioners of the last surviving gnostic religion, a faith that may contain pre-Christian origins and reflects the swirling influences of Greek and Middle Eastern thought in the first century A.D.
Mandaeans believe they are descendants of the disciples of John the Baptist, the ascetic preacher who baptized Jesus Christ, according to the Christian tradition, and baptism remains their faith’s central ritual. Unlike Christians, however, the Mandaean religion requires practitioners to perform baptism, called the masbuta, every Sunday, often rebaptizing the already baptized, …