“This groundbreaking technological experience will create a sense of time travel for our guests and bring them closer to the story of Jesus.” 

For those whose faith is strong but are seeking proof, the pricey admission will be a bargain. At the 2,900 square meter (30,000 square feet) exhibit, they will view the stone coffin that may have held the bones of the first bishop of Jerusalem — who may have been Jesus’ step-brother from a previous marriage of their father Joseph.

While the 2,000-year-old ossuary is seemingly genuine, the underlying issue is whether its Paleo-Hebrew inscription is the real deal or a clever fake replete with ersatz patina that was planted to fool experts.

Nothing is known of the James Ossuary’s provenance, as is the case with looted artifacts traded on Israel’s quasi-legal antiquities market.

Joe Zias, a retired physical anthropologist in Jerusalem who spent decades working for the Israel Antiquities Authority, reportedly saw the ossuary at an antiquities shop on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City in the 1990s. The inscription then read simply “Jacob (James) son of Joseph,” he claimed.

A decade later, the nondescript ossuary, purchased by controversial Tel Aviv antiquities dealer Oded Golan, resurfaced. Its famous inscription echoes Mark 6:3, which records Jesus as the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon, as well as the sibling of some unnamed sisters. The ossuary’s existence was bombastically announced at an Oct. 21, 2002, press conference in Washington, D.C., co-hosted by the Discovery Channel and the Biblical Archaeology Society, the nonsectarian publisher of the Biblical Archaeology Review which seeks to popularize archaeological research related to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

The inscription on Golan’s ossuary was initially translated by André Lemaire, a respected Semitic epigrapher at Sorbonne University’s prestigious École pratique des hautes études in Paris. The professor’s analysis claiming that the ossuary and its inscription were authentic was published in BAR’s November/December 2002 issue.

Lamaire’s credibility however suffered a blow when he authenticated the so-called “ivory pomegranate” alleged to be a 2,800-year-old cult object from Solomon’s Temple on Mount Moriah, leading to its purchase by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem for $550,000. In 2004, other scholars disputed Lamaire’s view, alleging the object was part of an elaborate antiquities fraud involving several suspected high-profile archaeological forgeries. Another was the Jehoash Inscription.

Following a major investigation by the Israel Antiquities Authority, a commission of experts including Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University determined that Golan’s artifact dated back to the 14th or 13th century B.C. but that the latter half of its inscription was a modern forgery.

In December 2004, the scandal led to Golan being arrested and charged with 44 counts of forgery, fraud and deception, including forgery of the ossuary inscription. This marked the first time a criminal court had been asked to rule in a case of antiquities forgery. But the bar to legal certainty is a higher bar than archaeologists’ expert opinion. In an external expert report, dated September 2005, Wolfgang E. Krumbein’s concluded: “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.”