A Private Collection, Not an Institution

Oded Golan is a Tel Aviv engineer who built a substantial private collection of Levantine antiquities over several decades, acquiring pieces through the antiquities trade rather than through excavation or institutional transfer. His ownership of the James Ossuary before its 2002 publication placed an object of major potential religious and historical significance in private rather than institutional hands, without the conservation standards, continuous public access or independent institutional oversight that a museum such as the Israel Museum or Indian Museum provides for comparable material elsewhere in this atlas.

Golan permitted the ossuary to be examined and published by the epigrapher Andre Lemaire and exhibited it publicly at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in late 2002, actions consistent with a collector seeking scholarly recognition for a significant piece rather than concealing it. What followed was less typical: Israeli authorities came to suspect the inscription, or part of it, had been added or altered rather than being entirely ancient, leading to Golan's prosecution, which made the collector himself, rather than any institution, the central figure in the object's custody dispute for the following decade.