Fudging with Forgeries

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I must confess at the outset that I should be disqualified from writing this piece because its subject, Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University, has charged me with playing a “pivotal role” in the forgeries alleged in the so-called forgery trial of the century, now awaiting decision in a Jerusalem court. My involvement in the crime, he says, is “evident.”^a

Nevertheless, I will proceed. The reader may make due allowance for my bias.

Professor Goren has been the single driving force that found at least three famous inscriptions to be forgeries. He spoke with authoritative influence because he is not a field archaeologist or a language or writing specialist, but a hard scientist who uses a microscope and scientific jargon. Others relied on his expertise.¹ He led the troops in finding the following inscriptions, among others, to be forgeries:

(1) The well-known ossuary, or bone box, inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

(2) A small ivory pomegranate inscribed “Belonging to the Tem[ple of Yahwe]h, holy to the priests.” If authentic, this pomegranate, 054 probably the head of a sceptre, may have come from Solomon’s Temple.

(3) A 15-line inscription on a black stone plaque ascribed to King Jehoash (Yehoash in Hebrew), who, according to the Bible, repaired the Temple in the late ninth century B.C.E. If authentic, this would be the only royal Israelite inscription ever discovered.

Professor Goren has also declared an elaborately decorated stone oil lamp, recently published in BAR, to be a forgery.^b

I begin my discussion, however, not with these artifacts, but with an important new inscription that Professor Goren found to be authentic. It, too, is on an ossuary and comes from the antiquities market. However, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) “deemed [it] significant enough to study despite its doubtful origin.”²

The Aramaic inscription is clear and reads as follows³:

“Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Ma‘aziah from Beth ’Imri.”⁴

Miriam (English: Mary) is the most common woman’s name found in archaeological contexts and literary references of the first century. The name is mentioned nearly 80 times. This Miriam’s father is Yeshua (English: Jesus). That name is even more popular, appearing in the sources more than a hundred times. This Miriam’s grandfather, however, had an uncommon name: Caiaphas, a family of priests. Caiaphas, of course, was the name of the high priest mentioned in the Gospels who delivered Jesus to the Romans for crucifixion. The Caiaphas family tomb was found in 1990 in Jerusalem.^c Among the 12 ossuaries in the burial cave, two are inscribed with the name Caiaphas. Scholars generally assume that one of these ossuaries once held the bones of the high priest mentioned in the Gospels.

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The Miriam inscription also has unusual scholarly importance because it mentions Caiaphas as a “priest of Ma‘aziah.” According to the Book of Chronicles, 24 priestly families were designated to serve in the Temple annually in successive periods (1 Chronicles 24). Each of these 24 periods is known as a “priestly course.” The final priestly course is assigned to the family of Ma‘aziah (1 Chronicles 24:18). This Miriam ossuary inscription is the first time this priestly name has been found in an archaeological context. We now know that the Caiaphas family of priests—to which Miriam belonged—is part of the Ma‘aziah family.

This priestly family came from Beth ’Imri, a place otherwise unknown. Perhaps it is not a place name but the name of a priestly family, according to Israeli epigrapher Shmuel Ahituv and Boaz Zissu, the Israeli archaeologist who published the report on the ossuary inscription.

The IAA obviously considered this inscription of unusual importance, despite the fact that it had come from the disdained antiquities market. But since the ossuary’s provenance remains unknown, there is always a chance that the inscription is a forgery—even if the ossuary itself is ancient. The matter must be studied. So the IAA called in the darling of the IAA nursery, Professor Yuval Goren.

By contrast, to judge the authenticity of the James ossuary inscription, the IAA had appointed a large committee, of whom only two or three were geological experts. Professor Goren managed to lead all the rest to conclude that at least the end of the James ossuary inscription (“brother of Jesus”) was a forgery. In one case a leading archaeologist wrote that he was “forced” to change his mind (he previously had concluded the inscription was authentic) because of Professor Goren’s scientific analysis.

In the case of the Miriam ossuary inscription, however, Professor Goren alone was enough for the IAA’s purposes.

