Editing Testament of Adam (section)

==Authorship and date==
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 [[pun]]s seem unique to Syriac in the oldest versions, along with a quote of [[Book of Zechariah|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&ndash;7th centuries.<ref name="robinson" />

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.<ref name="robinson" />