A Tale of Two Meetings

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The decision was unanimous: Antiquities collectors are criminals, responsible for the worldwide scourge of looting.

That was the theme of the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), held in Atlanta late last November. ASOR, the leading professional organization of Near Eastern archaeologists, was only one of several scholarly associations separately encamped in Georgia for their “annual meetings.” Others included the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Near Eastern Archaeological Society (NEAS). In all, more than 9,000 scholars gave well over a thousand papers both obscure and general—from “Bioarchaeological Study of Plastered Skulls” to “Erotic Conversion as a Response to the Priest Pedophilia Crisis” to “Shifting Ethnic Identities in Iron I Northern Moab” to “The Rhetorical Artistry of Aramaic Daniel.”

Elaborating on the broad-based attack on antiquities collectors, Amir Ganor, head of the Robbery Prevention Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), was explicit: The high-end collectors of museum-quality objects are nothing but “prominent criminals.”

Alex Joffe, formerly of Boston University and now an independent scholar, described the “ratline” that begins with looters, then passes through antiquities dealers and ends up with collectors. When scholars publish articles describing and analyzing unprovenanced finds that come from the antiquities market (that is, objects whose findspots are unknown and which may therefore have been looted), the scholars are doing something “not only pathetic, but pernicious,” Joffe said. Such scholars are guilty of making “a moral compromise.” Elizabeth Stone, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, agreed. Addressing her fellow scholars, she said that when they publish unprovenanced finds (like the James ossuary inscription that mentions Jesus), “we are culpable.”

Neil Silberman, a prominent archaeology writer now based in Brussels, compared antiquities collecting today to the search for relics as far back as the Byzantine period—the hunt for bones and clothes and objects of Biblical figures, most of which were of course fictitious. The search for a similar emotional charge is what leads many people, students as well as their parents, to volunteer for archaeological excavations in the Holy Land. Today’s collectors, Silberman said, represent “the modern cult of relics.”

Silberman would simply ban the collecting of and trading in antiquities. “We must have the courage to end this nonsense,” he said. This would bring a certain “moral clarity” into society’s position: “Some things,” he said, “are not for sale.”

Gideon Avni, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, picked up on this theme. Recalling the hundred thousand people who saw the James ossuary in late 2002 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (an exhibit arranged by the Biblical Archaeology Society), Avni likened the throngs to “medieval pilgrims,” using that description as a form of denigration.

In a major address Lord Colin Renfrew, of Cambridge University in England, carried the attack one step further—to museums. He said he feared using the word “conspiracy” because he might be sued. He then considered “collusion,” but decided that that too was legally dangerous. So he settled on “pernicious symbiosis” to describe the relationship between antiquities collectors and museums. He condemned the museums for displaying unprovenanced objects that belonged to antiquities collectors.

Lord Renfrew did not hesitate to name names—collectors such as George Ortiz, Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, and especially Shelby White and her husband, Leon Levy; museums like the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Getty Museum (which, he said, may have reformed itself), the Fine Arts Museum in Basel, Switzerland, and the Miho Museum in Japan; museum scholars and curators like Cornelius Vermuele and Martin Bodmer; 042museum directors like Thomas Hoving and Philippe de Montebello. All were roundly condemned.

Lord Renfrew suggested a “major public campaign,” of which ASOR scholars would be a part, to insure that museums do not acquire or display unprovenanced artifacts.

Not all museums participate in this “pernicious symbiosis,” however. One notable exception is the British Museum, of which Lord Renfrew is a trustee. By contrast, he noted that prominent collector Shelby White was a trustee of the Metropolitan, which had had a special exhibit of the objects from the collection of Shelby White and Leon Levy.

During the question period I asked Lord Renfrew if he knew that Mr. Levy (who died recently) had been an honorary trustee of ASOR. He replied that he did not, but that there was an “evolving morality” that would now, one supposes, lead ASOR to withhold such status from collectors, regardless of their generosity. Renfrew had himself once written a scholarly essay on Greek Cycladic figurines for a museum exhibit catalog featuring unprovenanced artifacts from a private collection. But not now. He now has the zeal of a convert. He would not participate in this pernicious symbiosis today.