In the case of the Miriam ossuary, Professor Goren was able to conclude that the inscription was “authentic beyond any reasonable doubt.”

We have no reason to question this conclusion. What is interesting, however, is that an accomplished scientist can study an ossuary inscription and conclude, without reservation, that it is authentic. How can he do it?

Professor Goren describes his method in great detail. His scientific examination of the Miriam ossuary inscription focused on the patina coating 056 the ossuary’s stone surface. After examining it under an ordinary microscope, he studied “thin sections” of the inscription under a vastly more powerful microscope that revealed the various layers in the patina. Next, samples were examined with an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM), which uses electron beams to reveal characteristics and elements of the patina, which are then chemically determined by an Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDS).

The result of this examination of the Miriam ossuary inscription was the identification of various layers in the patina—for example, a yellow-orange film of biopatina under some calcite stone patina—that could only occur “over a prolonged sequence of time.”⁵ This would be “extremely difficult—if not impossible—to replicate in laboratory conditions.” Hence the inscription was ancient and genuine.

The startling relevance of the Miriam ossuary inscription to the other artifacts that Professor Goren had found to be forgeries is that, in Goren’s own view, there is an examination—an ESEM/EDS examination—that can establish whether the inscription is authentic. Why, then, did he not perform an ESEM/EDS examination on the James ossuary? This is especially strange because another scientist on the committee assigned to look at the James ossuary inscription (Orna Cohen) found that “the end of the inscription, ‘brother of Jesus,’ appears authentic. In some places there seems to be remains of old [original] patina.” Moreover, Professor Goren says that in a 2007 article, he outlined the procedures he used in his study of the Miriam ossuary. Presumably he was familiar with them even earlier. So why did he not use these methods 057 (ESEM/EDS) on the James ossuary inscription that he found to be a forgery?

Worse still, Goren himself could conclude only that “the inscription [on the James ossuary] was inscribed or cleaned in a modern period.” Shouldn’t his finding that the suspicious covering he identified could be the result of a “modern cleaning” (ever the smart aleck, Goren dubbed this covering the “James Bond”) have suggested to Goren that he should perform an ESEM/EDS examination to determine authenticity? It would seem that Goren was determined to come up with a finding of forgery.

Goren’s conclusion formed the basis of a criminal indictment that could send defendant Oded Golan to jail. This apparently didn’t bother Goren. And his conclusion was accepted—until he testified in court and was subject to cross-examination. Then it fell apart.

Other equally eminent scientists found—as Orna Cohen did—original patina in the letters of the inscription under the surface coating. When presented with pictures showing this, Goren asked the court for a recess until the next day so he could re-examine the inscription. When he returned to court, he admitted that the inscription contained some original ancient patina. (Actually, he had discovered this more than a year before the indictment, but he failed to disclose it in his report to the IAA. This was the same original patina in the first letter of “Jesus” identified by Orna Cohen.) One of his explanations of this original patina he now admitted to seeing was that it might be in an ancient scratch that the modern forger used as a stroke in the forged letter. A little far-fetched, to say the least. But even then, Goren did not suggest performing an ESEM/EDS exam on the James ossuary, as he had done to determine the authenticity of the Miriam ossuary inscription.

When pressed on cross-examination as to whether the inscription on the James ossuary was a forgery, all Goren would say is that he was “undecided.”

Turning to the ivory pomegranate inscribed “Belonging to the Tem[ple of Yahwe]h, holy to the priests,” the inscription had been authenticated by Israel’s greatest script expert, Nahman Avigad. Careful examination by world-authority Sorbonne scholar André Lemaire confirmed Professor Avigad’s judgment. The Israel Museum paid $550,000 for the object.

Again, Goren led the troops in concluding that the inscription was a modern forgery. This time the issue turned on a physical examination of the letters of the inscription as they related to an edge of a part of the pomegranate that had broken off. That is, a third of the ball (or grenade) of the pomegranate had broken off in ancient times; all agree that this break is ancient. The question is whether any of the letters of the inscription goes into the break. If so, that would show that the letter had been inscribed in ancient times before the part of the pomegranate forming the ancient break had broken off.

