The Borborites or Borborians (; in Egypt, Phibionites; in other countries, Koddians, Barbelites, Secundians, Socratites, Zacchaeans, Stratiotics) were claimed to be a Christian Gnostic sect, said to be descended from the Nicolaitans. The group is described in the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis (ch. 26), and Theodoret's Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium, the only extant sources on them from antiquity.
It is difficult to definitively know the practices of the group, as both Epiphanius and Theodoret were opponents of the group. According to Epiphanius, the sect were libertines who embraced pleasures of the earthly world.
Etymology
The word Borborite comes from the Greek word , meaning "mud"; the name Borborites can therefore be translated as "filthy ones", and is unlikely to be the term the sect used for themselves. The name Koddian is claimed by Epiphanius to derive from an Aramaic term for a dish or bowl; J. J. Buckley writes that the likely root, kuda, refers in both Syriac Aramaic and Mandaic Aramaic to a hemorrhage after birth, or to the caul of a fetus, suggesting that the reference to a 'bowl' is euphemistic.
Teachings
Sacred texts
The Borborites possessed a number of sacred books, including Noria (the name they gave to Noah's wife), a Gospel of Eve, The Apocalypse of Adam, and The Gospel of Perfection. They also used a version of The Gospel of Philip, but a quotation from the Borborite Gospel of Philip found in Epiphanius' Panarion is not found anywhere in the surviving version from Nag Hammadi. Several of the Borborites' sacred scriptures revolved around the figure of Mary Magdalene, including The Questions of Mary, The Greater Questions of Mary, The Lesser Questions of Mary, and The Birth of Mary. Although the Borborites did also use both the Old Testament and the New Testament, they renounced the God of the Old Testament as an impostor deity.
Cosmology
They taught that there were eight heavens, each under a separate archon. In the seventh reigned a figure variously called Yaldabaoth or Sabaoth, creator of heaven and earth, the God of the Jews, represented by some Borborites under the form of an ass or a hog; hence the Jewish prohibition of swine's flesh. In the eighth heaven reigned Barbelo, the mother of the living; the Father of All, the supreme God; and Jesus Christ. They denied that Christ was born of Mary, or had a real body, defending instead docetism; and also denied the resurrection of the body. The human soul after death wanders through the seven heavens, until it obtains rest with Barbelo. Man possesses a soul in common with plants and beasts.
Epiphanius also indicates that the Phibionites honored 365 archons, with the 8 listed archons merely being the greatest of them. According to him, a male would have sex for each one of the archons as an offering. J. J. Buckley notes that this belief may have served as the grounds for certain Phibionite rituals.
The Borborites were also said to extract fetuses from pregnant women and consume them, particularly if the women accidentally became pregnant during related sexual rituals.
J. J. Buckley, similarly, highlights parallels which the Phibionite or Koddian belief system and rituals described by Epiphanius show with other Gnostic groups. The consumption of seminal and fetal material, as a microcosm of Barbelo's seduction of the archons to recover captive light, shows parallels with the Manichaean belief that when vegetables are consumed by the Elect, the captive light-particles or divine sparks within are purified and liberated. The ritual use of semen and menses parallels the use of water and hamra, respectively, in a ritual metaphor for fertilization in a Mandaean masiqta. Contrasts include Mandaean pronatalism versus Phibionite antinatalism, the stratification of society into priests and laity (Mandaeism) or elect and hearers (Manichaeism) versus the work to liberate divine sparks being carried out by the Phibionite laity, and the Manichaean view of semen and menses as demonic versus the Phibionite identification of their own bodily fluids with the body of Christ.
In Mandaean texts
Gelbert (2013, 2023) suggests that one passage in the Ginza Rabba (Right Ginza 9.1, paragraph 26) describes the Borborites, although they are not given a name in Mandaic.
References
Bibliography
- Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion (Adversus Haereses). Chapters 25 and 26.
- Theodoret. Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium.