Slavonic Josephus

Slavonic Josephus refers to a set of manuscripts that were once attributed to the ancient historian Flavius Josephus, but have since been mostly discredited.

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. (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 the Antiquities of the Jews Book 18 and Book 20 of the Antiquities 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.

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 I. Sreznevski pointed out that the language used was not Bulgarian or Serbian, but comparable to the Russian chronicles. At about the same time as Sreznevski, 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 Alexandeer Berendts published a German translation in 1906 and proposed the theory that the Slavonic version had been derived from the original Aramaic of Josephus. 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.

The Slavonic Josephus was defended in 1926 as authentic by Robert Eisler and was later supported by George Williamson. Robert Van Voorst 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 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 argued that the Slavonic Josephus was composed for the purpose of giving a Christian version of Josephus in Greek. In 1971 G. A. Wells argued that the existence of Christian interpolations within the Slavonic version of the Jewish War indicates that other works of Josephus also contain Christian interpolations.

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 an 11th-century creation as an ideological struggle against the Khazars. 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 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".