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I was talking to a scholar/friend who was a member of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) committee that had declared the ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” to be a fake. I will refer to the person as “he” simply because I don’t want to keep repeating “he or she.” In short, he was a little angry with me. He was referring to Sorbonne scholar André Lemaire’s piece in the November/December 2003 BAR (“Israel Antiquities Authority Report on the James Ossuary Deeply Flawed”).
“You didn’t print the other side,” he said.
“I would certainly print the other side,” I replied, “if it came in.”
“No, I mean in the same issue,” he said. He was angry because I hadn’t solicited an article from someone on the committee to print in the same issue with Lemaire’s piece.
We print many critical articles—and letters. We also print replies to these criticisms—almost always in a later issue, typically in the second issue after the critical piece appears. I assured him that we would certainly print anything from him that he cared to submit.
No, he wouldn’t submit anything.
In fact, we have not received any defense of the IAA report, nor any substantive criticism of Lemaire’s article.
Then he replied that BAR’s criticism of the IAA was so personal. He said that he was accustomed to scholarly criticism and even sometimes to making mistakes—even to admitting them. But he felt hurt because he had agreed to be a member of the IAA committee, donated his time and expertise, and then he’s faced with all this criticism.
“Is it really true that the ossuary inscription is 100 percent surely a forgery,” I pressed, “as Uzi Dahari [the chairman of the IAA committee] maintains?” He conceded that it wasn’t 100 percent certain; that was what Uzi Dahari claimed, not him.
But, alas, Uzi Dahari speaks for the committee.
“And who made it personal?” I asked. “It’s Shuka Dorfman [director of the IAA] who won’t speak to me. I’m willing to speak with him. And, can you imagine, he won’t allow [Jerusalem archaeologist] Ronny Reich to excavate Weill’s cistern [where, in a partial excavation many years ago, extremely important artifacts were found] because the money is coming through the Biblical Archaeology Society [publisher of BAR].”
The fact remains that my friend felt quite certain the inscription was a forgery—and that the forger badly hurt the discipline. People are now afraid to publish artifacts that come from the antiquities market, he said. “If it’s a forgery,” I agreed, “the forger has indeed hurt the discipline—and badly.”
But I guess that is the question. Is it a forgery? And that will remain the question until an international team of unbiased experts is permitted to study it. The sooner, the better.
I was talking to a scholar/friend who was a member of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) committee that had declared the ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” to be a fake. I will refer to the person as “he” simply because I don’t want to keep repeating “he or she.” In short, he was a little angry with me. He was referring to Sorbonne scholar André Lemaire’s piece in the November/December 2003 BAR (“Israel Antiquities Authority Report on the James Ossuary Deeply Flawed”). “You didn’t print the other side,” he said. “I would certainly print the […]