The Testament of Moses, the Assumption of Moses, and Jude 9

Jude 9 refers to a dispute between the devil and the archangel Michael about Moses’ dead body as if his readers would be familiar with such a story. No account of this is found in the Old Testament, so the story must be derived from an extrabiblical tradition. Jude’s reference could have drawn from an oral tradition on the topic or to a text which embodied the tradition. Since the surviving manuscript of Testament of Moses breaks off before Moses’ death, it is not obvious whether it contained a version of this tradition; no other surviving pseudepigraphal work about Moses contains this episode either (Priest, “Testament,” 924). compare Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 407–09; Bauckham, Jude, 235–270). However, several early Christian writers mention or cite noncanonical texts that may be related to the Jude 9 reference and/or the Testament of Moses, as described below (Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 407–09; Bauckham, Jude, 235–270).

Ancient lists of noncanonical texts, including the Stichometry of Nicephorus, mention both a work named Testament of Moses and one named Assumption of Moses (Bauckham, Jude, 236; Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 407–08). This suggests that the titles referred to two different works. The Testament of Moses seems to belong to the testament genre, and so is usually identified with the work Stichometry of Nicephorus calls Testament of Moses; however, Testament of Moses itself bears no title in the extant manuscript and is not quoted by that title in any ancient sources.

Several early Christian writers refer to the Assumption of Moses as a text containing the account referred to in Jude 9 (e.g., Origen, Princ. 3.2.1; Clement of Alexandria, Fragments on the Epistle of Jude); in most cases, there is no evidence that shows that these references are to the lost ending of the Testament of Moses rather than to a lost Assumption of Moses. However, the Historia Ecclesiastica of Gelasius Cyzicenus cites two passages which he attributes to the Assumption of Moses; one quotes Testament of Moses 1.14 (Gelasius Cyzenicus, Hist. Eccl. 2.17.17), while the other includes the tradition of the dispute between Michael and the devil over Moses’ body (Gelasius Cyzenicus, Hist. Eccl. 2.21.7; Bauckham, Jude, 260, 268). This appears to indicate that the Assumption of Moses which contained the account of the dispute is to be identified with the presently extant Testament of Moses. On this basis, the Testament of Moses was initially identified as and is still sometimes known as the Assumption of Moses (Priest, “Testament,” 925).

How to reconcile these data with one another is not obvious. Charles argued that the Testament of Moses and Assumption of Moses were originally two separate works but were ultimately joined into one book (Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 407–09). This would account both for their separate entries in lists of noncanonical books and for Gelasius Cyzenicus quoting the Testament of Moses as Assumption of Moses. Priest calls Charles’ suggestion “attractive” but leaves the issue unresolved (Priest, “Testament,” 925). Bauckham, taking into account a wide range of material from ancient and medieval Christian texts that provide traditions about Moses’ death, offers a different resolution. He argues that there are two distinct forms of the tradition about the dispute between Michael and the devil. In his view, Jude referred to the Testament of Moses, which included the first form of the tradition but was cited by only a few extrabiblical Christian authors, while the second form may actually have been created under the influence of Jude 9 as anti-gnostic polemic, and was included in the Assumption of Moses. Assumption of Moses was then cited by more extrabiblical Christian authors, since they were more familiar with it than with the Testament of Moses; Gelasius’ reference could be either an error or a reference to a combined text (Bauckham, Jude, 235–270).