The case against the authenticity of the Testimonium was put succinctly by Benedict Niese, ‘nam scriptus est a Christiano, male cohaeret cum insequentibus, dicendi genus a Josepho alienus, ab antiquissimis scriptoribus Christianis, imprimis Origine, non agnoscitur, abest ab argumentis libri XVIII, non exstat in Bello Judaico, neque ulla est causa cur necessarium putemus'. Scholarly opinion has long been divided over the matter, but it is safe to say that the arguments against authenticity outweigh those that would retain the passage as Josephan. Niese's points, that the passage interrupts a series of notices of Jewish risings and revolts and that Origen appears to have known Josephus only as hostile to Christianity, can be supplemented by the difficulty of attributing apparently Christian sentiments to a writer who in his last work, Contra Apionem, was very plainly proud to be a Jew. But if the passage is an interpolation, the further question is posed, whether it was inserted into the text of Josephus as a complete unit or whether it is the result of a process of minor alterations by many hands over many years. Here again there is divergence of opinion, but since 1930 it has been difficult to maintain the simple view of a single interpolation by one man at one time. Robert Eisler's attack upon this simple view was made possible by the publication of a thirteenth-century Slavonic version of Josephus initiated by A. Berendts, who in an earlier work had traced the Christian interpolations in Josephus back to the first century. Eisler's general contention, that the authentically Josephan basis of the passage constituted a hostile notice of Christianity and that this had, been altered in many particulars by various hands to show the opposite of what Josephus had written, was cautiously defended by Thackeray, the doyen of English-speaking Josephan scholars, in his Hilda Stich Strook lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion.

The posthumous reputation of Gregory the Great presents a sharp but possibly insufficiently appreciated contrast. On the one hand, there is the Anglo-Saxon historical tradition which, through the Carolingian world and the eleventh-century reformers, has prevailed to the present day. The Gregory of Aldhelm of Malmesbury and of the Anonymous of Whitby, is ‘the teacher of the English’, ‘our own St. Gregory’, ‘this apostolic saint of ours’ who ‘on the Day of Judgement … will bring us, the English nation whom he has taught, to present us to the Lord’. By the English mission he had brought the English into the community of Christian nations and was seen as the initiator of the new missionary apostolate which Bede's contemporaries were consciously perpetuating on the Continent; as the source for the life of St. Benedict he was of major interest to those who had made peculiarly their own Benedict's monasticism. He is in a sense the immediate founder of all things; in an age which was losing the perspective of the secular as its historical horizons shrank, he was a principal link in a new chain of authority and legitimacy which extended back to St. Peter. His legend and prestige as a founding authority spreads and assumes diverse forms in unlikely places.

Because the Church of England traditionally formed part of the British constitution, Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discussed the importance of extending the Established Church to settlements overseas. Yet nothing constructive was done in North America before the Revolution to complete the constitution of the colonial Church or reinforce its special position as the partner of the civil government. There were no bishops in America, and the remote bishop of London was left to supervise as best he could an institution that enjoyed few privileges and displayed an inveterate tendency towards independence. After the American Revolution, however, imperial administrators and colonial churchmen appreciated the need to buttress and reinvigorate the Church of England in British North America. In official circles at least, the loss of the Thirteen Colonies was attributed to the growth of a democratic spirit which a debilitated Church had been powerless to check. British administrators consequently agreed that the dangerous development of republicanism and religious dissent might be thwarted in the remaining colonies by strengthening the position of the Church as the ally of government in the task of preserving colonial loyalty.