Two further questions may help us determine whether or not a text developing Jewish scriptural material is, in fact, of Jewish or Christian origin when obvious ‘signature features’ are lacking or indeterminate.
The ¿rst is: Does the text in question develop a topic or ¿gure in ways that are consonant with other known, early Christian texts’ develop-ment of the same, or in ways that are contrary to and therefore prob-lematic within early Christian discourse? If the latter, does Christian invention of the Testaments better explain the evidence than Christian redaction (‘domestication’, ‘coopting’) of the same? The second ques-tion pertains to the ‘conversaques-tions’ reÀected within the particular text:
Do the Testaments evidence interaction with identi¿ably Christian traditions, or do they show an awareness, rather, only of pre-Christian Jewish literature? In other words, how can an analysis of the Testa-ments’ ‘intertexture’ help us locate their origin?
To take up the latter question ¿rst, the Testaments betray no acquaintance with early Christian literature. Rather, they reverberate with Genesis, with other Jewish scriptural texts, and with extrabiblical Jewish literature such as Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and literature from Qum-ran. The expansion of Reuben’s story has much in common with the version found in Jub. 33.1-8, where we also ¿nd Reuben catching sight of Bilhah bathing, entering her tent secretly and laying with her while she is asleep. Judah’s story is developed in ways that recall Jubilees, particularly in regard to the ‘wars’ against foreign and rival tribes, including Esau and his sons (T. Jud. 2.1–7.11; 9.1-8; Jub. 34.1-9; 37.1–38.14). There are multiple references to books of Enoch (T. Dan 5.6; T. Jud. 18.1; T. Sim. 5.4; T. Naph. 4.1; T. Jos. 9.1; T. Levi 10.5; 14.1; 16.1; T. Benj. 9.1), which emerge as authoritative wit-nesses to the future rebellion or apostasy of the children of Israel, and the consequences thereof.55 Reuben blames women as a source of
55. Not all references seem to point to our 1 Enoch, but perhaps to a wider body of Enochic literature.
temptation, speaking of their alluring even the Watchers into forni-cation (T. Reub. 5.6). While 1 Enoch appears rather to put the full onus on the Watchers themselves, the author of the Testament is still looking to this story to make his point, rather than the story of the Fall (Gen. 3.1-17), as is more typical for Christian authors. Presenting women as active plotters against men’s self-mastery and sexual virtue has more in common with the ethos of Ben Sira than that of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers. In a manner reminiscent of 1 Enoch 1–5, Naphtali observes how ‘sun, moon, and stars do not change their order’, and his descendants should show the same constancy with regard to ordering their lives according to the law of God. The Gentiles
‘changed their order’ by turning from the worship of the living God to idols; the residents of Sodom ‘changed the order of its nature’; the Watchers ‘also changed the order of their nature’, resulting in the Àood.56 Naphtali desires that his descendants not follow suit (T. Naph.
3.1-5).
The Testament of Levi shows clear connections with a pre-Christian, Jewish text, namely Aramaic Levi.57 Extant fragments of Aramaic Levi provide remarkable parallels with T. Levi 11-13, particularly in regard to the chronology of Levi’s life and the births of his children, as well as to several of his instructions, for example the emphasis on teaching literacy to the descendants of Levi. While Hollander and de Jonge caution against assuming that the author of the Testament of Levi used the Aramaic traditions about Levi that we just happen to have discov-ered, since archaeological chance plays a huge part here, they are also prepared to regard the Aramaic Levi texts as kin to material that the author of the Testament of Levi used and incorporated, and to employ synoptic comparison where the material overlaps to inquire into the
56. The examples of Sodom and the Watchers presumably refer to the trans-gression of the boundaries between angels and human beings in regard to intercourse.
This is certainly the interpretation given in Jude 6-7.
