History and Provenance

The ossuary was first made public in 2002, when the French epigrapher Andre Lemaire published it in Biblical Archaeology Review and it was displayed to large crowds. Its weakness was provenance: rather than emerging from a supervised dig, it came from the private collection of the Israeli antiquities dealer Oded Golan and could not be tied to a known tomb.

In 2003 the Israel Antiquities Authority appointed committees that concluded the inscription was not authentic, at least in its reference to Jesus, and the state charged Golan and others with running a forgery ring that had faked several sensational artifacts. The trial in Jerusalem stretched from 2005 to 2012, heard 138 witnesses and produced a judgment of 474 pages. In March 2012 Judge Aharon Farkash acquitted the defendants, holding that forgery had not been proved, while cautioning that acquittal did not mean the inscription was genuine.