The previous installment of this series (link) concluded that while Fourth-century Christian apologist and historian Eusebius was unreliable as an opinion witness, nevertheless he wasn’t especially suspect when relating simple facts he said that he’d read in Josephus about Pilate’s dates in office. This installment looks at a more complicated and more contentious occasion when Eusebius is our earliest witness to a passage in Josephus, the opening portion of the famous or notorious “Flavian Testimony,” Antiquities 18.63 (or 18.3.3 in the Whiston versification).
More clearly than the dates of Pilate’s term, the received Testimony of Josephus about the life of Jesus illustrates Eusebius’s influence over later Christian scribes. Some of what we read is far more readily believed to be the work of a Christian rather than of a Jewish writer. Inevitably, the Christian upon whom suspicion falls most heavily is Eusebius himself.