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The Slavonic Josephus is an
Old East Slavic
Old East Slavic (traditionally also Old Russian; be, старажытнаруская мова; russian: древнерусский язык; uk, давньоруська мова) was a language used during the 9th–15th centuries by East ...
translation of
Flavius Josephus
Flavius Josephus (; grc-gre, Ἰώσηπος, ; 37 – 100) was a first-century Romano-Jewish historian and military leader, best known for ''The Jewish War'', who was born in Jerusalem—then part of Roman Judea—to a father of priestly d ...
' ''
History of the Jewish War
''The Jewish War'' or ''Judean War'' (in full ''Flavius Josephus' Books of the History of the Jewish War against the Romans'', el, Φλαυίου Ἰωσήπου ἱστορία Ἰουδαϊκοῦ πολέμου πρὸς Ῥωμαίους ...
'' which contains numerous interpolations and omissions that set it apart from all other known versions of Josephus' ''History''. The authenticity of the interpolations was a major subject of controversy in the 20th century, but the latest scholarship has rejected them.
Background
Josephus wrote all of his surviving works after his establishment in Rome (c. 71 AD) under the patronage of the Flavian Emperor
Vespasian
Vespasian (; la, Vespasianus ; 17 November AD 9 – 23/24 June 79) was a Roman emperor who reigned from AD 69 to 79. The fourth and last emperor who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors, he founded the Flavian dynasty that ruled the Empi ...
. As is common with ancient texts, however, there are no surviving extant manuscripts of Josephus' works that can be dated before the 11th century, and the oldest of these are all Greek minuscules, copied by Christian monks. (Jews did not preserve the writings of Josephus because they considered him to be a traitor.) Of the about 120 extant Greek manuscripts of Josephus, 33 predate the 14th century.
The
references to Jesus by Josephus found in
Book 18 and
Book 20 of the ''
Antiquities of the Jews
''Antiquities of the Jews'' ( la, Antiquitates Iudaicae; el, Ἰουδαϊκὴ ἀρχαιολογία, ''Ioudaikē archaiologia'') is a 20-volume historiographical work, written in Greek, by historian Flavius Josephus in the 13th year of the re ...
'' do not appear in any other versions of Josephus' ''The Jewish War'' except for a
Slavonic version of the ''Testimonium Flavianum'' (at times called ''Testimonium Slavonium'') which surfaced in the west at the beginning of the 20th century, after its discovery in Russia at the end of the 19th century.
History of the text
The earliest surviving manuscript of the Slavonic Josephus dates to 1463. The translation itself, however, is at least a century older than that. Some scholars have associated it with the very first Slavic school of translators active in the ninth and tenth centuries. Others have associated it with the Jewish community of
Lvov
Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in Western Ukraine, western Ukraine, and the List of cities in Ukraine, seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is o ...
in the fourteenth century. Virtually any date between those two extremes is possible.
The text is generally associated with
Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rusʹ, also known as Kyivan Rusʹ ( orv, , Rusĭ, or , , ; Old Norse: ''Garðaríki''), was a state in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical Atlas of ...
on the grounds that it has proto-Russian features. It was widely copied and survives in some 33 manuscripts. In some it is interwoven with the chronicles of the Byzantine historians
John Malalas
John Malalas ( el, , ''Iōánnēs Malálas''; – 578) was a Byzantine chronicler from Antioch (now Antakya, Turkey).
Life
Malalas was of Syrian descent, and he was a native speaker of Syriac who learned how to write in Greek later in ...
and
George Hamartolos
George Hamartolos or Hamartolus ( el, ) was a monk at Constantinople under Michael III (842–867) and the author of a chronicle of some importance. Hamartolus is not his name but the epithet he gives to himself in the title of his work: "A compen ...
to form a single
universal history
A universal history is a work aiming at the presentation of a history of all of mankind as a whole, coherent unit. A universal chronicle or world chronicle typically traces history from the beginning of written information about the past up to t ...
.
Grigorije Vasilije was a
Serbian Orthodox
The Serbian Orthodox Church ( sr-Cyrl, Српска православна црква, Srpska pravoslavna crkva) is one of the autocephalous (ecclesiastically independent) Eastern Orthodox Christian churches.
The majority of the population in ...
monk and scribe who translated ''The Jewish War'' from
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language.
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine Empire, Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with Standard language, standardizing the lan ...
to Serbian in the sixteenth century.
All predate the first English translation of Josephus's writings based on the Latin text made in 1602 by
Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge (c. 1558September 1625) was an English writer and medical practitioner whose life spanned the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Biography
Thomas Lodge was born about 1558 in West Ham, the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lo ...
.
