“If this is a forgery, I quit,” declared Israel’s leading paleographer, Ada Yardeni, regarding the inscription on an ancient bone box, or ossuary, reading “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”
This ringing testimony to the authenticity of the inscription stands in contrast to one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Israeli scholarship, which began with the appointment of an academic committee by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) that included some of Israel’s leading academics and archaeologists to decide whether the ossuary inscription was to be condemned as a forgery. The committee unanimously concluded that the inscription was007 indeed a forgery. The ossuary’s owner, Oded Golan, was arrested in the middle of the night, handcuffed for the benefit of the assembled television cameras and interrogated for 30 hours. A seven-year trial charging Golan with criminal forgery followed—and ended with Golan’s acquittal.
At the trial, the government was unable to produce a single paleographer to testify that the inscription, or part of it, was a forgery. Regarding the IAA committee that had unanimously concluded the inscription was a forgery, one international authority (Dutch scholar Pieter van der Horst) has written: “It is stupefying that there are scholars who think in all seriousness that decisive proof of the inscription’s inauthenticity has now been provided. One really does not have to be a genius in order to see that no compelling arguments whatsoever [in the committee report] have been put forward.”1
I have written of this before,a so I will not repeat it in detail here. Suffice it to say that the question turns on the paleography of the letters. And here Yardeni is joined by André Lemaire of the Sorbonne, who is just as confident as Yardeni that the inscription is ancient and authentic.
In the public mind, however, the inscription is likely to be regarded as questionable at best, given this history. This view will be reinforced by the statement of a leading American paleographer, Christopher Rollston of the George Washington University, who stated on an Easter TV program in 2015 that, in his judgment, the inscription was “75–85 percent” likely to be a forgery—this despite the fact that at the trial Rollston refused to testify regarding the authenticity of this inscription because Second Temple inscriptions were not in his expertise. Moreover, he has subsequently produced no scholarly analysis to support his “75–85 percent” estimate of forgery.
So any layperson who says that scholars are divided as to the authenticity/forgery of the “brother of Jesus” inscription is making an accurate statement.
“If this is a forgery, I quit,” declared Israel’s leading paleographer, Ada Yardeni, regarding the inscription on an ancient bone box, or ossuary, reading “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”
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Pieter W. van der Horst, Saxa Judaica Loquuntur: Lessons from Early Jewish Inscriptions, Biblical Interpretation Series 134 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 81.
