The language is so familiar that we can hardly entertain the possibility it is not Christian. Christian, however, it can scarcely be. Although early Christian writers like Melito of Sardis and Justin Martyr recognize in the patriarch Joseph a prototype of Jesus Christ, no Christian writer would ever have called a Messiah ben Joseph ‘Lamb of God’, for Jesus was of the tribe of Judah.

In the previous case I was able to leave aside the Armenian version of the Testament of Joseph, because it contained almost all the key features of the Greek, even if it had much else besides. But we cannot ignore the Armenian version of Testament of Benjamin 3. It reads, in Charles’s translation:

Do ye also, therefore my children follow the good and holy man . . . [There comes a much shorter version of vv. 2-5, v. 6 continues:] For Joseph also besought our father that he would not impute to them this evil. And thus Jacob cried out: My good child, thou hast prevailed over the bowels of thy father Jacob. And he embraced him, and kissed him for two hours, saying, In thee shall be fulfilled the prophecy of heaven, which says that the blameless one shall be defiled for lawless men, the sinless one shall die for ungodly men.

All the decisive elements are lacking. It is possible that the Armenian represents a text pre-dating the work of a Christian interpolator, but that is not the only possible solution to a puzzling problem.

Notice that all that is contained in v. 8 in the Old Testament reference to Isaiah 53. The ‘prophecy of heaven’ in the Armenian version is a strict Old Testament prophecy. It is possible that a Christian editor removed a specific reference to the Messiah ben Joseph, but not very likely. There is no copy of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs that explicitly claims to be a Christian book, and the name of Jesus never occurs. A Christian scribe would therefore not feel bound to answer for everything in the book he copied; he could well accept the prefiguring of the Messiah in the virtues of Joseph without bothering with the fact that, strictly speaking, the prophecy looked forward to a son from the tribe of Joseph. Perhaps a messianic prophecy about the son of Joseph would he held not to be inappropriate concerning him who was known as Joseph’s son (Lk. 3.23-24; 4.22; Jn 1.45; 6.42). If the shorter text is not the result of a Christian excision, it is likely that the shorter Armenian text represents a tradition before the last of the Jewish additions was made.

My point is that it is scarcely possible to argue that a Christian interpolator would make this text say that the Lamb of God was to be son of Joseph, even though it is very likely that he would transmit the text without demur.