of the Twelve Patriarchs.This collection is clearly Christian in its present
form. One of its distinctive features is the expectation of a messiah from
Levi and Judah, who is evidently identified as Christ. He will be priest and
king, God and man (T. Sim.7:2). He is referred to as “the lamb of God”
(T. Jos.19:6).Testament of Judah24 speaks of a man from the tribe of Ju-
dah, for whom the heavens will be opened and in whom no sin will be
found. Scholars have argued that each of these references can be justified
in a Jewish context, or that they are Christian insertions in a text that is ba-
sically Jewish (Charles 1913: 291). The cumulative evidence, however, is far
more easily explained on the assumption of Christian authorship (de
Jonge 1953).
Nonetheless, there are good reasons to think that theTestamentsdraw
heavily on Jewish traditions. The association of the messiah with both Levi
and Judah inevitably recalls the two messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Par-
tial parallels to theTestament of Levi,in Aramaic, and to theTestament of
Naphtali,in Hebrew, have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is
possible, however, that these were source documents used by the Christian
authors of theTestaments(de Jonge 2000). We do not have conclusive evi-
dence for a JewishTestaments of the Twelve Patriarchs(as distinct from
apocryphal writings associated with individuals such as Levi). The ethical
teachings of theTestamentscan be explained satisfactorily in the context of
either Hellenistic Judaism or early Christianity.
In cases where the Christian elements are not extensive, and somewhat
incongruous, a stronger case can be made for Jewish authorship. The fifth
Sibylline Oraclecontains only one overtly Christian verse (arguably two) in
a composition of 531 verses. Verse 257 qualifies the “exceptional man from
the sky” with the line “who stretched out his hands on the fruitful wood.”
The following verse says that he will one day cause the sun to stand. Most
commentators excise either one or both verses as an interpolation (Collins
in Charlesworth 1983: 399). The reference to causing the sun to stand could
be regarded as part of the interpolation because of a play on Jesus/Joshua).
Davila allows that this is possible, but finds it unnecessary: “Sibylline Ora-
cles 5 as a whole reads comfortably as a work by a Jewish-Christian who was
outraged by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and who put after-the-
fact prophecies in the mouth of the Sibyl both to condemn the Romans and
the other polytheistic nations and to predict the coming of Jesus as the es-
chatological redeemer” (Davila 2005:189). But while the outrage over the
destruction is loud and clear in this work, the identification of Jesus as the
eschatological redeemer is perceptible only in this one passage, and is not11Early Judaism in Modern ScholarshipEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:48 PM