The Word That Became Text: Appendix I — The Slavonic Gospel Table

Scholarly Introduction

The following table collates the eight major passages concerning John the Baptist and Jesus that appear exclusively in the Slavonic (Old Russian) recension of Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War. These additions are absent from the extant Greek manuscripts and differ in tone and content from the later Antiquities references familiar to scholars. The text presented here derives from the synoptic edition of Leeming & Leeming, Josephus’ Jewish War and Its Slavonic Version: A Synoptic Comparison (Brill, 2003), with consultation of earlier Russian printings (Meshcherskii 1958 ff.) and subsequent English summaries.

Provenance and Method

The Slavonic War survives in a small family of East-Slavic manuscripts dated between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although traditionally treated as a medieval Christian adaptation, internal evidence suggests dependence on an earlier non-Greek Vorlage—possibly the lost Aramaic or Hebrew version of the War that Josephus himself mentions. Each entry below records the position where the Slavonic diverges from the Greek text, reproduces the opening English phrasing for orientation, and classifies the passage according to its operator function within a Logotic framework (Logos / Teacher / Recursion).

Purpose of the Comparison

The table serves a double aim. First, it documents in concise form the full scope of the Slavonic expansions dealing with the Teacher-figure identified as Jesus and with John the Baptist. Second, it provides a structural lens for interpreting these additions not as later pious fabrications but as survivals of an earlier theological grammar in which “the Word” (Logos) becomes self-manifest through speech, writing, and remembrance. Each interpolation articulates one stage in this recursive process—from prophetic prediction to inscription, from inscription to textual endurance. Read together, they form what may be called a “Gospel of the Word” embedded within the historical narrative of Josephus.

Limitations

This appendix confines itself to the eight John-and-Jesus interpolations; other Slavonic variants—moral maxims, Essene material, or minor stylistic expansions—are omitted for clarity. Translation is conceptual rather than literal, emphasizing sense over philological minutiae. Detailed textual notes and Qumran-Philonic parallels appear in Appendix II.

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The Slavonic Gospel Table

No.	Location (Slavonic / Greek gap)	Opening Words of Slavonic Text (Eng.)	Absent in Greek Josephus	Key Parallels / Resonances	Operator Mode (Logos / Teacher / Recursion)
1	Bk 2 (early)	“There was a man … who foretold a child to be born in Bethlehem who would reign over all the world.”	No infancy prophecy in Greek War	Matt 2 / Pseudo-Matthew	Predictive Logos — Word pre-embodied as prophecy.
2	2 ≈ 111–120	“At that time appeared a man named John, baptizer by water …”	Only in Ant. 18 parallel	Qumran 1QS 3–4 (purification ethics)	Purifier / Ox operator — voice preparing vessel for inscription.
3	2 ≈ 174 ff.	“About this time there appeared a certain man, if it is lawful to call him man …”	Absent	Philonic Logos formula (λόγος καὶ ἔργον)	Incarnate Word — speech becomes text through disciples.
4	2 cont.	“And when Herod heard … he said ‘Write down his words …’ ”	Absent	Royal scribal motif / Jer 36 (Baruch writes)	Inscription Operator — enemy becomes archivist of the Word.
5	5 ≈ 199	“Those who remembered the saying of the Teacher that the Temple would fall …”	Absent	Mark 14:58 / John 2:19	Architectural Logos — Word as new Temple not made with hands.
6	6 ≈ 312	“The disciples … reported that he was seen alive after three days.”	Absent	Acts 1 motif / Teacher of Righteousness memory	Textual Resurrection — Word lives through recitation and writing.
7	7 (intermediate)	“Blessed is he who lives according to the Word; cursed he who writes falsely …”	Absent	Essenic admonitions 1QS 5	Auto-Hermeneutic Word — language judging its own truth.
8	7 (end)	“Thus was fulfilled the word of the Teacher … for nothing written in truth perishes.”	Absent	John 1 prologue / Wis Sol 7	Eternal Text — Word as substrate of history.