Why I Am Not Yet Convinced the Ossuary Inscription Is a Forgery

June 19, 2003--The day after the Biblical Archaeology Review published an article last October on the extraordinary inscription, "James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus," scratched on a stone bone box from Jerusalem, it appeared on the front page of almost every paper in the world.

On June 18, 2003, a committee appointed by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) declared the inscription to be a forgery. The bone box, or ossuary, was indeed ancient, but the inscription was added in modern times, the committee found.

It may indeed be a forgery and, if so, let's hope the forger will be caught and put in jail.

But I'm still not convinced that it is a forgery.

The BAR article was written by one of the world's leading paleographers, Andre Lemaire of the Sorbonne in Paris. Each letter in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke and the language of the inscription) has a history and development, much like modern car grilles. Paleographers can date the letters and also tell if an inscription is a forgery, for in an authentic inscription the shape of all the letters will date to the same time period. There was no doubt in Lemaire's mind that the inscription was authentic.

Normally, anything that Andre Lemaire writes for us would be enough to justify its publication in BAR. Because this was such an extraordinary inscription, however, we showed it to a number of other prominent paleographers. Harvard's Frank Cross, perhaps the world's most distinguished Semitic paleographer, said, "If this is a forgery, the forger was a genius." (Along the same line, leading Jerusalem archaeologist and paleographer Gaby Barkay is quoted in a recent news report as saying, "If its a fake, it's a fantastically executed piece.")

The inscription was also examined by P. Kyle McCarter, Albright Professor at the Johns Hopkins University (and author of Ancient Inscriptions), and by Israeli paleographer Ada Yardeni, author of The Book of Hebrew Script. They, too, saw no reason whatever to question the authenticity of the inscription.

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