Wouldn't Eusebius have been concerned about getting caught and called out if he had written the Testimonium himself?

Ken Olson notes that “he wouldn’t have dared” as a defense against interpolation or forgery. The argument runs like this: if someone is prepared to believe that a modern scholar could pastiche Clement and invent a longer Mark, it cannot simultaneously be ruled “psychologically impossible” that an ancient Christian historian could massage or compose a short paragraph in Josephus. Fear of being caught is not a serious constraint in a world where texts circulate slowly, copies are few, and authorial control and pseudonymous writing are common. What matters is not our intuitions about an author’s scruples, but the external and internal evidence: manuscript distribution, patristic citation history, linguistic profile, and how the passage sits in its immediate literary context. In that light, the Testimonium has to be weighed on its own dossier, just as Josephus’s broader claim about the fixity of Jewish scriptures—“For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, but only twenty-two books” (Against Apion 1.8)—has to be tested against what can be shown about actual textual transmission rather than taken as a trump card.

Applied to Secret Mark, the same point undercuts special pleading. If Eusebian interpolation in Josephus is deemed “unthinkable” because Eusebius might be exposed, while a modern Clementine forgery is treated as “obvious” because its discoverer is distrusted, the standard is not really evidential but biographical. A consistent method would admit that ancient and modern fabrication are both, in principle, possible, then ask which hypothesis best explains the surviving artifacts: the photographs, the eighteenth-century hand, the citation and reception history, and the fit (or misfit) with Clement’s style and theology. The upshot is not a verdict on either text but a procedural demand: drop psychological vetoes and analogies as substitutes for evidence and let each case stand or fall on the quality of its own textual, historical, and material controls.