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 text included the Aramaic text and its translation 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. In 1587 the censor Andrea de Monte completed his work by deleting most references to idolatry. The work was dedicated to (the memory of) Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Boncompagni), who had died two years earlier in 1585.

In 1602 the manuscript was given to the College of the Neophytes (Collegium Ecclesiasticum Adolescentium Neophytorum or Pia Domus Neophytorum), 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, 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 suggests that Neofiti originated in the 4th century CE.