James Ossuary

A Box With No Findspot and a Very Loud Announcement

The object is a limestone ossuary, a bone box of the kind used around Jerusalem for roughly a century either side of the turn of the era, when a body was left in a tomb until the flesh was gone and the bones were then gathered into a chest and stored. It is 50.5 cm along its base, and along one side run two lines of Aramaic: Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua. Every one of those names was among the commonest in the country at the time, which matters for everything that follows.

Nobody excavated it. Its owner, the Tel Aviv collector and engineer O. Golan, says he bought it from a dealer in East Jerusalem in the 1970s and did not understand what the last three words might mean until an epigrapher looked at it decades later. That epigrapher was A. Lemaire of the Sorbonne, and the announcement was made on 21 October 2002 by the Biblical Archaeology Society; the next morning it was on front pages around the world. Within weeks the box had been shipped to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where it went on display in the second half of November 2002 and stayed until the New Year. It arrived damaged: the packing had not held, the limestone had cracked in transit, and the museum drew up a plan to fill the fissures with adhesive before the public saw it. The ROM's director of collections told reporters at the time that responsibility for the shipping had been the owner's.

Set the inscription aside and the box is unremarkable, which is exactly why the last phrase carried so much weight. Ossuary inscriptions normally give a name and a patronymic. Naming a brother is rare. If those last words are ancient, the man in the box is James the Just, and this is the only object anyone has ever proposed that touches the family of Jesus directly.

The Trial, and What the Verdict Actually Decided

In 2003 an Israel Antiquities Authority committee concluded that the inscription — or at least its second half — was a modern addition to an ancient box. In 2004 the state indicted O. Golan and four others; by the end only Golan and the antiquities dealer R. Deutsch remained. The trial in the Jerusalem District Court ran more than five years, heard 138 witnesses, admitted over 400 exhibits and generated a transcript of some 12,000 pages. On 14 March 2012 Judge A. Farkash acquitted both men of every forgery charge. Golan was convicted on the minor count of trading in antiquities without a licence.

The reasoning matters more than the headline. The judge did not find the inscription genuine. He found that the prosecution had not proved forgery beyond reasonable doubt — a much narrower thing, and he said so. C. Rollston of George Washington University, who testified in the trial about the Jehoash Inscription and the Moussaieff ostraca and who declined to testify about this box at all, reported the judge's own words the day the verdict came down: the acquittal "is not to say that the inscription on the ossuary is true and authentic and was written two thousand years ago."

The box was eventually returned to its owner, and the Israel Antiquities Authority's assessment has not changed. Both of those facts are true at once and neither settles anything. It has since travelled in commercial exhibitions, and it remains the private property of a private collector rather than the holding of any museum.

Why This Article Says Less Than You Were Probably Told

The honest position is that the authenticity of the second half of this inscription is unresolved, and that the words "acquitted", "authenticated" and "guilty" name three different things. A. Lemaire, who first published the inscription, has maintained ever since that the letters are ancient, and the late A. Yardeni, one of the finest palaeographers of the script, agreed with him. Serious scientists, above all Y. Goren, then of Tel Aviv University, examined the patina inside the letters and concluded that part of it is not ancient. The most interesting thing that happened in the trial happened to Goren. After his testimony he asked the prosecution to let him look at the ossuary again, away from the witness stand, because one letter — the last letter of the last word — had given him doubts he could not settle. He looked again, and testified that in the bottom of that letter there is a true patina, and that his conclusion was unequivocal. The judge's reasons treat the varnish in that letter as a plausible option and as enough to establish reasonable doubt. The authenticity side treats it as the most important thing the trial produced, and it is a fair thing for them to treat that way — it came from the prosecution's own expert, volunteered rather than extracted. What it did not do was change his mind: the same document records that Goren's final conclusion remained that the inscription is a modern forgery, on grounds that go well beyond that one letter. Nor did it move the epigraphers who were already suspicious. C. Rollston, who declined to testify about this box, has said since that his own position on it is the one the late J. Naveh held, and that laboratory results still have to be interpreted. The trial was the longest and best-resourced attempt anyone has made to decide the question, and it decided a legal question instead, which is what trials are for.

