The Stone Box

Did An Ossuary Once Contain The Bones Of Jesus' Brother?

(CBS) 
The ossuary was returned to Golan. But then, just two months after it had been exhibited in Toronto, there was another extraordinary revelation.

A tablet was secretly offered to Israel's National Museum, with a reported price tag of $4 million. Why so much? It was billed as the only remnant of the Temple of King Solomon, a godsend for religious Jews, because it would strengthen their claim to the Temple Mount, which has been contested for centuries by Jews and Muslims.

First the ossuary, and then the tablet, both revealed in the space of two months? It was an amazing coincidence, but the amazing coincidences don't stop there.

Amir Ganor, head of the Antiquities Authority Detective Unit, was put on the tablet's trail and all leads pointed to the apartment of Golan. They confiscated the tablet and decided to take the ossuary as well. But when Golan led them to it, the detectives could barely believe their eyes.

"He opened a small chamber on the roof, and I saw this chamber is a toilet, and what I found on top of the toilet, I found the ossuary of James the brother of Jesus," says Ganor.

Golan doesn't try to deny that he kept the ossuary on the toilet, but he says don't leap to unwarranted conclusions.

"I was really scared that people will come into the house and steal it, so I took it to the safest place in this building," says Golan.

As the unit continued to search the building, they stumbled upon a workshop that they found interesting. There were drills designed, they thought, to cut new inscriptions. There were half-completed seals. Ancient charcoal, useful perhaps, to outwit carbon dating. There were samples of soil from archaeological sites, which could be used to make fake patinas. The cops called the workspace a factory of fakes.

"The police are talking to us also about earth and charcoal samples from a specific period that they say you would have used to make something appear to be much older than it is," says Simon.

"This is just a wrong allegation. It's a false allegation, that's all what I can tell you," says Golan. "Because all the materials that I had, which are some soils, different color soils. It's in order to give when you restore an ancient piece you would like to give a feeling to the viewer that it looks old."

He admits that he has restored some of the artifacts that he has found. But has he ever created an artifact? A fake?

"No," he says.

Golan says the Israeli authorities want to make an example of him, a scapegoat. And Witherington, who wrote that first book about the ossuary, agrees: "There's this huge anxiety about collectors and looters and forgers. I think they saw this as a window of opportunity."

An opportunity, he says, to clean up the business, and make Golan a scapegoat.

Does he think the ossuary is real or fake? "I would say it's probably real," says Witherington.

But the Antiquities Authority continues to insist it's a fake. And not only that. They claim Golan has been making forgeries and millions of dollars for the last 15 years. And they say the real casualty here is knowledge itself, our passion to dig down to the real foundations of our history, and our faith.

"It seems to me that there's really two possibilities when you're dealing with the James ossuary and other recent discoveries," says Simon. "Either they're real or you've got a group of very talented forgers."

"There have been good forgers for hundreds of years," says Silberman. "But a 16-year-old with a basic graphics program can take absolutely documented inscriptions, and rearrange the letters, and reproduce them and it makes it very much harder just to see the difference between something new and something genuine."

"So both sides are getting better. The forgers are getting better, as is science in discovering forgeries is getting better," says Simon.

"Well, that's what we call progress in archaeology, I guess," says Silberman.

In December, Israeli police charged Golan and four antiquities dealers with faking an array of Biblical artifacts, including the James Ossuary, and that tablet from King Solomon's Temple.