According to Altman, inscriptions on ossuaries were covenants made by the dead person's family members, pledging that they would continue to revere their deceased loved one. As was the case with all such solemn vows, the covenant had to be written in the hand of the person making it. Thus, while professional masons might have "touched up" the inscription later, the original inscription had to be made by the family member.
Obviously, not all family members were literate, so their inscriptions might have been a little shaky. Either way, it would have all been done in the same hand. However, Altman argues that the inscription on this particular ossuary was written by two different people.
How does she know? Well, the first group of words -- "Jacob son of Joseph" -- was written by someone who was fully literate (she could tell by the consistency of the lettering and the formal script).
After the author carved the initial lettering, a professional excised the text (meaning that the stone around it was carved out to make the letters raised) and enclosed the words in a kind of frame -- a common practice when excising an inscription.
All of this appears legitimate to Altman. But, she says, that's not true of the second half of the inscription -- "brother of Jesus." Apparently, there are a few strange misspellings in this second part, as if the person writing it had little grasp of either Hebrew or Aramaic, and was trying to copy a script and language unfamiliar to him. Altman also points out that the script is informal, as compared with the formal lettering of the first section.
But that's not all. She additionally notes that there's no excised frame around the words. Since it was a normal practice to excise both the words and a frame, she concluded that the second writer removed the original frame so he could add his own words.
Her final verdict? The box is real; the inscription is not. "If the entire inscription on the ossuary is genuine," she says, "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' [the Hebrew form of Jesus]. Further, they had better explain where the frame has gone."
Here's the problem: even if we grant every aspect of Dr. Altman's analysis about the inscription(s) on the ossuary, her conclusion, "the box is real; the inscription is not," is not logically necessary.
If two people write a note together, with parts of it in each of their own scripts, is the note genuine?
Simple answer: we don't know.
That two people wrote a note together has no bearing on its authenticity. And the same is true of the inscription on the ossuary.
This type of textual analysis is interesting, but is often carried too far. For example, there are those who conclude that the Book of Genesis was written by multiple authors because there are multiple names used for God. This presumes (without justification) against the possibility of a single author using different names for God as they were used by different people in the past, and thereby reflecting that in the chronology he was writing.
Here's a simple and plausible anwer to the challenge of Dr. Altman's final paragraph (as quoted above):
The original inscription was written by one person, and the subsequent inscription was written hastily by someone less literate and skillful with a chisel. Maybe the second inscription is true, maybe it isn't. Maybe it was inscribed by someone who knew James and Jesus, maybe it wasn't.
Stone inscriptions are notoriously tough to date. I'd like to see an analysis of the matrix found in the grooves of the inscriptions, and perhaps dating on any pollens or organic material found there.
