Phony biblical relics spark controversy

— -- Medieval pilgrims would have understood the throngs who crowded Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to see the James Ossuary. Only six years ago, the stone box inscribed "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" in Aramaic, made Time magazine's cover and drew 100,000-person lines to see the limestone box that, by implication, may have once held the skeletal remain of Jesus' brother.

But like so many religious relics before, the ossuary, a two-foot-long box that Jewish inhabitants of burial-site-poor Jerusalem typically used to store remains around the First Century, A.D., turned out to have a checkered past. The 2002 vetting of the box's authenticity described in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review came under fire quickly, from experts who complained the box's origins were unknown. Oded Golan, the antiquities dealer who owned the ossuary, only said he had bought it from another dealer in the 1970's.

Many outside experts, concluded the second part of the ossuary inscription, the reference to Jesus, was a fake, including the scholar Rochelle Altman who found that it "bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition," and "is questionable to say the least." Others, such as Amnon Rosenfeld of the Geological Survey of Israel, continue to defend the inscription's authenticity.

In 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority raided Golan's apartment, famously finding the ossuary sitting atop a rooftop toilet amid a workshop setting filled with inscription tools. Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University described the furor over the ossuary as a case of " Jerusalem syndrome," modern-day people suddenly deluding themselves into believing they are Bible characters. Golan and three other men were indicted for forgery of the James ossuary in 2004 by Israeli authorities. Golan and one other man, the antiquities dealer Raymond Deutsch, remain on trial.

The case has called into question other artifacts of the same era, particularly the " Jehoash Inscription," a stone describing repairs to the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and an ivory pomegranate once thought a relic from Solomon's Temple, declared a forgery by the Israel Museum in 2004.