Great platform for further reflection, cienfuegos!
I can't analyze languages I don't know. Mescerskij brought Josippon into the picture. It is a medieval Hebrew reworking of Josephus [or maybe not; cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josippon ]. In chapter 7 of his intro., M. was led by analyzing Josippon to deny the existence of an original Aramaic version, despite what Josephus wrote in BG 1.3. His analysis of Syriac and Old Russian terms led him to think that the original BJ was in Greek. Then in chapter 8, M. goes into an analysis of the Russian vs. the Greek and concludes that some Greek words weren't translated. He thinks (thought in 1958) that the Greek ms. used to translate SlaJos differed in certain respects from the mass of our extant Greek mss. He didn't think the "additions" went back to Josephus, though.
Having recommended the book to me, of course, maryhelena, I know you're familiar with M's position. I can't go further right now. Josippon is a complicator.
Steven Bowman, in his 2006 review of Leeming and Leeming in
Speculum (pp. 556-7) says that Pseudo-Hegesippus, a Jewish convert to Christianity, produced a "theologically based history" on the fall of Jerusalem in the fourth or fifth century. It was subsequently attributed to Josephus, as was 4 Maccabees. Bowman says that Ps.-Heg was in turn "apparently the major source" for the account of the fall of Jerus. in the 10th century Hebrew
Josippon, which in turn "had considerable influence" on both the Slavonic Jos. Jewish War and the Slavonic Josippon that appeared at the end of the 11th century. Bowman agrees with the conclusion that SlaJos is based on some Greek ms., not on an Aramaic version of the War. [He doesn't go into the source of the "additions."] Bowman opines that SlaJos and Josippon "should be treated in tandem" given their relationship in time and content.
Bowman approves of Mescerskij's conclusion that in SlaJos we have an independent text, not a "slavish" translation of a Byzantine model, as Solomon Zeitlin thought. Bowman commends the critical text of the Hebrew Josippon produced by David Flusser. Flusser found numerous interpolations in it. Bowman sums up: "Both the Slavonic Jewish War and the Hebrew Yosippon then are independent creations of versatile lay authors who were masters of their respective cultures and literary languages with a highly developed sense of originality and imagination. Surely these conclusions by the two critical editors of the manuscripts of these controversial texts add a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of literature in the tenth and eleventh centuries among Jews and Christians on the periphery of Byzantium." He adds that Mescerskij would have profited from Flusser's better text of Josippon.
I'm not a specialist in any of this stuff, save that I read Greek and Latin and have read a good deal of Josephus and have poked around in the secondary literature on him and on the different ancient translations of his work. From what I can see, Bowman does a good job of putting SlaJos in a context. If the scholars on whom he relies were right, it does look as though in SlaJos we have a fascinating case of story development - but that it gives us a window into a process of development taking place in early medieval Russia, not in 1st century Palestine.
