Category:Targum Neofiti (text)

The Targum Neofiti is the largest and best preserved among the Palestinian Targumim on the Torah. It covers all books of the Pentateuch. It is also the earliest among extant targumim; its composition is dated in the first centuries of the common era.

Discovery and publication

In 1968-79, Spanish scholar Alejandro Díez Macho published the editio princeps of the Targum Neofiti, based on one manuscript preserved at the Vatican Library. The volume included the Aramaic text and its translations into Spanish (by Alejandro Díez Macho), French [[]] and English (by Martin McNamara).

The first piece of information about the manuscript goes back to 1504, the year indicated in the colophon as the date in which the manuscript was copied in Rome. It became then a property of the censor Andrea de Monte who completed his work by deleting most references to idolatry. When Andrea de Monte passed away in 1587, the manuscript was donated to (the memory of) Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Boncompagni), who had died two years earlier in 1585.

In 1602 the Boncompagni estate gave the manuscript to the College of the Neophytes. The Collegium Ecclesiasticum Adolescentium Neophytorum (or Pia Domus Neophytorum) had been founded in 1577 by Gregory XIII for education of young men, in an institution for converts from Judaism and Islam that itself been started in 1543 by Pope Paul III. The manuscript was preserved there until 1886, when the Vatican bought it along with other manuscripts when the Collegium closed.

At that time Targum Neofiti was titled incorrectly as a manuscript of Targum Onkelos, and it remained unremarked until 1949, when Professor Jose Maria Millas Vallicrosa and Alejandro Díez Macho noticed that it differed significantly from Targum Onkelos.

Two decades after the publication of the editio princeps by Alejandro Díez Macho in 1968-79, Martin McNamara completed an English edition, with commentary, in 1992-97.

Neofiti's date of origin is uncertain. Díez Macho argued for a 1st-century CE date, based upon anti-halakhic material, early geographical and historical terms, New Testament parallels, Greek and Latin words, and some supposedly pre-masoretic Hebrew texts. Martin McNamara rather suggested that Neofiti originated in the 4th century CE.

Closely related to Targum Neofiti are the so-called Fragment Targums, of which ten manuscripts survive. The fragments were first published in 1899 (by M Ginsburger), 1930 (by Paul Kahle) and 1955 (by Alejandro Díez Macho), and then collected together by Michael L. Klein in 1980 and 1986. As the fragments share theological views with Targum Neofiti, they could be variant readings of that targum.

In 2004 Teresa Martínez Saiz has began the publication of the Spanish synoptic edition of Targum Neofiti and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.