Professor Lawrence Stager of Harvard University then rose in Levy’s defense, saying that we must also consider the good things that collectors do. Levy, he noted, had poured millions of dollars into supporting his own excavation at Ashkelon in Israel without suggesting that he be rewarded with so much as a pottery sherd. Levy had also supported the excavation of Megiddo and other sites. He and Shelby White had established a program for financing the publication of excavation reports, which has distributed additional millions of dollars to scholars. Among the recipients of this largesse are a number of ASOR scholars. (Jane Waldbaum, who is also the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, which takes the same position as ASOR with respect to unprovenanced artifacts, is among them. Her research continues to be supported by this apparently tainted money. Thus far, she has not renounced it.) And among those who have served on the board of directors of the Shelby White-Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, Stager noted, is Professor Martha Joukowski, of Brown University, now the vice-president of ASOR. Professor Joukowski, who was in the audience, leapt to her feet and cried, “I resigned.”

In response to Professor Stager’s comments, Lord Renfrew referred to society’s increasingly higher standards of morality, suggesting that it might not be proper to accept money from collectors in light of these “evolving” moral standards. Professor Renfrew said that he had heard of a proposal to change ASOR’s strict policy against ASOR scholars’ publishing scholarly articles about unprovenanced artifacts and that he was opposed to such a change.

Since I had made the proposal to change ASOR’s policy, I thought I should explain it and the reasons underlying it. I raised my hand, and Lord Renfrew recognized me. We, too, despise looters, I said, and, indeed, the Biblical Archaeology Society agrees with Lord Renfrew’s aim, which is to reduce, if not eliminate, looting. But we feel that it cannot be reduced simply by excoriating collectors and museums. Indeed, this strategy has proved wholly unsuccessful; looting is worse than ever. We support police actions, protective electronic fences and market-based strategies to reduce looting. The antiquities market, we contend, can never be eliminated. Moreover looted objects sometimes have significant scholarly value—inscriptions, coins, items of high artistic merit. These need to be rescued when looted. They are worth less because they do not have an archaeological context, but they still have scholarly value, which cannot be ignored. We distinguish between good collectors and bad collectors. Good collectors ransom items of importance and make them available to scholars to study and publish, and then allow them to be displayed to the public. Bad collectors are those who keep these objects hidden and private; we, the public, never know about them or see them. I argued that the blanket vilification of collectors is counterproductive. It does nothing to reduce looting and only sends the market underground, with the result that collectors who are willing to make their important artifacts available for study would not do so for fear of the kind of vilification that Lord Renfrew was heaping on them.

At this point, Professor Joukowski, who continues to display in her home her museum-quality antiquities collection, jumped to her feet and tried to shout me down. I resisted. “I let you finish,” I said. “Now let me finish.” From the other side of the room, Nan Frederick, an ASOR trustee from Annapolis, Maryland, shouted, “You’ve talked long enough.” At that point, I thought it best to sit down, so I did.

Lord Renfrew then addressed Professor Joukowski: “Is there something you would like to say?”

“Thank you very much [for your remarks],” she replied, emphasizing each word, and then sat down.

It was a memorable session.

In this atmosphere, it was not surprising that the discussion of the James ossuary inscription—the bone box inscribed, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”—was dismissed as an obvious forgery by all of the ASOR speakers who mentioned it. None of the speakers expressed any doubt about it. There was simply nothing to consider on the other side.

Yuval Goren, of Tel Aviv University, one of the two scientists on the Israel Antiquities Authority committee that declared the ossuary inscription to be a forgery, explained how he detected the fake patina on the ossuary on the basis of the isotopes of oxygen in it. He smiled when he recalled that geologists of the Geological Survey of Israel (Amnon 043Rosenfeld and Shimon Ilani) had found nothing suspicious about the inscription; they, he said, had even authenticated an obviously fake stone oil lamp, which he flashed on the screen.

Goren said he had found a number of other fakes—“dozens” of them—in the stores of the IAA, some of which had been accepted as authentic in scholarly publications. He also noted that the “Three Shekel” ostracon (as well as a related inscription referred to as the “Widow’s Plea” ostracon)^a have been judged to be fakes by a German laboratory.

