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Concept
Testament of Adam
Summary
The Testament of Adam is a Christian work of Old Testament pseudepigrapha that dates from the 2nd to 5th centuries AD in origin, perhaps composed within the Christian communities of Syria. It purports to relate the final words of Adam to his son Seth; Seth records the Testament and then buries the account in the legendary Cave of Treasures. Adam speaks of prayer and which parts of Creation praise God each hour of the day; he then prophesies both the coming of the Messiah and the Great Flood; and finally, a description of the celestial hierarchy of angels is given.
The work was likely originally written in Syriac. Manuscripts are extant in Syriac, Arabic, Karshuni, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and Greek. The earliest surviving manuscript is dated to the 9th century, and there appear to be three major recensions of the text.
The author of the work is unknown. The date of composition was likely somewhere between the 2nd century to the 5th century; S. E. Robinson hypothesizes that the mid-to-late third century as the best guess. They probably were a Syrian or Palestinian Christian, as certain wordplay and puns seem unique to Syriac in the oldest versions, along with a quote of Zechariah 1:8 that matches the Syriac Peshitta version rather than the Greek Septuagint version. There appears to be a quotation of the work in the Syriac version of the Transitus Mariae, generally thought to date to the late 4th century. The third section of the work, the celestial hierarchy, does not appear closely linked to the rest of the work; it is thus possible it was composed independently before being combined with the work at some point in the 5th–7th centuries.
The author was likely compiling and modifying an existing piece of Jewish apocrypha. What was originally a Jewish midrash on the story of Creation was expanded to include a defense of Christianity's claim that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah. This suggests a community that was admiring of Judaism, as contrasted to other branches of Christianity which strongly rejected Judaism in the era of the late Roman Empire; for this author, Jesus was a continuation of a grand Jewish tradition.
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