[3] Due to the pseudonymous nature of this attribution, it is now also referred to as the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, although this is variously abbreviated as TPsJ or TgPsJ.
The Talmud relates that Yonatan ben Uziel, a student of Hillel the Elder, fashioned an Aramaic translation of the Nevi'im.
The second is the Venice edition first printed in 1591 and whose manuscripts were known earlier to Azariah dei Rossi (d. 1578), an Italian physician who discussed them in his work Meʾor ʿEynayim (1573–1575).
[11][12][13] Earlier citations to the TPsJ are not known, and none exist in the works of Nathan b. Yehiel of Rome who otherwise cited Palestinian Targums many times.
[15] Later still, the rendering of Genesis 21:21 in the TPsJ contains a polemic reducing the status of Ishmael and against Khadija (called Adisha in the text), the first wife of Muhammad, and a daughter of theirs name Fatima.
[15] Paul Flesher and Bruce Chilton have argued that all three major Targums, including Pseudo-Jonathan, should date to the fifth century or earlier because of a lack of Arabic loanwords, for one, and that the Jerusalem Talmud describes a variant containing an expansion of Leviticus 22:28 in y. Ber.
Flesher and Chilton take this to imply that the Jerusalem Talmud, which reached its form by the first half of the fifth century, has cited the TPsJ.
[16] However, Leeor Gottlieb has retorted that this only provides evidence for the presence of a tradition acting as the common source for the Jerusalem Talmud and TPsJ Lev.