The Brother of Jesus: The Dramatic Story & Meaning of the First Archaeological Link to Jesus & His Family

332 Pages·2004·4.25 MB·English

by  Hershel Shanks

THE BROTHER OF
JESUS

The Dramatic Story & Meaning of

the First Archaeological Link

to Jesus & His Family

HERSHEL SHANKS & BEN WITHERINGTON III

Contents

Introduction to the Revised Edition v

Introduction xi

Foreword by André Lemaire xv

PART I. THE STORY OF A REMARKABLE DISCOVERY

(Hershel Shanks) 1

1. Oh, No! 3

2. An Amazing Discovery 7

3. How Could the Son of God Have a Brother? 23

4. Is It a Fake? 31

5. Is It the Jesus? 53

6. Can We Ignore It? 79

PART II. THE STORY OF JAMES, SON OF JOSEPH,

BROTHER OF JESUS (Ben Witherington III) 89

Introduction—In His End, a Beginning 91
iv Contents
7. From Brother to Follower 93

8. From Follower to Head of the Jerusalem Church 111

9. James, Mediator Between Jews and Gentiles 127

10. James the Sage 143

11. The Death of James 165

12. James the Legend 177

13. Brother, Cousin, or Kin? 199

14. Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus 211

PART III: IS IT A FAKE? WHERE MATTERS STAND 225

15. Summary Report of the Examining Committees for

the James Ossuary and Yehoash Inscription (Israel

Antiquities Authority) 227

16. Don’t Close the Box Yet (Hershel Shanks) 239

17. Israel Antiquities Authority’s Report on the James

Ossuary Is Deeply Flawed (André Lemaire) 245

18. Bones of Contention (Ben Witherington III) 265

19. The Top Ten New Testament Archaeological

Finds of the Past 150 Years (Ben Witherington III) 273

20. A Curator’s Perspective (Edward J. Keall) 281

Acknowledgments 307

About the Authors

Other Books by the Authors
Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher
Introduction to the Revised Edition

O
n June 18, 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority an-
nounced at a press conference that the inscription “James,
son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” on the bone box, or ossuary, of
James was a modern forgery.
On July 21, 2003, Oded Golan, the owner of the ossuary, was
arrested, presumably for forging the inscription with tools found
in his workshop.
So the jig was up. Everything in the first edition of this
book—at least the first part, which I wrote—was either wrong or
irrelevant. I had been taken in by a forger and made a fool of.
But that is not really the end of the story. As a matter of fact,
the end of the story cannot yet be written. At the present time we
still don’t know for sure whether the inscription—perhaps the
most startling artifact ever found from the time of Jesus—is au-
thentic or a modern forgery. Nor do we know for sure whether the
owner of the ossuary, Tel Aviv collector Oded Golan, is a forger.
What we do know for sure is that the Israel Antiquities Au-
thority (IAA) has not proved its case. Maybe it will do so in the fu-
ture as more and more people study the inscription and the
ossuary and, despite the failings of its study, find the inscription a
forgery. But at this time, the IAA has not even bothered to defend
its study. We can only speak about what we know now and what we
vi Introduction to the Revised Edition
do not know now. At this time, whether the inscription is authen-
tic is an open question. I can no longer state with such confi-
dence, as I did in the first edition, that it is “virtually certain that
the James ossuary and its inscription are authentic artifacts.” But I
am by no means convinced that it is a forgery either. In short, the
question has been raised but not answered.
As for Oded Golan, the fact is that he has never been
charged—either with forgery or any other wrongdoing. True, the
IAA and the Israeli police have been assiduous—to say the least—
in their effort to obtain a confession from him. Even though there
was no danger that he would flee, the police handcuffed him in
front of his parents and took him to be mugged and fingerprinted
at the local police station. They put the cuffs on unnecessarily, the
chief fraud investigator for the IAA told me, because they wanted
to “pressure him.” Later, they came to his home at night and team-
interrogated him for nearly thirty hours, well into the following
evening. When, finally, they came to arrest him, they arrived in the
middle of the night, as if he were a potentially violent criminal
who would endanger the police if he were awake when they ar-
rived. But they did not charge him with a crime. Instead, the police
convinced a judge to allow him to be held, under Israeli law, for
four days for questioning, after which they would have to charge
him with a crime or release him. When the four days had elapsed,
they released him without charging him. Yet, almost everyone knows
only that he was arrested (and thus presumes he is guilty).
By the time you read this, perhaps Golan will have been
charged. But, just as I made the decision to print in Biblical Ar-
chaeology Review Professor Lemaire’s original article about the in-
scription on the basis of what we then knew (after getting
confirmation from leading epigraphers and linguists as well as
the scientific judgment of geologists at the Israel Geological Sur-
vey), I can speak now of the case against Oded Golan, the owner
of the ossuary, only on the basis of what we know at this time.
I can report that IAA officials have told several people, in-
cluding me, that there is a group of forgers operating in Israel
and that it includes an “honored Israeli archaeologist.” This is ex-
tremely hard to believe. Yet it is also hard to think that this kind
Introduction to the Revised Edition vii
of information would be given out by the IAA if it didn’t have the
evidence to back it up.
Further, since I last wrote, Golan’s association with another
controversial artifact has been made public: the so-called Jehoash
inscription, which mentions the biblical king Jehoash, who ruled
over Judah from about 835 to 801 B.C. Golan denies ownership of
the inscription, but it was in his apartment when the police seized
it. Unlike the ossuary inscription, the Jehoash inscription has
been deemed a “demonstrable forgery” by several distinguished
paleographers who have analyzed the script and linguistics. While
some other scholars are, as they say, on the fence, the weight of
the evidence at this time is clearly that the Jehoash inscription is a
forgery. It was this inscription that led the IAA to suspect Golan
and to appoint committees to examine both the Jehoash inscrip-
tion and the ossuary inscription. The IAA committee that exam-
ined the Jehoash inscription found it also to be a forgery.
But sometimes these authorities play dirty. They may still be
trying to pressure Golan to confess. A case in point: after the IAA
completed the study concluding that the ossuary inscription is a
forgery, the ossuary was returned to the owner. By this time, he
was famous and he was fearful that it might be robbed from his
middle-class apartment in Tel Aviv. So he wrapped it in bubble
wrap, then placed it in a cardboard box and wrapped this card-
board box in cloth. Then he took it to the only place in his apart-
ment building where he thought it would be safe. On the roof was
a small old room that hadn’t been used in decades. It contained a
toilet that no longer had a seat, so he took a board and placed the
box on top—and locked the door. When the police came to arrest
him, they wanted to take the ossuary too, so they asked him where
it was. He took them to the roof where he had hidden it. The po-
lice proceeded to take off the outer cloth, open the cardboard
box, remove the ossuary from the bubble wrap, place it back on
the toilet, take a photograph of the ossuary on the toilet, and re-
lease the picture to the newspapers. Voilà. Now they had “evi-
dence” of the disrespect the owner was showing to the ossuary.
Which is not to say that Oded Golan is not a forger, simply
that the case hasn’t been made yet.
viii Introduction to the Revised Edition

