Testamentum Domini

Testamentum Domini ("Testament of our Lord") is a Christian treatise which belongs to genre of the Church Orders. The work can be dated about the 5th-century CE even if a 4th-century date is sometimes proposed. The provenience is regarded as Syria, even if also Egypt or Asia Minor are possible origins.

The author is unknown, even if the work declares to be the legacy left by Jesus Christ himself to his Apostles before the Ascension, and to give his own words and commands as to the government of the Church.

The late dating, to the 4th or more likely the 5th century CE, may be discerned in the interpolations in the prayers, possibly in the reference to the chief deacon, for elsewhere no single deacon is distinguished by name until the close of the 4th century, in the reference to the Epiphany, which is first heard of elsewhere at the beginning of the 4th century. The suggestion has been hazarded that the last revision was due to the school of Apollinaris of Laodicea (died about 390 CE).

The Testamentum was originally written in Greek, but this original is lost, although a small fragment has been identified in 2011. Extracts were published by Paul de Lagarde in 1856, and a Latin fragment, edited by Montague Rhodes James, appeared in 1893.

The whole book was first published in Syriac in 1899, with a Latin translation by Ephrem Rahmani, the Syrian Catholic Patriarch of Antioch. His text is that of a 17th-century MS. at Mosul, the colophon of which says that the Syriac text was translated from the original Greek "a Jacobo paupere," evidently James of Edessa, in A.D. 687; but he makes use of other material, including an Arabic version made from a Coptic copy written in A.D. 927. The Mosul MS. contains the whole Bible in the Peshitto version, followed by the Syrian Clementine Octateuch. An English translation followed in 1902 by Cooper and Maclean.

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