What went on in the halls outside the lecture rooms was sometimes as interesting as what was being said inside. Neil Silberman, with whom I have been friendly in the past (he published his first archaeological article in BAR), urged me to ’fess up. “C’mon, Hershel. You know it’s a forgery. Why don’t you just get up and say that you made a mistake.”

More serious was a discussion I had with Joe Zias, a physical anthropologist who formerly worked for the IAA. Zias told me that in the mid-1990s, when he was working for the IAA, he visited the antiquities shop of a certain “Mahmoud” in the Old City of Jerusalem. There he had seen the James ossuary, except that at that time it had been inscribed only “James, son of Joseph.” Therefore the words “brother of Jesus” must have been added later. Even without these words, the ossuary was valuable. Mahmoud referred to it, Zias said, as “my pension.” Also involved in this hallway discussion was a prominent Jerusalem scholar who claimed in his accented English that he, too, had seen the ossuary in Mahmoud’s shop, perhaps even earlier than had Zias. He could date the occasion because he saw it about a year before he published a Syriac inscription in the scholarly journal Liber Annus (he could not remember exactly the date of publication). But, he added, he did not want his name used. He did not want to be murdered, he said, drawing a finger across the front of his neck. Zias told me there was a third person who had also seen the ossuary in Mahmoud’s shop, but he, too, didn’t want his name used. They would not even tell me who it was.

I tried to get some information about Mahmoud from them, but was unsuccessful. He has since closed his shop and moved to Germany (he married a German woman). They had no idea how he could be found. But Zias was sure that even if I found Mahmoud, he would never admit that he had the ossuary in his shop.

It remains a puzzle as to why Zias has not come out with this information publicly. It is even more puzzling that the unnamed scholar in this discussion has kept silent. It is especially strange because he has published his views about the ossuary inscription. He has vociferously argued that the inscription, though mentioning the name Jesus, does not refer to Jesus of Nazareth and that it could not refer to the Jesus of the New Testament. Yet he gives no hint in his publication that the inscription is a forgery (at least the last half), and he gives no indication that he had previously seen the ossuary inscription with only part of its present inscription.

From the ASOR meeting, I moved to downtown Atlanta, where the SBL meeting was held. It was only a few miles away, but it was worlds apart. Not that SBL was any less concerned with the issues raised by the James ossuary inscription. SBL’s Matthew Collins organized a session devoted to the antiquities market and the issues that it raised. The presentation was balanced (with perhaps the exception of Yuval Goren, who for the most part simply repeated the remarks he had made earlier at the ASOR meeting). One of the presenters at this SBL session has agreed to write an article for us on some of these issues. In the audience were Sorbonne professor André Lemaire, who wrote the original BAR article on the ossuary inscription,^b and Oded Golan, the owner of the ossuary. After the formal presentations, the chair invited Lemaire to comment on the presentations—and he did. Next he invited me to do the same—and I did. Finally, he invited Golan to comment—a clear effort to insure that all sides were represented and heard.

Later, an SBL session that I chaired considered the authenticity of the James ossuary inscription as well as the other inscription that the IAA found to be a fake, the so-called Yehoash inscription.^c Although the session was organized too late to be included in the printed program booklet, so many scholars had heard about it and wanted to attend that it was moved into a ballroom of the hotel. There scholars with very differing views discussed the philology of the Yehoash inscription. Chaim Cohen of Ben-Gurion University defended it, and Edward Greenstein of Tel Aviv University contended it was a forgery.

André Lemaire analyzed the IAA report’s treatment of the James ossuary inscription.^d Central to the question of the authenticity of the James ossuary inscription, however, were 060the presentations of two eminent specialists with vast experience in analyzing ancient stone artifacts. Richard Newman, the head of scientific research at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and James A. Harrell, of the University of Toledo and an officer of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity (ASMOSIA), delivered the final blow to the IAA report. Much of Harrell’s presentation has now been published in BAR.^e Bottom line: The geological arguments in the IAA report, like its non-geological arguments, are seriously flawed. From the geological viewpoint, the inscription is as likely to be authentic as a fake. More tests and experiments are needed.

The next day an Associated Press report flashed this headline around the world: “Scholars say Jesus box may be genuine.” The article noted that I had invited Yuval Goren to be on the panel, but he had refused. (Goren has apparently taken our criticism quite personally; in an e-mail, he has urged colleagues not to write for BAR. So far, we have noticed no effect from this campaign.)

