I begin by noting my basic agreement with certain conclusions offered by Professor de Jonge in his recent essay on ' Christian Influence in the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs': I concur (1) that the Greek Testaments are the end product of a long literary process with Jewish and Christian redactional stages; (2) that the process can be only partially traced; (3) that the Christian redaction comes at a later stage in the process; (4) that no definite conclusions are yet possible concerning the relationship between passages in the Test XII and the messianic texts from Qumran. On this last point, however, I do not think it likely that the full publication of the Qumran fragments will resolve the question of the origins of the Testaments because there are fundamental features of our document which have no direct connection with messianic matters and which diverge so sharply from the outlook on life represented at Qumran as to require us to assume a non-Qumranian provenance for the Testaments. I suggest, therefore, that we turn from a messianic/christological approach and concentrate on another dimension in which hopefully greater clarity is attainable: the ethical framework of the Test XII. The procedure followed will be (1) to seek to discern what the ethical stance implicit and explicit in the Testaments is, and (2) to show how that ethical framework relates to other Jewish and non-Jewish ethical systems presumably contemporary with the earlier stage of the Testaments.