Slavonic Josephus
The Slavonic Josephus is an
Background
Josephus wrote all of his surviving works after his establishment in Rome (c. 71 AD) under the patronage of the Flavian Emperor Vespasian. 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.[3] (Jews did not preserve the writings of Josephus because they considered him to be a traitor.[4]) Of the about 120 extant Greek manuscripts of Josephus, 33 predate the 14th century.[5]
According to Van Voorst, Creed, and a narrow group of researchers, the
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
The text is generally associated with Kievan Rus' 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 and George Hamartolos to form a single universal history.[9]
Grigorije Vasilije was a Serbian Orthodox monk and scribe who translated The Jewish War from Old Church Slavonic to Serbian in the sixteenth century.[10] All predate the first English translation of Josephus's writings based on the Latin text made in 1602 by Thomas Lodge.
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.[7] In 1879 Izmail Sreznevsky pointed out that the language used was not Bulgarian or Serbian, but comparable to the Russian chronicles.[11] 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.[7] 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 of Josephus.[7] However, Paul L. Maier 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.[12]
The Slavonic Josephus was defended in 1926 as authentic by
In 1948 Solomon Zeitlin argued that the Slavonic Josephus was composed for the purpose of giving a Christian version of Josephus in Greek.[15]
See also
References
- ^ a b Chilton & Evans 1998, p. 451.
- ^ a b Bowman 1987, pp. 373–374.
- ^ Feldman & Hata 1989, p. 431.
- ^ Flavius Josephus et al. 2003, p. 26.
- ^ Baras 1987, p. 369.
- ^ Van Voorst 2000, p. 85.
- ^ a b c d Creed 1932.
- S2CID 162250694.
- ^ a b Leeming 2016, p. 391–92.
- ^ Jakovljevic, Zivojin (2011). "Editing in a Sixteenth-century Serbian Manuscript (HM. SMS. 280): A Lexical Analysis with Comparison to the Russian Original".
- ^ a b Flavius Josephus et al. 2003, pp. 1–4.
- ^ Flavius Josephus, Whiston & Maier 1999, p. 11.
- ^ a b c Van Voorst 2000, p. 87.
- ^ Van Voorst 2000, pp. 87–88.
- ^ Zeitlin 1948.
- ^ Davies 2000, p. 918.
- ^ Baras 1987, p. 339.
Bibliography
- Baras, Zvi (1987). "The Testimonium Flavianum and the Martyrdom of James". In ISBN 978-90-04-08554-1.
- ISBN 978-90-04-08554-1.
- Chilton, Bruce; ISBN 978-90-04-11142-4.
- Creed, John Martin (Oct 1932). "The Slavonic Version of Josephus' History of the Jewish War". The Harvard Theological Review. 25 (4): 277–319. S2CID 162926700.
- Davies, William David, ed. (2000). The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 3: The Early Roman Period. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-24377-3.
- ISBN 978-90-04-08931-0.
- ISBN 978-90-04-11438-8.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link - Flavius Josephus; Whiston, William; Maier, Paul L. (1999). The New Complete Works of Josephus. Kregel Academic. ISBN 978-0-8254-2948-4.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - Leeming, Kate (2016). "The Slavonic Version of Josephus's Jewish War". In Honora Howell Chapman; Zuleika Rodgers (eds.). A Companion to Josephus. Wiley Blackwell. pp. 390–401.
- Van Voorst, Robert E. (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-8028-4368-5.
- ISBN 978-0-301-71014-3.
- JSTOR 1452821.