The Slavonic Josephus is an Old East Slavic translation of Flavius Josephus' History of the Jewish War 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. 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 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 in the fourteenth century. Virtually any date between those two extremes is possible. 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. Grigorije Vasilije was a Serbian Orthodox monk and scribe who translated The Jewish War from Old Church Slavonic 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. History of the controversy The existence of the documents that led to the discovery of the Slavonic Josephus was first