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The press conference of the Israeli Antiquities Authority was announced with much fanfare, and headlines went out around the world—JAMES OSSUARY DECLARED HOAX, INSCRIPTION SAID TO BE CERTAINLY A MODERN FORGERY. Of course, it was not possible in June to critique this finding since the scientific reports that were said to be the basis of it were not released. Two months later, as I am writing this, only a summary of the findings has been released (though it is called a "final report"). One must wonder why the IAA is holding back the data, when the commission finished its work nearly three months ago.

As it is, the summary of findings of the various committees reveals major problems. If the scientific reports that are the basis of these summaries are not more substantial than the summaries, then certainly the headlines were not merely premature, but probably inaccurate as well.

Let us start with a few facts. First, only a few weeks after the IAA's much ballyhooed press conference, careful scholars from Toronto published more of their findings. They concluded that the inscription on the James ossuary is certainly not a modern forgery. Toronto Museum curator Ed Keall could hardly have been clearer in his article that appeared in the July/August Biblical Archaeology Review. Thus, at a minimum, we have a divided scholarly house in regard to this ossuary, and the attempt by the IAA to close the case on the James ossuary files has failed.

Second, Simcha Jacobovici, the producer of the Discovery Channel's special on the James ossuary, also held a news conference near the end of June. In it he pointed out various of the problems underlying the IAA's report and the way IAA proceeded with its examination. For example, the head of the Israeli Geological Survey initially silenced his two associates who first authenticated the patina on the ossuary, in effect overruling them. He then stated publicly that if French epigrapher André Lemaire still thinks the inscription is authentic it probably is. Then he retracted this statement. In fact, Lemaire does still believe the inscription is authentic. His detailed refutation of the IAA's findings and his devastating critique of the process will be published this fall in BAR. Something is rotten in Jerusalem, and this whole investigation begins to look more and more political.

Third, at a July panel discussion in Jerusalem after the showing of the Discovery Channel special The Brother of Jesus, Ada Yardeni, a leading Israeli authority on Hebrew and Aramaic script, continued to maintain that the inscription was authentic and that nothing the IAA's report had revealed disproved this conclusion.

Fourth, two independent examinations of the IAA's report indicate that it is far from conclusive. A team of scholars at the University of Kentucky has compared the IAA's summaries with the reports from Toronto. This team consists of Dr. Sue Rimmer (an organic petrographer), and Drs. Ana Carmo and Harry Rowe (both isotope geochemists). Their preliminary findings note the "many inconsistencies in the information we have looked at both in terms of data/observations and interpretations" and state that "the issue of whether the inscription cuts the ossuary's primary patina is unresolved" (despite the claims of some in the IAA that its report resolves the matter). The team also asks, "Is it true that only three additional ossuaries were sampled for comparison with the oxygen isotope data? On what basis were these selected?" Obviously a larger sampling is needed before one can draw sweeping conclusions.

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10