I also gave a report on the James ossuary controversy to the Near Eastern Archaeological Society (NEAS). People were sitting on the floor and standing in the back, all seats having been taken. The NEAS meeting was as friendly as the ASOR meeting was hostile.

Before I was introduced, an NEAS officer urged members of the audience who had not joined the society to do so. NEAS is a society of evangelical scholars, and for years members could not join without first signing a statement professing faith in the inerrancy of the Bible. I could not sign such a statement. As early as 1975, I complained of this, arguing that the requirement was inappropriate for a scholarly organization.^f In 1994, I again complained.^g So NEAS changed its rules, and created the category of associate member, who have all the rights and privileges of other members except the right to vote. Associate members need not sign the statement of faith. I thought that was a nice compromise, and I have been an associate member ever since. Before getting to the text of my talk, I explained all this to the audience and urged them to join, either as an associate member or a regular member.

I have found that evangelical Christians vary widely in their approaches to the Biblical text—from quite conservative to much 062further to the left on the critical/literal spectrum. To say that someone is evangelical does not really say much about his or her approach to the Bible. In this regard, evangelicals are similar to Jews. To say that someone is Jewish doesn’t tell you much about how literally he or she interprets the Biblical text.

I speak with evangelical scholars on the same basis as I talk to other scholars—on the basis of the evidence and rational arguments based on that evidence, not on the basis of faith commitments. I have never found a problem with evangelical scholars on this matter. I enjoy my discussions with evangelical scholars as with non-evangelical scholars, including Jewish scholars of varying commitments to the Biblical text. Some prominent evangelical scholars come to mind with whom I have had such discussions—Kenneth Kitchen, Alan Millard, Bryant Wood, James Hoffmeier, Keith Schoville; and younger scholars like John Monson, Steve Ortiz and Dan Master. (I apologize for leaving out many others.)

But among secular scholars, I find a certain distrust of evangelical scholars. Evangelical scholars supposedly have an agenda that makes their scholarship suspect. The situation is not dissimilar to the current denigration of archaeological giants of the period before about 1970. Many of them were men of the cloth. They wanted to learn how archaeology might illuminate the Bible. Yes, they sometimes went too far in attempting to prove the truth of the Bible. So do some evangelical scholars today. But I wonder if they are any more ideologically driven than some secular scholars who seem determined to undermine the veracity of the Bible.

More broadly, there seems to be a suspicion of people of faith today, a suspicion that they cannot be good scholars. Among a segment of secular Near Eastern archaeologists, even an interest in the Bible is suspicious—and a little low-class, not really sophisticated.

We all have our biases. Our aim must be consciously and conscientiously not to allow these biases to affect our scholarship. Secular scholars need to do this. And so do evangelical scholars.

The fact is that interest in the Bible remains very high, even among ASOR members. The ASOR sessions that dealt directly with the Hebrew Bible were among the most heavily attended of the entire conference. (No ASOR sessions dealt directly with the New Testament, a sign of its secular tilt.)

I fear that this report is itself biased in that it perforce ignores 95 percent of the papers presented at the meetings. And of course I was able to attend only a tiny fraction of them. An interesting SBL session I did attend featured frescoes of women in Christian catacombs, reflecting their surprisingly high status in Roman society. Another SBL session, on Aelia Capitolina (the name the emperor Hadrian gave to Jerusalem in the second century), considered whether the Temple Mount, its temple now destroyed, was included within the Roman city. Other talks considered ethnic boundary markers in early Israel that might be discerned in the archaeological record. How Hellenized the Galilee was in Jesus’ time was the subject of still another presentation. I could go on and on.

One final criticism: I never again want to hear scholars say something is “problematic.” That was the most widely used word for an entire week in Atlanta. Almost every scholar who gave a paper seemed to find something “problematic.” Why can’t they say “vague” or “ambiguous” or “questionable” or “doubtful” or “unsettled,” expressing what they really mean instead of that vague coverall that supposedly reflects scholarly sophistication?

But for the most part, it was stimulating and fun. Next stop: San Antonio in 2004. See you there.

The decision was unanimous: Antiquities collectors are criminals, responsible for the worldwide scourge of looting.