As the text stands, the reference to the lamb is unlikely to be Christian. We should have to imagine a Christian’s wanting to insert a reference to Jesus the Lamb of God in a context where another great figure shares in his work. The passage seems to assume a doctrine of the two anointed figures, the anointed priest and the anointed king. No early Christian writer, so far as I know, has ever even toyed with the idea that another man, also anointed, would stand beside Jesus and share in his work. The idea that a Christian interpolator would rename one of two such figures ‘the Lamb of God’ seems highly unlikely.

This point is not new, but I think it is made unassailable by a further observation, which perhaps is new.

The two figures are, pretty clearly, an intrusion; they have been foisted on to an original text which knew of only one figure, the figure of the Lamb. In other words, the lamb imagery has been locked into the tradition by a scribe who held a theory of two Messiahs. Such an editor could not have been a Christian; therefore the tradition he was using is doubly unlikely to have been Christian.

Notice first the confusion. Of the lion and the lamb, surely the lion would represent Judah, yet it is the lamb who is born of the virgin, and she is of Judah. Can the lion represent Levi? In any case, what is the loin doing in the story? He does not fight, nor does he take part in the victory. The solution to all these questions seems to lie in the clause in v 8, και εξ αριστερων ως λεγων. The word αυτου is a false reading for αυτος, either a natural mistake after εξ αριστερων or an unconscious change made by a scribe who believed there had to be two figures. We should accordingly translate, ‘And there cam forth form her a spotless lamb and he was at (her) left hand like a lion’. Because the lamb was like a lion he was able to destroy the wild animals when they attacked him.

But what are we to make of the reference to Judah and Levi in v. 11? It is importance to notice that, even if I had not been able to remove the supposed figure of the lion from v. 8, there would still not be two figures in v. 11. As the text stands, the lamb is descended from Judah and from Levi. This is, of course, perfectly possible, and some commentators, beginning with Charles, have argued that the common phrase ‘Messiah from Aaron and from Israel’ in the Damascus Document referred to one Messiah and not two. However, the Greek MSS vary in the order of precedence, MS C reading ‘Levi and Judah’ against all the rest. This suggests that ‘Levi’ was originally a gloss which was incorporated in varying order into the text and that εξ αυτων was originally εκ του σπερματος (cf. C) or εξ αυτου. The original text here two referred to the Lamb of God from the seed of Judah, whose kingdom, as promised to David for his son would be an eternal kingdom.

It seems that v. 8 has been misread by scribes who were accustomed to thinking of two great figures as taking part in the final victory, and v. 11 has been added by a glossator who believed that the Lamb of God would be descended from both Judah and Levi. Neither the scribe (unless it was a sheer mistake) nor the glossator can have been Christians, for no Christian would have wanted either to associate another figure with the Lamb in the work of salvation or to suggest that the Lamb of God was descended from Levi as well as form Judah.

The scribe who changed αυτος to αυτου, if he was not simply making a mistake, cannot have been a Christian. The scribe who added a reference to Levi to a text that referred only to Judah cannot have been a Christian. But the scribe who put ‘the Lamb of God who bears the sin of the world saving the Gentiles and Israel’ in v. 11 where all other manuscripts have ‘the Lab of God by grace saving the Gentiles and Israel’ was almost certainly a Christian (MS C; cf. Jn 1.29)

We have these small but precious pieces of evidence that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs were transmitted by scribes who were not Christians, as well as later, by scribes who were Christians.