Legal issues, cracks and scholars' FRAUD reports damage "James ossuary"

Israel Insider ^ | 11/5/2002 | Israel Insider

[Israel Insider]

An ancient burial box believed to have belonged to James, the Biblical brother of Jesus, was damaged while being sent for display at a Toronto museum. The museum is awaiting word from the ossuary's owner before attempting to repair the box, but the owner is being questioned by police as the burial box may actually belong to the State of Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli scholars insist that the inscription on the box is a fraud.

Click here to learn more about this possible fraud!

[Vic3O3]

ping-link to the whole article

[lexington minuteman 1775]

Well reports of it being a "fraud" should not surprise anyone. Crimony, ever since Biblical textual criticism began to evolve in the 1700's they have torn apart the book claiming this group wrote it for this reason, this redactor took this approach to get his view across.There are folks out there who do not want this to be authenticated.And even if some scholars do aunthenticate it.There will always be questions.Some things are best taken at FAITH.You either belive or you don't.Whether or not this osarary is ever found to be aunthentic will not change my faith regarding the Lordship of Jesus.I don't need burial boxes to celebrate a Resurrected Lord. But it sure is intresting to watch!

[justshutupandtakeit]

There is no evidence of fraud printed in that story. Just some opinions. It is unlikely that the experts quoted have yet to see the box at all. Why would this guy try something like that? He sounds like a very smart guy who would know that it could not be expected to stand scrutiny from a hostile academic world.

Developing.

[Reelect President Dubya]

Meanwhile, Israeli scholars insist that the inscription on the box is a fraud.

"James, Brother of Jesus" is just too perfect, and if there is one thing I have learned in life, any time something seems too good to be true, it usually is.

[polemikos]

An ancient burial box believed to have belonged to James, the Biblical brother of Jesus, was damaged while being sent for display at a Toronto museum. The museum is awaiting word from the ossuary's owner before attempting to repair the box, but the owner is being questioned by police as the burial box may actually belong to the State of Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli scholars insist that the inscription on the box is a fraud.

Staff at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto discovered numerous cracks Friday in the 2,000-year-old limestone burial box. The cracks appear under an Aramaic inscription which states: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Herschel Shanks, the Jewish publisher of the respected Biblical Archaeology Review, announced the discovery of the box last month as the "first archaeological attestation of Jesus."

"We sent out a conservation proposal to the owner on the weekend and he's decided he wants to wait," Royal Ontario Museum spokesman Francisco Alvarez told The Globe and Mail. The museum sent the owner images of the damage caused in transit, and said that repairs would have to be done in Toronto. The museum plans to exhibit the box between November 16 and December 29.

When granting an export license, officials at the Israel Antiquity Authority received a promise from the ossuary's owner that it would be returned to Israel after four months so that they could continue to study the box in attempts to date it.

Owner may have acquired ossuary illegally
"We put one and one together and realized that [the ossuary's owner] must be Oded Golan," says Dr. Uzi Dahari, deputy director of the Antiquities Authority.

Golan, 51, the chief executive at a Tel Aviv high tech company, said he purchased the ossuary from an antiquities dealer some thirty years ago, apparently when he was in his early twenties. "Until a short time ago, I didn't realize the historical importance [of the box] to the Christian world. When I sent the box to an exhibition overseas, it had a small crack in its side that apparently widened during the transit to Canada," Golan told Maariv.

Shortly after the Biblical Archaeology Review announced its finding, Tel Aviv police summoned Golan for questioning. Investigators at the Antiquities Authority claim that Golan acquired the box illegally. According to Israel's Antiquities Law, an artifact that "was discovered or found in Israel" after 1978, when the law was enacted, is "state property." Original media reports indicated that Golan acquired the box about 15 years ago, which would mean that it belongs to the State of Israel.

Scholars insist: inscription is a fraud
Israel Insider posted exclusively on October 29 the report of an expert of ancient scripts and writing systems who claimed that while the burial box appeared to be genuine, as was the first part of the inscription, the second half of the inscription, "brother of Jesus," was a "poorly executed fake" and a later addition.

Rochelle I. Altman, co-coordinator of IOUDAIOS-L, a virtual community of scholars engaged in on-line discussion of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, says that people are taking Sorbonne University paleographer Andre Lemaire's word too quickly when he stated "that the inscription is incised."