57. In a conference paper (‘Levi in Aramaic Levi and in the Testament of Levi’, http://orion.mscc huji.ac.il/symposiums/2nd/papers/deJonge97 html.), Marinus de Jonge argues that the medieval Aramaic fragments discovered in the Genizah of a synagogue in Cairo (the same repository that gave the modern world its ¿rst glimpses of the Hebrew original of Ben Sira and the ‘Covenant of Damascus’) and the frag-ments of an Aramaic Levi document found at Qumran ultimately all go back to the same original composition. The Cambridge fragments of Aramaic Levi are provided in Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 466-68.
method and purpose of the author of the Greek Testament of Levi.58 Similarly, Naphtali’s testament opens with an account of the geneal-ogy of Bilhah and Zilpah that is found elsewhere, in extant literature, only among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q215 1.2-5). The Testaments’
anthropology, which prominently features various ‘spirits’ that invade the person for good or for ill, most closely resembles the ‘two spirits’
of error and truth so prominent in Qumran literature (as, e.g., 1QS 3.13-4.26, though literary dependence is not hereby suggested).
The world of ‘textual conversations’ within the Testaments remains very much a pre-Christian Jewish world. The early Christian pseude-pigraphon known as 5 Ezra (2 Esd. 1–2), dating from the mid-second century CE, provides an informative contrast. While it contains no explicitly Christian content,59 it nevertheless clearly echoes the lan-guage of speci¿c passages in the Gospel of Matthew and in Revela-tion, showing that these texts were part of the thought-world of the author, thereby locating the author within the Christian community.
The author of 5 Ezra saw no problem with ‘anticipating’ Christian texts (i.e. through intertextual resonances) in a text attributed to Ezra, the sixth-century BCE scribe. If Christians had composed the Testa-ments, especially after the ¿rst century and the broadening dissemi-nation of authoritative Christian writings, would they fail to introduce (consciously or otherwise) echoes of their own formative literature and tradition? This absence, it seems to me, argues for Christian redacting (with the addition of Christian glosses or commentary), not composition, of the Testaments.60
58. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 23-24.
59. Some might object that the reference to the ‘Son of God’ in 5 Ezra 2.47 is distinctively Christian and marks the work as such, but the messiah is also referred to as God’s son throughout 4 Ezra (= 2 Esd. 3–14). See especially 4 Ezra 7.28-29; 13.32, 37, 52). The motif of God’s rejecting the people’s ‘festal days and new moons and circumcisions of the Àesh’ (5 Ezra 1.31) is meaningful within Christian discourse, to be sure, but it is also not foreign to Israelite prophecy (see Isa. 1.13-14; Jer. 9.25).
Notably, violence against God’s people is the cause for this rejection in both Isaiah and 5 Ezra.
60. Two expressions merit further discussion here. T. Levi 6.11 closely resembles 1Thess 2.16, both in context and in wording: both speak of God’s wrath coming upon an enemy of God’s people ‘at last’. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 147), however, argue that mss. b and h preserve the more original wording, with the other mss. showing the inÀuence of 1 Thess. 2.16 (an instance of Christian scribal harmoni-zation of the text to phrases in the New Testament). Moreover, the expression itself could have been derived independently from LXX Num. 12.9; 2 Chron. 19.2; 25.15;
It is not, however, merely the case that the Testaments fail to resonate with known early Christian texts. They also contradict early Christian discourse in surprising ways at a number of points. To consider a less weighty example, the Testaments persistently articulate a different vision for the leadership of the twelve tribes in God’s eschatological future. The expectation throughout the Testaments is that the patriarchs themselves would rise to life to govern their tribes in God’s future (T. Sim. 6.7; T. Levi 18.14; T. Jud. 25.1; T. Zeb. 10.1-4; T. Ben. 10.6-10). This contradicts the probably authentic saying of Jesus that his own disciples would sit enthroned governing the twelve tribes when God’s kingdom comes (Mt. 19.28),61 and stands also in tension with the place accorded to these same twelve apostles in the New Jerusalem in another stream of early Christian tradition (Rev.
21.14).
28.9; 32.26; Ps. 78[77].21, 31; Zech. 7.12 (citations given in Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 147). Second, the expression ‘sin unto death’ (BNBSUJB FJK RB OBUPO, T. Iss. 7.1) is very similar to an expression found in an early Christian text (BNBSUJB QSP@K RB OBUPO, 1 Jn 5.16), but the formulation may again have been developed inde-pendently from the frequent correlation of ‘sin’ with ‘death’ in Jewish texts, as for example the ‘death-bearing sin’ of Num. 18.22, or, more strikingly, the ‘sin unto death’ of Jub. 26.34 (see also 21.22; 33.18).
