TESTAMENT, Old and New. When the books written by the apostles of .Jesus Christ, or by apostolic men, came to be placed alongside the sacred books of the Hebrews, as comprising the entire scriptural canon, it became necessary to distinguish the two divisions bv' appropriate designations. A usage which already pre- vailed furnished the designations required. The gra- cious engagements into which God was pleased to enter with indivieluals and communities bear in the Old Test. the name of H'^'na, or covenant (q. v.), and to tliis cor- responds the Greek ciaSrtjKi] in the Sept. and New Test. Of these covenants two stand out from all the rest as of pre-eminent importance — God's covenant with Israel mediated by Moses, and that covenant which he prom- ised to establish through the Messiah. In the Jewish Scriptures this latter is designated "^T^"in r\"i"i3, t) Kaivi) Sia<i!]ici] (Jer. xxxi, 31), and this, adopted by our Lord (Matt, s.wi, 28), and familiarly used by the apostles (2
Cor. iii, 6 ; Heb. ix, 15, etc.), would naturally suggest the application of the phrase r/ TraXaia Pta^tiKtj to the former. Among the Jews such expressions as mnnb rr^iatl, TrXaict<; Tiig SiaBl]Kr]c, for the tablets on which the law was inscribed (Deut. ix, 9) ; rii~>3n ""SD, /3i- jSXiov Ttjc Sia^{]K}]i: (Exod. xxiv,7 ; 2 Kings xxiii,21 ; 1 Mace, i, 57), /Si/iAoe cinSrljiciji: (Ecclus. xxiv, 23), were in common use. From these it is an easy transition to such an expression as that of the apostle (2 Cor. iii. 14), »; avdyvioiJit; Tiji; TraXaiuQ Sia!dliK>]c, where the name appropriate to the thing contained is used of that which contains it. There thus arose in the Greek Church the usage of the phrases t) TraXaid StaBlftci] and »'; Knwt) ^uihi]Kr} as designations of the Jewish and Christian sacred writings respectively. In the Latin Church the usage prevailed of calling these Vetus et Novum Testa- inentum. Why the word Testamentum was selected to represent Sia^qKi} rather than Fadus or Pactum may be explained by the fact that the former rather than the latter is the proper equivalent of the Greek word. Hence in the old Itala made from the Sept. it is always used where the Greek has dia^ljKi]; and in the Vulgate it is used similarly in those books that remain in the old version, whereas in those which Jerome translated from the Hebrew n'^~i3 is represented by fcedus or pac- tum. That this usage was an early one in the Latin Church is evident from the words of Tertullian (Adv. Marc, iv, 1) : " Duos Deos dividens (Marcion) alterum alterius Instrumenti vel, quod niarps Usui est dicere, Tes- tamenti." The use of Testamentum, however, does not seem to have been universally accepted till a much later period. In the passage quoted Tertullian evidently gives the preference to the word instrumentum, a term used technically to denote a writing by which anything is to be attested or proved (c(nnp. Quintil. Inst. Oral. xii, 8, 12) ; and this is the word he generally uses (comp. Adv. Marc, iv, 2; l)e Pudic. c. 12, etc.). Rufinus also has " novum et vetus instrumentum" {Expos. Symb. Apostol.) ; and Augustine uses both instrumentum and testamentum in the same context (De Civ. Dei, xx, 4). Lactantius, however, freely uses testamentum as a well- accredited term when lie wrote {Inst. Div. iv, 20).
From the Vulgate and the usage of the Latin fathers. Testament has naturally passed into the title of the two divisions of the Scriptures in the English and most of the European versions.— Kitto. See New Testament ; Old Testament,
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, The, is one of the seventy-two Apocryphal books of the Old Test, which were at one time in circidation, and, accord- ing to Epiphanius {Lib. de Mensuris et Ponderibus, § 10), it formed one of the twenty-two canonical books sent by the Jews to Ptolemy, king of Egypt. See Apocrypha.
I. Author of the Work and his Object. — There can b«f no dispute that the writer's main object and purpose was the conversion of the Jewish nation to the Chris- tian faith. To gain his object his appeal is based not on the authority of INIoses or the law of Sinai, but is re- ferred back to the earlier period of the patriarchs, where, underlying the simple covenant between God and man. were latent the first germs of Christianitv. From this it has been inferred that the writer himself was a Jew. Grabe, the first who treated at length of the Testaments, thought that the writing in question was the work of a, Jew shortly before tlie Christian jera; and to account, for the presence of passages which no Jew could possi- bly have written, he had recourse to the theory of inter^ polation. This opinion, however, has found but little favor, and critics have generally agreed to tlie conclu- sions of Nitzsch, who definitely attributed the work to a Judffio-Christian writer, an opinion adopted now even by Kitschl, who in 18,50 maintained that author was a. Cliristiau of Pauline tendencies. Without entering upon the different views advanced on this point, we pass oa lu the _
TESTAMENTS, PATRIARCHAL 292 TESTAMENTS, PATRIARCHAL
II. Time of Composition. — That it was not composed bcfiiri! A.D. 70 we may inter from tlie author's alhisioii to the tiestructioii of Jerusalem, which assigns to the Testiimcitls a date subsequent to this event. On the other iiand, it is already quoted by Tertullian {Adv. .Uarc. V, 1 ; Scorp. e. 13) and Origen {Horn, in Jos. xv, c. 6) ; and thus we may safely infer, without quoting the different opinions, tliat the most (irobablc date for iis composition is XO-l 10 or 120 of our ;era.