What 'Jesus hoax' could mean for Mideast antiques

When the collector was identified as a high-tech businessman named Oded Golan, Israeli officials stepped in. Israel sharply limits the number of antiquity merchant licenses offered each year and forbids unlicensed citizens like Mr. Golan from trading, selling, or exporting archaeological finds.

IAA officials seized the ossuary on its return from Toronto and took a look at the rest of Golan's collection. In it, they found yet another item worth solid gold, archaeologically speaking: the Yoash Inscription.

The charred sandstone tablet, three inches thick and just under a foot long, was covered in four ancient scripts describing King Yoash's attempts to renovate the Temple. In this part of the world, where Israelis and Palestinians bitterly contest every rock, the Yoash Inscription was a stone of particular importance.

Both peoples would like sovereignty over the area where the Jewish Temple stood and where one of Islam's holiest shrines now gleams in the sun.

This issue has been a sticking point in peace talks and some Palestinians have claimed that no Jewish Temple ever existed in the area. A written record of its renovation would buttress Israeli claims and silence naysayers.

But Golan could not or would not provide details of its provenance or of the ossuary's. The Yoash Inscription belonged to a Palestinian friend from East Jerusalem, he told authorities.

As for the ossuary, he couldn't remember who sold it to him, though he was sure it came from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

In that dusty, desolate part of the city, the earth is riddled with 1st century Jewish burial caves where ossuaries were commonly used. Jews at the time buried their dead twice, first placing them in a burial cave and then a year later placing the bones in an ossuary.

There is no doubt that the James Ossuary came from such a cave - the box itself dates from the 1st or 2nd century, in line with James's death in AD 62.

The Yoash stone, too, is genuinely ancient. The problem with both items lies in their inscriptions - skillful forgeries betrayed by the stones themselves.

Stones stored in damp caves develop a patina, the film created by chemicals as they seep out of a rock over centuries. In the case of both objects, the IAA found that the inscriptions cut through the patina.

They also discovered chemical elements in the patina that didn't exist in Jerusalem in the past 3,000 years but are found in modern tap water.

While the relics might be fake, the issues they raised for religious Christians and Jews are very real, particularly on the question of whether physical proof is at all relevant to faith.

Avigdor Horowitz, a Biblical language expert at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, who helped the IAA with the Yoash Inscription, recalled looking it over one Sabbath morning.

"It is a charming text," he says of the passage that mirrors the Bible's Second Book of Kings (12:1-6, 11-17). "I was sitting there thinking, 'I wish this text were authentic.'" It clearly wasn't, he says, but as usual, he went to synagogue anyway.

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