But what of the inscription itself? Is it authentic, or is it a
forgery? Whether or not Oded Golan is a forger, there is no ques-
tion that he has many authentic and important pieces in his col-
lection—and the ossuary with its inscription may be one of them,
even if he is a forger.
The IAA declaration that the inscription is a forgery, re-
printed in chapter 15 of our new part 3, is based on the findings
of two committees, a Writing and Content Committee and a sep-
arate Materials and Patina Committee. In chapter 17, André
Lemaire analyzes the work of the Writing and Content Commit-
tee and convincingly demonstrates that it is deeply flawed. As he
shows, no confidence whatsoever can be placed in its conclusions,
especially in light of the other world-renowned paleographers
who find no reason to question the authenticity of the inscription
based on the shape and form of the letters (paleography). The
members of the Writing and Content Committee who studied the
ossuary do not even discuss the paleography of the letters,
though it seems this should have been a critical aspect of their ex-
amination. The committee’s conclusions are simply impressionis-
tic. And the ossuary committee, as Lemaire points out, did not
include anyone identified by the appointing committee as a pale-
ographic expert.
One member of the Writing and Content Committee candidly
admitted that he was convinced only by the conclusion of the two
relevant scientists—geologists—on the Materials and Patina Com-
mittee. Otherwise, he would have found the inscription authentic.
It is clear that the geologists’ judgment—and their judgment
alone—guided the conclusion of the committee as a whole. Yet
each of the two geologists explicitly states that his individual state-
ment on the ossuary is not a final report or a proper scientific ex-
planation of his position. Instead, both say they will publish a
proper scientific report in a professional journal sometime in the
future. Hence, it is impossible for other geologists—and I have
talked to many of them—to review the work of the two geologists
on the IAA committee.
But that is not the worst of it.
After the ossuary was displayed in November and December
2002 at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, a team
Introduction to the Revised Edition ix
from the museum did its own scientific study of the ossuary and
its inscription. Like the original team from the Israel Geological
Survey, the ROM team found nothing suspicious or modern
about the inscription and declared it authentic. Perhaps both the
ROM team and the team from the Israel Geological Survey were
mistaken. But at the very least, the IAA committee should ex-
plain, as a professional courtesy, why it believes these other stud-
ies erred, why these scientific tests failed to reveal the forgery.
Tellingly, neither of the two geologists on the IAA committee
uses the word fake or forgery in his statement. The summary of the
individual statements released by the IAA (and printed in chapter
15) contains the following sentence by one of the geologists: “The
inscription was inscribed or cleaned in a modern period.” Every-
one has acknowledged that the inscription was indeed cleaned in
modern times—several times, roughly, and with a sharp instru-
ment. But the IAA committee never bothered to consider this al-
ternative in its own statement.
Moreover, even the IAA committee found ancient patina in
some of the letters of the inscription. One of the members of the
Materials and Patina Committee stated, as quoted in the sum-
mary, “The end of the inscription ‘brother of Jesus’ appears au-
thentic; in some places there seems to be remains of old patina.”
If this statement is correct, it is highly unlikely that the first part
of the inscription is a forgery.
Perhaps in the end the inscription will be proven to be a
forgery. But that hasn’t happened yet.
Many scholars are asking how the IAA got involved in this
matter in the first place. After all, its job is not to assess the au-
thenticity of questionable artifacts. It has never done so in the
past. When questionable artifacts surface, scholars write a variety
of analyses in professional journals until a consensus is reached
or the two sides have reached an impasse and each individual
scholar is then free to adopt the analysis that seems most con-
vincing. Many scholars believe that is what should have happened
here: let scholars from a variety of scholarly subdisciplines ex-
press their views, and let those who wish to counter them do so.
The IAA committee is not a judicial authority empowered to
make a definitive decision like a court. But that is how the IAA