A gentleman named David Blocker has made a comparison of the English translations of the passage in Josephus Jewish War where he describes the episode at Jotapata. Very kindly he has allowed this to appear here:
He writes:
[This is a] tabular comparison of different translations of Jotapata episode from Jewish War beginning with Lodge translation through Thackeray, and including Josephus variants: PseudoHegesippus, Slavonic Josephus, and the Jossipon.
I should have included the Latin as well, but I gave up, I would have to find a Latin text , then locate the proper section and dictionary bash a parallel translation, more work than I felt capable of.
There are some interesting differences between the Greek text and the non Greek versions as shown in the table, suggesting some passages may have dropped out of the Greek manuscript tradition, again showing the need for a study of the Latin text to see if these passages are in the earlier Latin manuscripts.
It is always interesting to see how different translators handle the same passage, and occasionally disturbing! This should be of interest to Josephus people!
Since Google translate has greatly improved since the time I made the above table, I went to the Latin Josephus site,
https://www.latinjosephus.org,
and copied the Jewish War Latin text of the Jotapata incident into Google translate.
The Latin “Rufinus” Jewish War does not mention Vespasian cutting the aqueducts to the city, unlike the versions based on PsHegesippus.
The manuscript PsHegesippus used to make his paraphrase was different from the Greek manuscript that Rufunus used to make his translation, and also from all the surviving Greek manuscripts.
Therefore the 4th c. there were at least two different manuscript families of the Greek text of Josephus, the one used by Rufinus and the copiers of the ancestors of the manuscripts which survive to the present day, and the copy used by “PsHegesippus” for his paraphrase.
Origen, Eusebius and Photius also give evidence that the Josephus they cited was different from the Josephus we have today.
It would be interesting to see if any of the excavations of Yodfat showed evidence of an aqueduct leading into the city.