rakovsky wrote:DCH,
Two things to consider are:
1. Is it a Christian interpolation or is the whole book Christian? A discussion on original sin need not be Christian, depending on the substance. AFAIK, Jews and Eastern Christians, who continue the theology of the early centuries, agree that Adam committed an act that led to his rejection from Eden. So this statement does not appear in conflict with that: "Do you not know that all who have come from Adam and Eve have died, and that none of the prophets has escaped death?"
Personally I don't have an opinion on whether it was Jewish or Christian authorship. Here is an article strongly defending Jewish authorship from a Jewish POV:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic ... stament-of
2. If the whole book is Christian, then from what period of Christianity was it written? It's not enough to say as the scholar I cited did that since the book has references to the NT, therefore it must have been written after the NT was basically completed, and that this date of NT completion must have been 100 AD.
Since the NT has lots of passages and concepts, in fact the text of Testament of Adam only
needs to have been written after those NT passages or concepts existed. So if a colloquy about original sin was created in 40 AD, and was written down in a NT Epistle in 45-70 AD, then this fixes the earliest date for its inclusion in Testament of Adam as 40-45 AD.
There are authors of original material and there are editors of sources. Something like parts of the T12P are found among the DSS, but not anything like what Christians were preserving. The T12P may utilize Jewish materials, but has certainly given them Christian perspective. I do not think that anything like the Testament of Adam was found among the DSS, so it is almost certainly a Christian composition.
When would that writing or editing have happened? I think that the 40s CE is just way too early. It is wishful thinking along the line of "Well, it
should be so, so it
must have been so." I think that critics have identified specifically Christian statements in them, and these need to be traced to likely sources (NT gospels, primarily, maybe Pauline epistles) and then related one to another. As you probably know, most critics, even believers, think that the NT did not take its current form until at very earliest 100 CE. Maybe even 200 CE for Acts and some or all of the General epistles. Thus I would date the current forms of the T12P or the TAdam earlier than 100 CE, when Christian doctrine as we see it in the NT finally solidified.
Are you familiar with David Trobisch? He looks at the NT books as groups based on genre. These books tended to be grouped together in most all existing Mss. containing multiple books. These groups are
1) The Four Gospels, then
2) The 13 Pauline Epistles plus Hebrews, then
3) Acts and General Epistles; and finally
4) The Revelation of Jesus Christ to his Slave John.
He found that in their present "canonical" form these groups contain phrases, probably added by the final editor, that link them together. Jn. 1:42 is a good example.
John 1:42 He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, "So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas" (which means Peter).
This phrase links the four gospel collection to the Pauline collection: 1 Co. 1:12; 1 Co. 3:22; 1 Co. 9:5; 1 Co. 15:5; Gal. 1:18, & 2:9, 11, 14 (in the Nestle Aland text at least). The Stephanus critical text had "Petros" instead of "Kefas" at Gal 1:18, and 2:11,14. Trobisch does not mention this link in his
The First Edition of the New Testament (2000), but it seem to be an example of this linking phenomenon
He also published
Pauls Letter Collection-Tracing the Origins (1994), which treaded the Pauline collection as a purposely created letter collection, based on real letters and possibly even edited by Paul himself to remove irrelevant materials and order the books used.
These indications of editorial activity do not argue in favor of a really early date for their origins as we have them.
DCH