The first group of experts heralded it as one of archaeology's greatest discoveries, a burial box inscribed with the earliest reference to Jesus ever found. But after a closer look, another group of specialists debunked the find as an elaborate hoax.
Now Israeli authorities have indicted the box's owner as a serial forger. But far from putting the case of the "James Ossuary" to rest, the indictment has further polarized opposing sides in an increasingly vitriolic dispute.
Magazine editor Hershel Shanks, the most outspoken advocate of the box's possible authenticity, last week published an article in his Biblical Archaeology Review detailing mistakes in what he called a "badly bungled" investigation by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The response was immediate. Antiquities Authority Deputy Director Uzi Dahari dismissed Shanks as "totally crazy" and his claims as "pathetic." Dahari denounced ossuary owner Oded Golan as a "scoundrel" and a career criminal who lives off the proceeds of doctored artifacts.
All this has left the box trapped, perhaps forever, in historic limbo -- revered by many believers as the one-time repository for the remains of Jesus's brother, James, even as skeptics revile the ossuary as an attempt to deceive 2 billion Christians.
Shanks announced the appearance of the ossuary in October 2002. Reportedly looted from a Jerusalem cave and sold secretly to Golan, it is a nondescript limestone box about 20 inches long and slightly trapezoidal in shape, like a window box for flowers.
But the simple Aramaic inscription it bears caused Sorbonne philologist Andre Lemaire, the first important scholar to examine it, to catch his breath: Ya 'a kov bar Yosef a khui Yeshua, it read: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." James is the English translation for Ya 'a kov, the Old Testament Jacob.
The original Biblical Archaeology Review article on the find presented detailed scholarly analyses of the script and the box, and even examined how frequently people with those three names could have been related as brothers and father in Jerusalem in 60 A.D.
The analyses concluded that the box could indeed be the ossuary used to store the bones of James, regarded by many Christians as Jesus's brother, half-brother or cousin. He was martyred in 62 or 63 A.D.
If authentic, the ossuary would be the earliest artifact to mention Jesus and a find of extraordinary significance. In early 2003, a book on the ossuary, co-written by Shanks, was published: "The Brother of Jesus: The Dramatic Story & Meaning of the First Archaeological Link to Jesus & His Family."
But in mid-2003, the Antiquities Authority, an agency of the Israeli government, concluded it was a fraud. Forensic analysis by its experts showed the inscription had been gouged through the ancient patina covering the rest of the box. The grooves were new; the inscription was a phony.
A month later, police raided Golan's Tel Aviv apartment house and found the box sitting on the toilet seat in a locked bathroom on the roof. Reports at the time quoted Amir Ganor, head of the Antiquities Authority's theft unit, as saying investigators had found many other forgeries and equipment for creating them.
Ganor said authorities suspected that Golan, then 52 and a well-known antiquities collector, had been forging and trafficking illegally in Israeli artifacts for years. Lior Bringer, Golan's attorney, acknowledged in a telephone interview last week that his client "has been buying antiquities" for some time but "as an archaeology fan, from when he was an adolescent."
"The artifacts are dug up by farmers on the West Bank [and] are then sold for a few hundred dollars to a dealer in East Jerusalem, who will then sell them for maybe $2,000 or $3,000," Bringer said. "If you identify the value and buy it an early stage, it can be worth a fortune in the world market."