61. The saying has the support of the criterion of embarrassment insofar as Judas is included here with no quali¿cation (such as we ¿nd in Jn 17.12). Second, the episode in Acts in which Matthias is selected to ¿ll up the number twelve after Judas’
defection presupposes a pre-Easter tradition about the importance of there being twelve with a view to some future role. As the ‘Twelve’ as such do not play an important role in the early church apart from the occasional reference (e.g. 1 Cor.
15.5), such that early Christians would invent (problematic) sayings about their eschatological role, this tradition is likely to have come from Jesus himself. See W.D.
Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. III. Matthew XIX–XXVIII (ICC; London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), p. 58; E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 100; T.W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1957), p. 217; Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 249. The Jesus Seminar designates the saying as inauthentic (Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997], pp. 222-23), but this judgment is based on the Seminar’s a priori position that Jesus did not proclaim an apocalyptic/eschatological message, and, in particular, that all sayings about the ‘Son of Man/Adam’ are ‘the creation of the Christian community’. If ever a phrase met the criterion of dissimilarity in regard to early Christian usage (i.e. outside the body of Jesus sayings), it is ‘Son of Man’.
A weightier example is the elevation of Levi throughout the Testa-ments, and the genealogical connection between Levi and the future priest under whom, in conjunction with Judah, God’s future for Israel would be realized. Given early Christian discourse about the priest-hood of Jesus and the ways in which it is legitimated, it seems to me impossible to conceive of a Christian composing a collection of texts that would work so hard to redeem Levi (who, together with Simeon, stood under Jacob’s curse and was passed over in favor of Judah; see Gen. 49.5-12), when other Christian leaders had already found per-fectly suf¿cient grounds upon which to legitimate Jesus’ high priest-hood other than the invention of a genetic link between Levi and Jesus (alongside the generally acknowledged link between Judah and Jesus).62
The genealogies of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’
lineage back to Judah (Mt. 1.2-3; Lk. 3.33). John the Seer speaks of Jesus under the guise of ‘the lion from the tribe of Judah’ (Rev. 5.5), betraying a complete lack of interest in Levi and any connection between a messiah and that tribe. Paul accepts this Judahite lineage by virtue of af¿rming Jesus’ descent from David (Rom. 1.3). The one author who indirectly introduces priestly branches into Jesus’ extended family tree (Lk. 1.5) makes no explicit claims about the degree of Mary’s relationship to Elisabeth, and therefore Jesus’ connection to a priestly line. Most tellingly, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews explicitly af¿rms Jesus’ descent from Judah and acknowledges his lack of any genealogical pedigree for priesthood through Levi’s line.
Indeed, this author believes it to be ‘well known’ (QSP EIMPO) ‘that our Lord sprang up from Judah, in reference to which tribe Moses said nothing about priests’ (Heb. 7.14).
The author of Hebrews solves the problem not by inventing a genealogical connection through Mary, but by appealing to an oracle of God that would legitimate a non-levitical priesthood, ¿xing upon Ps. 110.4: ‘The Lord has sworn, and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek’. An appeal to Ps. 110.4 is contrary to an appeal to genealogical descent from Levi, at least in Christian discourse as represented by Hebrews, for the eternal priest must come, according to this text, from an entirely different line than
62. This reversal of the biblical tradition about Jacob’s judgment on Simeon and Levi appears also in Judith and Jubilees, texts reÀective of ‘boundary-maintaining Judaism’ (see Jdt 9.2, 4; Jub. 30.3, 18-20).
the line of Levi. The rejection of Levi and elevation of Judah in Genesis 49 is much more conducive to early Christian discourse with its promotion of the priest after the order of Melchizedek, the priestly messiah and king from the line of Judah, as attested by every passage concerning Jesus’ genealogy in the New Testament. The concerted effort to elevate the priesthood (Levi) over any other line would be quite foreign to early Christian interests and strategies. Early Chris-tians could co-opt this kind of material, but would scarcely have invented it.63