What is the “Testament of Moses”?
Testament of Moses
Richard Bauckham has argued convincingly that there were at least two Moses pseudepigrapha circulating in antiquity: the Testament of Moses and the Assumption of Moses. He thinks that the (more) original Greek version of the Latin fragment was the Testament of Moses, which is quoted in Jude 9. I have argued that the Latin fragment could be a separate work from either the Testament of Moses or the Assumption of Moses.
I agree that the internal evidence indicates that the Latin fragment is a first-century Jewish work. I do not see any convincing evidence that the now mostly-lost Greek version was a translation of a Hebrew original.
See my The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2005), pp. 149-154, for details.
Past posts in Phil Long's series on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha are noted here and links. For some time he has been working though the Testamentary literature. Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.
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