History of the controversy
The existence of the documents that led to the discovery of the ''Slavonic Josephus'' was first brought to light by A. N. Popov in Russia in 1866. In 1879
Izmail Sreznevsky
Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky (russian: Измаил Иванович Срезневский; 13 June 1812, Yaroslavl – 21 February 1880, St. Petersburg) was a Russian philologist, Slavist, historian, paleographer, folklorist and writer.
Life
His ...
pointed out that the language used was not Bulgarian or Serbian, but comparable to the Russian chronicles. At about the same time as Sreznevsky, the subject was also studied by
E. Barsov and by the end of the 19th century knowledge of the existence of the documents was established in the west via its listing by Niese and Destinon in 1894. The Estonian scholar Alexander Berendts published a German translation in 1906 and proposed the theory that the Slavonic version had been derived from the original
Aramaic
The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...
of Josephus. However,
Paul L. Maier
Paul L. Maier (born May 31, 1930) is a historian and novelist. He has written several works of scholarly and popular non-fiction about Christianity and novels about Christian historians. He is the former Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient H ...
states that the ''Slavonic Josephus'' "includes so many sensationalized accretions" that most modern scholars consider it as a highly colored translation and paraphrase, and do not consider it to be true to the original Aramaic.
The ''Slavonic Josephus'' was defended in 1926 as authentic by
Robert Eisler
Robert Eisler (27 April 1882 – 17 December 1949) was an Austrian Jewish polymath who wrote about the topics of mythology, comparative religion, the Gospels, monetary policy, art history, history of science, psychoanalysis, politics, astrology ...
and was later supported by George Williamson.
Robert Van Voorst
Robert E. Van Voorst (born June 5, 1952) is an American theologian and educator.
He retired in 2018 as a Professor of New Testament Studies at Western Theological Seminary, in Holland, Michigan, and has published scholarly works in early Christ ...
states that apart from Eisler's controversial book and Williamson statements, "no strong defense has been made" for the authenticity of the ''Slavonic Josephus''. Henry Leeming states that Eisler at times used insufficiently substantiated material which were then discredited, adding that Eisler's
philological
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as the ...
attempts to reverse translate from Old Russian to Greek were shown to be "extremely flimsy". Van Voorst states that the contents of the passages in the ''Slavonic Josephus'' show that "they are Christian compositions and that they do not provide an authentic textual alternative to the main ''Testimonium Flavianum''."
In 1948
Solomon Zeitlin
Solomon Zeitlin, שְׁניאור זלמן צײטלין, Шломо Цейтлин ''Shlomo Cejtlin'' (''Tseitlin, Tseytlin'') (28 May 1886 or 31 May 1892, in Chashniki, Vitebsk Governorate (now in Vitebsk Region) in Russia – 28 December 1976, i ...
argued that the Slavonic Josephus was composed for the purpose of giving a Christian version of Josephus in Greek.
Steven B. Bowman states that the consideration of the ''Slavonic Josephus'' should be removed from the scholarly discussions of the first century, for it only pertains to the
Macedonian elements of the 10th and 11th centuries. The ''Cambridge History of Judaism'' states that the Slavonic version includes statements which Josephus could have hardly written and that recent scholarly opinion dismisses the ''Slavonic Josephus'' as less than authentic, but the 11th-century creation as an ideological struggle against the
Khazars
The Khazars ; he, כּוּזָרִים, Kūzārīm; la, Gazari, or ; zh, 突厥曷薩 ; 突厥可薩 ''Tūjué Kěsà'', () were a semi-nomadic Turkic people that in the late 6th-century CE established a major commercial empire coverin ...
. Van Voorst states that the ''Slavonic Josephus'' at times focuses on blaming Pilate and the Jews, to the point of suggesting that the Jews and not the Romans crucified Jesus.
Louis Feldman
Louis Harry Feldman (October 29, 1926 – March 25, 2017) was an American professor of classics and literature. He was the Abraham Wouk Family Professor of Classics and Literature at Yeshiva University, the institution at which he taught si ...
states that the question "is Josephus the author of the additions and modifications in the Slavonic version" has usually received a negative answer.
Craig A Evans states that although some scholars had in the past supported the ''Slavonic Josephus'', "to my knowledge no one today believes that they contain anything of value for Jesus research".
See also
*
Josephus on Jesus
The extant manuscripts of the book '' Antiquities of the Jews'', written by the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus around AD 93–94, contain two references to Jesus of Nazareth and one reference to John the Baptist.
The first ...
*
Trilingual heresy
*
Grigorije Vasilije
References
Bibliography
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{{refend
External links
The Slavic Version of the Jewish War by Joseph Flavius in the Context of the Archival Chronograph(Bulgarian language)
Historiography of Jesus
Early Christianity and Judaism
Pseudepigraphy
Golden Age of medieval Bulgarian culture
Preslav Literary School
Cyrillo-Methodian studies