Word: testimonium
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...supposedly unbiased source: virtual confirmation of the basic truths of their faith. The trouble was, scholars began to object during the Enlightenment, that such a passage could hardly have been written by a nonbeliever, and had almost certainly been reworked by some pious Christian editor. As historical evidence, the Testimonium Flavianum, as the passage was called, fell into disrepute...
...agree in thinking that the new passage derives from a quotation of Josephus in an early edition of an ecclesiastical history by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a commanding figure of 3rd and 4th century Christianity. In a later edition of his history, they speculate, Eusebius inserted instead the traditional Testimonium Flavianum because it was more in keeping with the Christian conception of Jesus. Only the fact that the more authentic passage was passed down to the 10th century in Syriac, the scholars believe, may have saved it from church editors...
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