Both Altman and noted paleographer Ada Yardeni have concluded that the second part of the inscription was added later. "There are two hands; two different scripts; two different social strata, two different levels of execution, two different levels of literacy, and two different carvers," Altman says.

Altman believes that the second half was actually written in the 3rd or 4th century, while Paul Shafer at the University of Wyoming, an expert on Hebraicized Aramaic dialects, dates it anywhere between the 2nd and 7th centuries.

"The reason the police are onto Golan is that there are two such ossuaries, both already known and photographed in a book on the ossuaries in collections in Israel published in 1996. This one was not bought at an antique dealer in the 1960s, but at an auction, from a museum, in the 1980s," Altman says.

[concentric circles]

While Jesus never took away anyone's relic, shrine, saint, creed, or holy place, he never endorsed them either. Jesus taught an eternal relationship with God achieved through faith and based on love and service to one's fellows. The ossuary is an interesting artifact deserving of further study but it is irrelevant to faith.

[Seruzawa]

It is unlikely that the experts quoted have yet to see the box at all.

And what, pray tell, is new about "experts" shouting fraud about things they've never seen? One thing we never have is a shortage of "experts".

How does one get proclaimed an "expert" anyhow?

[polemikos]

Here's the article claiming fraud:

Rochelle I. Altman is co-coordinator of IOUDAIOS-L, a virtual community of scholars engaged in on-line discussion of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. She is an expert on scripts and an historian of writing systems.
risa3@netvision.net.il

As an expert on scripts and an historian of writing systems, I was asked to examine this inscription and make a report. I did.

The bone-box is original; the first inscription, which is in Aramaic, "Jacob son of Joseph," is authentic. The second half of the inscription, "brother of Jesus," is a poorly executed fake and a later addition. This report has already been distributed on at least two scholarly lists.

Please note that the fraud is so blatant that I did not bother to go into extreme detail on whether the faked addition is supposed to be Hebrew or Aramaic. (If that's a vav, -- then it's Hebrew, not Aramaic; if it's yod, then it's says 'my brother', not 'his brother' or 'brother of'. By no stretch of the imagination can one claim this to be in Aramaic... 'of' in Aramaic is 'di'.)

You have to be blind as a bat not to see that the second part is a fraud...

Here is the report:

Report on the "James" ossuary inscription
I carefully checked many photos and writings on ossuaries and covenants before sending you my report. I make no claim to be an expert on ossuaries, but inscriptions and scripts are another story. It might be in order to warn you that I have a great deal of experience at spotting ancient frauds and forgeries.

There are a few things we have to bear in mind about ossuary inscriptions.

First, according to Rahmani (1981, 1982) on Jerusalem burial practices, most ossuaries are from the period between 30/20 BCE-70 CE -- but by no means all.

Second, human remains are not dug up and displaced without very good reasons. Ossuaries show up in quantity when burial space is at a premium.

Solutions to the burial space problem are quite varied. In Classical Greece, for example, low status people were buried in space-saving one-person shaft graves (with a tiny round marker on the spot with the necessary data). The Keramikon in Athens is full of these. In Italy, from the Renaissance until the late 19th-century, after 3 years, unless a family could afford an ossuary or pay another three years rent, the bones were dumped in a mass grave site -- usually a convenient quarry or crevice or what have you, filled with dirt layer by layer. In Athens, ossuaries are still used (metal boxes nowadays); again, that three-year rent period runs. Even in modern Louisiana, along the Mississippi water seepage makes it impossible to dig graves of a reasonable depth; burials are in family mausoleums and bones are pushed down to make way for the latest arrival.

As ossuaries, after all, contravene the normal rules for Jewish burial, the appearance of so many ossuaries in the period before the destruction of the Temple is strong evidence that the cemeteries around Jerusalem were in a space-crunch. (The post-70 reduction in ossuaries follows naturally enough from the removal of enough people from the area to reduce the need for bone- boxes.)

It is not a question of "popularity" at all (which when one thinks about it, is a most peculiar way to think about the subject), but a lack of burial space... which also gives us information about population density of a given area. (Oddly enough, there does not seem to be very much in the literature that addresses this point for the relevant period; yet the correlation between the space constraints indicated by the rise in ossuaries and the density of the population of a given area is rather obvious.)

