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A former employee of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) named Joe Zias has for years maintained that he saw the famous bone box (ossuary) inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” in a Jerusalem antiquities shop without the words “brother of Jesus.” If true, the addition of these words to the inscription is clearly a modern forgery.
At a scholarly conference in 2003, Zias told me about this—that he had seen the ossuary without the critical phrase “brother of Jesus.” I was hesitant to publish this on the basis of a relatively short conversation. But it turned out that I was not the only one to whom Zias had made this claim. Among the others was Eric Meyers, a distinguished archaeologist, former president of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and former editor of the scholarly journal Near Eastern Archaeology. Meyers published Zias’s claim.
Once the claim was public, I felt free to discuss it in BAR. Was Zias lying? Apparently, he made the same claim to his former employer, the IAA, because that became the critical allegation of the criminal indictment admitting that the ossuary itself and the first part of the inscription were ancient but the last part, “brother of Jesus,” was a modern forgery.
It has now been almost a decade since I had this conversation with Zias. The five-year forgery trial ended a year and a half ago, and the judge has only recently announced his decision acquitting the defendants of all charges of forgery. But Zias has never retracted his claim that he saw the ossuary without the words “brother of Jesus.” Until now!
In January 2012, Zias replied to a message thread on a scholarly list-serv1 recounting how he had told me and my “assistant quietly and discretely [sic] that we [Zias and another scholar] had seen the James ossuary independently of one another, decades after [Oded] Golan [owner of the ossuary] claims to have published it? [sic]. Not ‘having a sense of humor,’ [Shanks] retaliated with the ‘Lying Scholars[?]’ article.”
In short, I took him seriously when he was only kidding. I didn’t have a sense of humor. Zias was only joking when he told me (and presumably also when he told Eric Meyers at the same scholarly conference) that he had seen the ossuary inscription without the words “brother of Jesus.”
I have since spoken to a prominent Jerusalem archaeologist to whom Zias also made this same claim. The Jerusalem archaeologist asserts very strongly that Zias was serious when he made the claim.
It now appears that Zias is the source of the theory on which the central claim of forgery in the “forgery trial of the century” was based—that the ossuary and the first part of the inscription are authentic but that the words “brother of Jesus” are a modern forgery.
If I had had a sense of humor, I would have realized that Joe was only kidding when he claimed to have seen the ossuary inscription without the words “brother of Jesus.” Perhaps Joe’s old employer, the IAA, also failed to realize that Joe was only kidding when he told them this same story. If they had, perhaps this whole litigation could have been avoided.
Never mind that there is no longer a place for Joe at the IAA. He may well have a brilliant future as a professional comedian.—H.S.
A former employee of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) named Joe Zias has for years maintained that he saw the famous bone box (ossuary) inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” in a Jerusalem antiquities shop without the words “brother of Jesus.” If true, the addition of these words to the inscription is clearly a modern forgery.
