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Brother of Jesus Ossuary

New Tests Bolster Case For Authenticity

By Edward J. Keall

“By accident most strange,” Shakespeare reminds us in The Tempest, can come “bountiful Fortune.” So, it might be argued, was the case with the tragic accident in which the now-famous ossuary (bone box) inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” broke last fall on its way from Israel to Toronto for exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).a It arrived in a cardboard carton encased only in layers of bubble wrap, which, when removed, revealed a soft limestone bone box that had broken into five pieces. Now restored, the ossuary is more structurally sound than before. And the […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Hershel Shanks, “Cracks in James Bone Box Repaired,” BAR 29:01.

2.

See André Lemaire, “Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus,” BAR 28:06, and Hershel Shanks and Ben Witherington III, The Brother of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

3.

In archaeometry, “patina” refers to a surface appearance that develops from a reaction of the object itself to the environment; “encrustation” implies a deposit that settles on a surface through migration of soluble minerals, either from within the object itself or from elsewhere.

4.

See “Epigraphy—and the Lab—Say It’s Genuine,” BAR 28:06.