James Ossuary

The James Ossuary is a 1st-century limestone box that was used for containing the bones of the dead. An Aramaic inscription reading "Jacob (James), son of Joseph, brother of Yeshua" in translation is cut into one side of the box. The ossuary attracted scholarly attention due to its apparent association with the Christian Holy Family.

The existence of the ossuary was announced at an October 21, 2002, Washington press conference co-hosted by the Discovery Channel and the Biblical Archaeology Society. The owner of the ossuary is Oded Golan, an Israeli engineer and antiquities collector. The inscription was initially translated by André Lemaire, a Semitic epigrapher, whose article claiming that the ossuary and its inscription were authentic was published in the November/December 2002 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

In 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) argued that part of the inscription was forged at a much later date, a position later challenged by multiple scientific experts.

In December 2004, Oded Golan was charged with 44 counts of forgery, fraud, and deception, including alleged forgery of part of the Ossuary inscription. He was later acquitted of all of those charges by the Israeli court. In an external expert report, submitted to the court and dated September 2005, the conclusions of Wolfgang E. Krumbein (an internationally renowned expert on stone bio-patina) contradicted those of the IAA, stating: "Our preliminary investigations cannot prove the authenticity of the three objects beyond any doubt. Doubtlessly the patina is continuous in many places throughout surface and lettering grooves in the case of ossuary and tablet. On the other hand a proof of forgery is not given by the experts nominated by the IAA.". Since then, leading epigraphers, archaeologists, and archaeometric scientists, some of whom testified during the trial, have published peer-reviewed studies supporting the inscription’s antiquity, citing physical, paleographic, and geochemical evidence, and reporting no indication of modern forgery.

The trial lasted seven years before Judge Aharon Farkash came to a verdict. On March 14, 2012, Golan was acquitted of all forgery, fraud and deception charges but convicted of illegal trading in antiquities. The judge stated that the prosecution had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that the inscription was forged. The court accepted evidence that the ossuary had been in Golan’s possession since at least 1976, thereby undermining the claim that the inscription had been forged around 2002. He emphasized that he did not have a mandate to make scientific determination about the authenticity of the ossuary and said this acquittal "does not mean that the inscription on the ossuary is authentic or that it was written 2,000 years ago". The ossuary was returned by order of the court to Golan, who put it later on public display.

Several experts, including prosecution witnesses Orna Cohen (IAA stone conservator) and Prof. Yuval Goren (Tel Aviv University), testified that they observed natural biological patina—formed over centuries—inside the grooves of the disputed letters. In 2019, Prof. Howard R. Feldman published archaeometric findings supporting the authenticity of the inscription, identifying ancient microfossils and minerals embedded in the patina across both the ossuary surface and the letters.