Third, while today, grave markers are carved by pros, this was not the case in these Jewish ossuary inscriptions. The apparently wide variations in ossuary inscriptions come from a simple fact: these ossuary inscriptions are covenants, vows to affirm continuing respect for the deceased in spite of having disinterred his/her remains. As with any other vow, the text must be in the hand of the one making the vow. Thus (as is noted in the literature), a surviving member of the family painted on, or scratched into, the (usually) limestone box the memorial data. In some cases a professional would carve over the handwriting exactly as written. (BTW, this is the standard practice for all professionally carved covenants.)

In other words, all those ossuary inscriptions are holographs. Needless to say, in such a mass of individual writing, literacy varied tremendously from semi-literates who wrote only upon occasion to school-boys to scholars. [What is relevant to sorting out the apparent lack of relation between status and ossuary is not the wealth or social status of the individual(s) (up to three sets of same-family bones can show up in an ossuary), but the level of literacy and status of the survivors. Thus, there is a relationship between status and inscription... but we would need information on the "survivors" in each case to know who, what, when, how, and why.]

From the writing on the ossuary inscriptions, some are clearly written by youngsters and semi-literates who did not have complete control of graph sizes and could not hold a straight line. Others are clearly the holographs of literate people.

James inscription was written by two different people
The inscription on the "James" ossuary is a bit more complicated. First it has been gone over by a professional carver; the words are excised (not incised). Second, it was written by two different people.

Translated, with the amendments to the original spelling as given in the article, the inscription reads:

Jacob son of Joseph brother of Joshua.

The emended translation does not indicate the way the words are actually written, which is in two distinct groups:

Y(KOBBRYWSF   )XWW(Y#W(

[Editor's note: the transliteration provided by the author is in accordance with the Michigan-Claremont Encoding System for ASCII]

Nor does the translation give any indication of the change from the carefully executed and expertly spaced *inscriptional* cursive -- including careful angles and the cuneiform wedge on the bet's, the resh, and the yod -- in

Y(KOBBRYWSF
[Jacob son of Joseph]

to the less than expertly executed *commercial* sans-wedge cursive in

)XWW(Y#W(
[brother of Joshua]

While it is customary to dismiss such differences as unimportant ("scribes are not typewriters"), here the differences between the two parts are glaring and impossible not to see.

In the first part, the script is formal
In part 1, the script is formal, the ayin has an acute angle, the bets, resh, and yod have the cuneiform wedge, and the yods are consistent in size and cannot be confused with the vavs.

The person who wrote the first part of the inscription [ Y(KOBBRYWSF ] was necessarily a surviving member of the family. He was fully literate; he clearly was familiar with the formal square script (those cuneiform wedges), the writing is internally consistent, and this part of the inscription is his expertly written holograph.

In the second part, the script is informal
In part 2, the script is informal, the two ayins are completely different from each other and differ yet again from the ayin in part 1. When we compare the yod in Y(KOB with the (amended) three yod's in )XWW(Y#W( we immediately can see that this is a different person writing. First of all, the yod in 'brother of' and the first yod in W(Y#W( are written as vavs. With the model of the correct way to write the yod-ayin [ Y( ] right in front of his nose on 'Jacob', there is no reason at all for the extended vav or the extra vav in what should be Y(#(. Then, the yod in the peculiarly misspelled W(Y#W( does not resemble the yod in Joseph [ YWSF ] as written in part 1 which also has a wedge. The shin in W(Y#W( [damned if I can figure out how to trans-literate this abhorrent spelling of Joshua] is wedgeless and does not accord with the first part of the inscription... but then, none of the forms in the second part agree with the script of the first part.

The person who wrote the second part [ )XWW(Y#W( ] may have been literate, but it is doubtful that he was literate in Aramaic or Hebrew. Again, aberrant spelling is dismissed as dialectic. True, there are dialectic variants, but there is always some linguistic logic behind these variants. There is nothing logical about these misspellings. They smell of someone guessing how the words "brother of" and the name "Joshua" would have been spelled a couple, three hundred years earlier. Once again, the writing in this part is internally consistent in its semi-literacy. Part 2 has the characteristics of a later addition by someone attempting to imitate an unfamiliar script and write in an unfamiliar language.