Two further limits are worth naming plainly. First, the box has no archaeological context whatever. Even a genuine inscription bought from a dealer cannot be tied to a tomb, a layer or a date by anything except the object itself, and the proposal that it came from the Talpiot tomb has not been established — the statistician A. Feuerverger, who did the published statistical work on that tomb, wrote that in his opinion there is at present no credible evidence tying this ossuary to it. Second, even at its best the inscription would establish that a man in first-century Jerusalem was recorded as the brother of a Jesus. All three of the names on it were among the commonest in the country at the time, and how surprising the combination is depends entirely on assumptions about how many such families there were — an argument about statistics, not about stone.

None of that touches the New Testament's own account. Paul writes that he met the Lord's brother in Jerusalem; the Gospels name the brothers; Josephus, writing outside the church, records the death of the brother of Jesus called Christ at the hands of the high priest Ananus. That evidence stands where it stood in 2001. A bone box bought in a shop was never holding it up.

Scripture references

• Galatians 1:19 — Paul meets James, the Lord's brother, in Jerusalem — the New Testament's own plain statement of the relationship
• Mark 6:3 — The brothers named: James, Joses, Judah and Simon
• Matthew 13:55 — The same list in Matthew, where the brothers are James, Joses, Simon and Judas
• Acts 15:13 — James speaks as the leading voice of the Jerusalem church
• James 1:1 — The letter that bears his name opens with no claim of kinship at all

Sources

• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Israeli Forgery Trial: The Verdict is Given" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University — a witness in the trial · Rollston Epigraphy, 14 March 2012; his statement that he refused to testify about this ossuary is in his own reply in the comment thread the following day. Served over plain httpSupports: Judge A. Farkash's statement that the acquittal is not a finding that the inscription is ancient, and Rollston's own refusal to testify about this object
• ReferenceH. Shanks, "Verdict: Not Guilty" — Hershel Shanks, Biblical Archaeology Society — who published the ossuary in 2002 and argues it is genuine · Bible History Daily, 14 March 2012. Written by a partisan of authenticity and useful for the trial's measurements: 138 witnesses, 400+ exhibits, a 12,000-page transcript, a 474-page opinionSupports: The scale and outcome of the trial, and the conviction on the licensing charge
• ScholarshipA. Rosenfeld, H. R. Feldman, Y. Kronfeld and W. E. Krumbein, "Implications of the 'Forgery Trial' Verdict on the Authenticity of the James Ossuary" — Amnon Rosenfeld (Geological Survey of Israel) and colleagues, one of whom was a defence expert · Bible and Interpretation, April 2012. The case for authenticity as its own advocates state it, including the case number 482/04Supports: The geological argument for the patina inside the letters, and the translated passages of Judge A. Farkash's written reasons recording Y. Goren's testimony about a true biopatina in the last letter and the court's acceptance that a real patina covers some letters of akhui di Yeshua
• ScholarshipA. Feuerverger, "Rejoinder of: Statistical Analysis of an Archeological Find" — Andrey Feuerverger, University of Toronto · The Annals of Applied Statistics 2/1 (2008), 99-112. Open accessSupports: The judgement that there is no credible evidence tying this ossuary to the Talpiot tomb
• ReferenceCBC News, "ROM says damaged ossuary may be displayed as planned" — CBC News, reporting D. Rahimi, director of collections at the Royal Ontario Museum · November 2002. The museum's own account of the damage in transit, the plan to fill the cracks with adhesive, and where responsibility for the packing laySupports: The condition the box arrived in at Toronto and what the museum did about it
• Holding institutionAssociates for Biblical Research: the ossuary is returned to its owner — Associates for Biblical Research · A short notice recording that the Israel Antiquities Authority returned the box after its case failedSupports: The object's return to private hands

Further reading

• Biblical Archaeology Society: the verdict, reported the day it came down

Reflect

A court can decide whether a man is guilty. It cannot decide whether a thing is true. Where in your own thinking have you let one verdict stand in for the other?