Goren claimed the letters involved stopped short of the ancient break. By this time, Professor Avigad had passed away. André Lemaire’s physical examination of the pomegranate differed from Goren’s. So a group of us, including both Goren and Lemaire, got together at the Israel Museum to look at the object under a microscope.^d

Three letters were involved. One goes into one of the new breaks. Goren admitted he had been wrong to conclude otherwise. But this did not decide the issue because it involved a new break. A second 058 letter involved both the new and the old break, and no agreement could be reached. The third letter, however—the Hebrew letter heh—clearly went into the old break, establishing that it had been engraved in ancient times, before the old break had been created. Each side from the group at the museum wrote up its report for the Israel Exploration Journal.⁶ Lemaire naturally emphasized the heh that went into the old break. Goren’s report discussed all aspects of our meeting, except one: He failed even to mention the heh! I wrote a letter to the Israel Exploration Journal pointing this out. But the editor, a colleague of Goren’s, declined to print it. Whenever I see Goren at a scholarly conference, I am tempted to call out, “Hey, Yuval, what about the heh?” But I can do it here: “Hey, Yuval, how about addressing the question of the heh?”

The third inscription is the Jehoash (or Yehoash) inscription engraved on a black stone plaque. Goren initially identified the stone as metamorphic greywacke from the Troodos massif in Cyprus. (Greywacke is not found in Israel.) It later turned out, however, that the stone is ordinary arkosic sandstone common near the Dead Sea and other sites in Israel. Goren may be forgiven for the mistake, however, because he is an expert in clays, not in stone.

As for the Jehoash inscription itself, Goren concluded that it is a modern forgery because he noticed “signs of fresh cutting and polishing.” Moreover, the patina on the back of the stone was not the same as that on the front, which was an “artificial mixture.” His explanation as to how this artificial mixture was applied to the stone later proved to be erroneous, and he was unable to explain how this supposedly “artificial mixture” was made to stick.

But the question now is: Why didn’t Professor Goren examine the Jehoash inscription with an ESEM/EDS as he did the Miriam inscription? If it would tell us whether the Miriam inscription was authentic, why not the Jehoash inscription?

Another group of distinguished scientists (two from the Geological Survey of Israel and one from Yuval Goren’s own university) did examine the Jehoash inscription with ESEM/EDS. They followed the same method Goren used in the Miriam inscription, concluding that layers in the Jehoash patina could form only over a long period of time.⁷ Their study, they tell us, “strongly supports” the conclusion that the inscription is authentic.^e

Professor Goren’s failure to examine the Jehoash inscription with ESEM/EDS is not the only sloppy aspect of his contrary conclusion. A deep crack in the stone plaque runs (or ran) through several lines of the inscription. The inscription itself goes across the crack. Even if a forger could engrave across this deep crack without breaking the plaque, would any forger choose such a plaque on which to forge a long 15-line inscription? Hardly. Yet Goren gave no consideration to the crack.

Worse yet, when the Israeli police seized the plaque, they accidentally dropped it and broke it in two, revealing further evidence of the antiquity of at least that part of the inscription through which the crack ran. Professor Goren has declined to respond to this evidence.

This has become standard operating procedure with him. In the case of the stone oil lamp recently published in BAR, Professor Goren has declared he regards it with suspicion with little if any study. Certainly he has not examined it with the ESEM/EDS that he used on the Miriam inscription. In connection with BAR’s publication of the oil lamp as authentic (based on the conclusion of a number of the same scientists who wrote on the Jehoash inscription), I contacted Professor Goren in the hope that he would respond. He declined to respond.

I must confess at the outset that I should be disqualified from writing this piece because its subject, Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University, has charged me with playing a “pivotal role” in the forgeries alleged in the so-called forgery trial of the century, now awaiting decision in a Jerusalem court. My involvement in the crime, he says, is “evident.”a Nevertheless, I will proceed. The reader may make due allowance for my bias. Professor Goren has been the single driving force that found at least three famous inscriptions to be forgeries. He spoke with authoritative influence because he […]