The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

BOCCACCINI Targum Neofiti as a Proto-Rabbinic Document 259
features of the law. Jesus of Nazareth is the historical incarnation of
the preexistent Christ, who preceded and rules God's creation. As
witnessed in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, the existence of just
people before the gift of the Mosaic law was, in the opinion of secondcentury
Christians, one of the main polemical evidences that, since the
beginning, salvation relied on the preexistent Christ and not on the
later Mosaic law.
In rabbinic Judaism the myth of eternal wisdom was replaced by the
myth of the eternal law. 8 The Mosaic law gradually assumed the
atemporal functions of wisdom. At the end of the second century CE,
the Mishnah explicitly stated that, 'Abraham our father performed the
whole Law before it was given' (m. Qid. 4.14). Christian apologists
had to meet the challenge. The Contra ludeos by Tertullian depends
on Justin's Dialogue with Trypho but for one point. Tertullian knows
of the preexistence of Torah: 'The Law of God already existed before
Moses...for the first time in Paradise' (2.9). The superiority of
Christ's law is no longer founded on the delay and particularism of
the Mosaic law, as in Justin, but on the many reformations that
marked the historical path of the one Torah, until Christ came and the
eternal law was submitted to its definitive reformation.
Neofiti is the evidence of a remarkable occurrence in rabbinic
Judaism in the second half of the second century—the idea of preexistence
of the Torah established itself. Two thousand years before the
world was created, (God) created the Law...the garden of Eden for
the just and Gehenna for the wicked' (Targ. Neof. 3.24). This concept
strengthened the centrality of the Mosaic law and gave a higher degree
of consistency to the ideas of salvation and retribution that the
pharisaic-rabbinic tradition had set up in the previous centuries.
Neofiti is much more than an embellished and clarifying translation; it
is an ideological narrative. It aims to teach how since the beginning,
the destinies of individuals and peoples depend on obedience to the
Mosaic law, from Adam and Eve to the messianic age and the last
judgment.
The idea of the preexistence of Torah clearly derives in Neofiti
from the wisdom tradition. The age of 'two thousand years' corresponds
to the time wisdom stood before God 'daily' before creation—
8. See M. Maher, 'Some Aspects of Torah in Judaism', ITQ 38 (1971),
pp. 310-25; and J. Maier, Torah und Schopfung', Jahrbuch fur Biblische
Theologie 6 (1990), pp. 139-50.