Geologist rebuts claim of forged Jesus inscription on ossuary
The disputed ossuary.
(Israel Antiquities Authority)
The heated controversy over the authenticity of the inscription naming Jesus on an ancient burial box discovered a year ago has flared up again, after claims by an American geologist that the Israeli findings, dismissing the inscription on a small 2,000-year-old limestone ossuary as a forgery, were flawed.
James Harrell published his opinion Friday in the Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR).
Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) Director-General Shuka Dorfman says "we would be happy if someone proves these findings are real. At present, as far as we know, they are a total forgery."
Israeli archaeologists say the article is part of a systematic mud-slinging campaign the BAR editor is waging against the IAA.
The discovery of the beige chest caused a stir a year ago because of its inscription: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."
If it was indeed the container that held the remains of James, and it referred to Jesus of Nazareth, it would be the oldest physical link ever found between the modern world and Jesus. According to biblical accounts, Jesus' brother James led the early church in Jerusalem and was stoned to death as a Jewish heretic in A.D. 62.
The IAA appointed two teams of experts to examine the ossuary. In June the experts declared the inscription a fake, though the box itself dated back to the first century, a time when burial in stone boxes was a widespread Jewish custom in Jerusalem.
Israeli researchers said the main clue that the inscription was phony was that its letters had been cut through a soft gray residue that could not have built up naturally with age and thus was most likely a homemade paste smeared over the inscription to make it appear old.
The IAA report undermined the credibility of the popular American bi-monthly BAR, which had been first to disclose the ossuary's discovery.
Even before publishing the article about the ossuary's discovery, BAR editor Hershel Shanks acted to get the ossuary out of Israel and put it on display in a museum in Toronto, Canada.
At the end of the exhibition, visited by more than 100,000 paying viewers, Shanks planned to exhibit the ossuary in a series of U.S. museums. But his plans were thwarted when IAA director Dorfman refused to extend the permit for taking the ossuary out of Israel.
"I simply could not believe it happened," Shanks said Saturday. "I begged Dorfman. It could have been such a great thing for Israel. Even now, after the IAA announced it a fake, there is still a demand for the ossuary," he said.
"Why does Dorfman hate me so much?" he asked his readers, offering a $100 prize to anyone who finds the answer. In a previous BAR edition, Shanks published an article by Andre Lemaire, an expert of ancient scripts from the Sorbonne Unviversity of Paris.
Lemaire lists several flaws in the IAA report, adding that the writers displayed a lack of sensitivity to Christian feelings, by underestimating the finding's importance and by even joking, in one case, at Jesus' expense.
Shanks concedes "there were some very unsuccessful expressions toward Christians' feelings in the report, but the religious identity of the writers is totally irrelevant." He believes, however, that the findings should be re-examined by an international independent experts' committee.
Shanks confirms he was the one to suggest Harrell write the article attacking the report. But you don't have to be a scientist to find questionable statements in the report, he says.
Harrell, a geologist at the University of Toledo and a member of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity, did not examine the ossuary, but only the IAA report. The flaws he claims he found are in the geological chapter written by Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University and Dr. Avner Ayalon of the Geological Institute. The two establish that the stone residue around the inscription is of a different texture than the residue around the rest of the ossuary's surface.
They conclude the residue around the inscription was not formed from a natural aging process but was prepared by modern methods. Goren assumes the composition was formed by dissolving substances in boiling water. Harrell claims that the substances Goren mentions are not soluble in boiling water.
Harrell also claims the researchers did not examine the possibility that the texture difference might have been created by cleaning the inscription with chemical materials. The ossuary's owner, collector Oded Golan, said he remembered his mother cleaning the inscription on one occasion.
