"You must understand, the Mandaeans were not taken in by the Pauline propaganda. They knew all the reasons why the older stories were true; the significance of Paul arriving in Corinth and Ephesus claiming himself to be the first Christian missionary and finding churches already there, as the Acts of the Apostles so foolishly gives away, and the churches were those of John. They also grasped the deep significance of baptism, and the Muslim people hereabouts regard their long adherence to that practice as very, very strange. The central significance, of course, is that the baptizer always initiates the baptized. He is senior to him, more initiated, more acquainted with the mysteries. He is no follower. He is the bearer of the knowledge, not the acolyte in search of it. How that managed to turn into a tale of John being little more than a spiritual warm-up act is one of history’s more endearing little tales.