Footnote 2 – The Baptism of Jesus

There is considerable scholarly debate about the date of the Targums. Although they may have been edited and “published” considerably later than New Testament times (some say as late as the seventh or eighth century A.D.), various passages in the Targums obviously must be dated much earlier. This is true of the material relating to the binding of Isaac. We have a number of clues suggesting that the Targumic version of the story of the binding of Isaac was well-known in New Testament times. For example, the works of Philo and Josephus and other first-century documents all describe the voluntary nature of Isaac’s submission to sacrifice. Even more significant is the fact that the Targumic material locates the binding of Isaac on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In the Targumic accounts, when Isaac looks up from the altar, he has a vision of God’s glory known in rabbinic literature as the Shekinah, who dwelt in the Temple. In this way the Targums use the binding of Isaac to prove the sole legitimacy of Jerusalem and its Temple as the place of sacrifice. This makes good sense only in the period before 70 A.D., before the Roman destruction of the Temple, and suggests that those details were incorporated into the story before the Temple’s destruction.