Christianity: Details about 'Testaments Of The Twelve Patriarchs'
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The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is an important constituent of the apocryphal scriptures connected with the Old Testament, comprising the dying commands of the twelve sons of Jacob. It is part of the Oskan Armenian Orthodox Bible of 1666 and fragments were found at Qumran. It is considered Apocalyptic literature. The testaments were written in Hebrew in the later years of John Hyrcanus, in all probability after his final victory over the Syrian power and before his breach with the Pharisees, in other words, between 109 BC and 106 BC. Their author was a Pharisee who combined loyalty to the best traditions of his party with the most unbounded admiration of Hyrcanus. The Maccabean dynasty had now reached the zenith of its prosperity, and in its reigning representative, who alone in the history of Judaism possessed the triple offices of prophet, priest and king, the Pharisaic party had come to recognize the actual Messiah. To this John Hyrcanus, in whom had culminated all the glories and gifts of this great family, the author addresses two Messianic hymns. In the early decades of the Christian era the text was current in two forms. One of these was translated not later than AD 50 into Greek, and this translation was used by the scholar who rendered the second Hebrew recension into Greek. In the second and following centuries it was interpolated by Christian scribes, and finally condemned undiscriminatingly along with other apocryphs. For several centuries it was wholly lost sight of, and it was not till the 13th century that it was rediscovered through the agency of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, who translated it into Latin, under the misconception that it was a genuine work of the twelve sons of Jacob, and that the Christian interpolations were a genuine product of Jewish prophecy. The advent of the Reformation brought in critical methods, and the book was unjustly disparaged as a mere Christian forgery for nearly four centuries. A copy of the testaments is published in The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden. The Testaments
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