There is yet another tell-tale sign of fraud here. As noted, the text is excised. (Which indicates a wealthy family.) Nobody excises an entire block of stone to raise the text; not even the Yadi stele is entirely excised. In "name" plates or other small inscriptions, if excised rather than incised (cheaper), the normal practice is to excise the text and a frame, which frame itself is excised by incised limits but never beyond them. Only the area within the frame will be excised; the rest of the block will be left alone. Far too much here has been excised from around the names. More to the point, where is the original frame?

Second part of inscription added later
Well, to anybody who knows something about anti-fraud techniques as practiced in antiquity, it is rather obvious. The frame was removed to add the second part of this inscription. The original frame would have been the barest minimum distance from the text and have appeared something like this:

|-------------------|
|Y(KOBBRYWSF |    )XWW(Y#W(
|____________|

If the entire inscription on the ossuary is genuine, then somebody has to explain why there are two hands of clearly different levels of literacy and two different scripts. They also have to explain why the second hand did not know how to write 'brother of' in Aramaic or even spell 'Joshua'. Further, they had better explain where the frame has gone.

The ossuary itself is undoubtedly genuine; the well executed and formal first part of the inscription is a holographic original by a literate (and wealthy) survivor of Jacob Ben Josef in the 1st century CE. The second part of the inscription bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition and is questionable to say the least.

Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I think you get the official title when some presstitute contacts you for a comment. After getting the appropriate degrees and churning out the appropriate journal articles or books.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Thank you for the additional information. So it claims that this "fraud" occurred over a millenium ago? Granting all the information in the article is true and that this is the work of two hands still does not mean that the box and inscription's contention is not true.

It is just as easy to believe that the added portion was done to make the remains in the box more specific. This article certainly does not prove fraud by any means even if it raises some interesting points.

Clearly the owner has not committed fraud nor those contending that the inscription says what it says.

As far as a war of experts goes, I have as much regard for Hershel Shenkel and his experts as any.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

Two thoughts:

1. We are given some hints in scripture that not all of Jesus's relatives believed Him to be the Christ -- even James was not a believer before Christ's resurrection, but only came around afterwards. Possibly some of James's relatives were not believers. Might it possibly be that after James died, it was these unbelieving relatives who were responsibile for his initial burial arrangements. Later, after the ossuary had been prepared and James's remains placed in it, Christian believers may have found it and made the addition to identify it for the benefit of their fellow believers, as it did hold the relics of a martyr.

2. Or perhaps the Christian community was responsible for all of the burial arrangements. It might possibly be that there were no believers with the necessary skills to make an ossuary and carve the inscription. It may be that only unbelievers, hostile to Christianity, were available to do these tasks. Perhaps the ossuary was originally procured with only the non-controversial "Jakob bar Joseph" inscription, and the Christians then added the "brother of Yeshua" inscription afterwards.

Neither of these scenarios constitute "fraud", and either could be a reasonable explanation for the findings of these scholars.

[polemikos]

At least one expert claimed that, statistically, there were approximately 20 James-Joseph (son-father) combinations in the population at the time. Personally, I can accept the possibility that this is still the ossuary of The James in question, because I think there are a number of arguments that increase the odds above the statistical 5% possibility.

I'm inclined to lean towards a scenario that the box fell into the hands of the Christian community after 70 A.D. because (a) the added inscription is apparently by a non-native speaker (while I would think that the relatives of James would still have their Aramaic language skills), (b) the added inscription would have been important to the Christians (but not necessarily to the relatives), and (c) the Christians had a history of preserving the remains of early church figures (while Israelites on the run could easily have chosen to leave bone boxes behind). Still, one can imagine all sorts of possibilities and ownership changes.

Still, I think your comments about this not being a "fraud" per se are well taken. I don't know the religious beliefs of the "expert" evaluators, but it is possible that those outside of Christianity have an anti-Jesus agenda. Fraud in the "interpretation" of facts might exist, but probably can't be proven.

In the end, actual or not, the authenticity of the box can't be proven one way or the other. So I suspect that everyone will fall back on their existing belief systems.

[SunkenCiv]

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Note: this topic is dated 11/05/2002. Blast from the Past. Thanks Israel Insider. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.