Jim Larmore

Anyone check out the chapter on "Hades" written by Flavius Josephus? In this discourse there is mention of the "Christ" and that He was crucified by Pilate.

I'm all for a critical look and approach to ancient history , however I think we can go to far with it sometimes . Occam's Razor you know?

Bernard Muller

Jim wrote:
Anyone check out the chapter on "Hades" written by Flavius Josephus? In this discourse there is mention of the "Christ" and that He was crucified by Pilate.

Peter & I checked on that, and it is explained on my page about the Testimonium Flavianum:
http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/appe.shtml

Best regards, Bernard

yummyfur

Thats what I thought, but I couldn't find any complete translations of Slavonic Josephus. I did read a piece that had every addition or deletion from the greek version, and could not find anything like that qoute, but I thought there might be a very slight possibility that it was in some alternate manuscript version that was discovered later or something.

Truly bizarre what some authors will qoute, they should remember to always triple check primary sources, but judging by a short synopsis of the books subject, I'm guessing that wasn't very important.

Patrick Schoeb

Roger Pearse

Until this year, it was very hard indeed to find out what was or was not in the Slavonic Josephus. G.A.Williamson, in the Penguin edition of the BJ, popularised the possibility that the Slavonic text relied on an Aramaic source. However the basic problem was that the text was only available in Russian, the various translations being partial or unsatisfactory. I've not seen the complete German translation, but most of the commentary seems not to be based on it either.

However once you look at the two books side by side in English -- an edition has now appeared --, and read Meshcherskii's preface in full, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no such thing as the 'Slavonic Josephus'. Rather there is a medieval Russian composition, "The Three Falls of Jerusalem", composed from whatever sources the author had, which uses verbatim chunks from these sources. The author had a bible, a copy of the Jewish War, possibly Antiquities or perhaps Eusebius, and Byzantine chroniclers such as John Malalas. All of these are used in a cut-and-paste job, and the results revised.

In short, deviations need have no significance other than that the Russian editor thought they should be made. It is a text of importance to the history of Russian historiography, not to the study of Josephus. Its readings might or might not be interesting; but it will always be hard to use them.

It may not have been clear to all that the differences from the Greek are *extensive* -- not just the famous "8 passages".

Meshcherskii wrote his study-edition after being released from the gulags, by the way.

All the best,

Roger Pearse