Even before I give you this controversial little quote, I have to point out that its authenticity is almost as hotly debated as the Shroud of Turin's. It's not that I'm irresponsible about these things, but… this is just one of those hot dog quotes that is too good to pass up.

“What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us?”

Pope Leo X is the person to whom those words are attributed. He was head of the Catholic Church from 1513 to 1521, and I have to say that if any Pope was going to say something like that, he would have been the one. He was a Medici - quite a guy. Worth looking up.

Whether he said it or not is beside my point. I use the words because they express so perfectly the ugly reality that a great deal of striving for profit, monetary or otherwise, does swirl around that “fable of Christ”. And I wanted to write about the possibility that all of us, who have been watching and listening to the news during the last few weeks, have been watching the birth of yet another sacred fraud, one designed simply for the purpose of letting someone snatch a brass ring out of the air.

You'll have heard of the ossuary that, it is said, might have held the bones of Christ's brother, James. It suddenly came to light in Israel this year. Its existence was announced by the American magazine Biblical Archaeology Review at a press conference in Washington on October 21. Now known as the James Ossuary, it has been on display for the last couple of weeks at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where it is attracting a great deal of attention.

What makes this particular box so fascinating is an inscription on its side that reads “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”. If it is genuine, this container provides the only New Testament-era mention of the central figure of Christianity and is the first archaeological discovery to corroborate Biblical references to Jesus.

I should explain what an ossuary is and what it was used for. Some time around 30 or 20 BCE , for some reason, Jews began to transfer the bones of their ancestors to these receptacles. They did this for about a century - the practice was largely abandoned after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE. According to one expert, ossuaries were likely to have been supplied, ready-made, to interested customers by professional box makers. From the diversity of decoration evident on the thousands that have survived to this date, it seems that people were given a choice of styles. Chances are, this practice was in response to the high price of burial.

Certainly in other parts of the world where they have been used, that seems to have been the motive. Bodies were buried in the normal way for only a short period, then the bones dug up and stored in an ossuary to avoid paying more rent on the grave. This apparently still happens in Greece, although metal boxes, rather than stone, are used. Ossuaries were stacked in a cave found or dug as a kind of family vault. The average size of an ossuary was about 24 inches in length by 14 inches in height by 12 inches in width. They were rectangular for ease of storage.

No one knows for certain why the Jews either started this practice, or stopped it. But it conveys a great deal of meaning to our age, because the period during which ossuaries were used was so short that our understanding of it and its people benefits tremendously from the names and associations that were carved in stone because of it. This particular box was authenticated by an eminent French expert and announced to the world by a respected journal, so its authenticity has largely been accepted.

But, there are some suggestive little mysteries.

Two weeks before the Biblical Review's press conference in October, a man named Oded Golan asked the Israeli Antiquities Authority for permission to export two ossuaries for an exhibition abroad. Since neither of these objects seemed in any way unusual, the Authority gave him permission. During the press conference in Washington, the ossuary was identified simply as being part of a private collection in Jerusalem.

Its owner had bought it, the Biblical Archaeology Review told the press, about 15 years before. That turned out to have been a careless thing to say, because, uncomfortably, Israel's Antiquities Law dictates that an artefact discovered in Israel after 1978, when the law was enacted, is state property. When the press began to ask for comment on the box, the Authority guessed that the owner might be Mr. Golan, and they came upon information that led them to believe that, in truth, he had bought the box only a few months before.

Dr Uzi Dahari, its deputy director, called Golan, who admitted it was his. When he was pressed about having acquired it 15 years before, Golan claimed the Biblical Review had misunderstood him. Really, he had bought it for $200 when he was a teenager, around the time of the 1967 Six-Day War. Where had he bought it? Who had he bought it from? He couldn't remember. The Authority is investigating. Meantime, Golan, who is in Canada, has permission to keep the box out of Israel for four months, until February. As was widely reported, the box was damaged in transit to Toronto.

It was cracked in several places, one of the cracks running through the word Jesus, and had to be repaired before it was put on exhibit. You'd have thought that its owner would be devastated. Not a bit of it. Golan told the National Post in Toronto that although the accident certainly decreased the financial value of the artifact - considered by some to be about US$2 million - he was not overly concerned about being reimbursed. Even though the box was insured, he hasn't filed a claim and doesn't intend to.

“My main concern is to make sure it doesn't happen in the future,” he said. He also told the newspaper that he had no intention of selling the object. He intended that it should become a permanent fixture of his Jerusalem collection. How did the cracks occur? Golan says the box was packed by an experienced packing company, which wrapped the ossuary with many layers of bubble wrap and a special type of paper.

Then it was placed in a small box of cardboard that he described as “hard, but flexible”, and the whole thing placed in a larger carton. He says he is still trying to determine whether the damage was caused by the low cabin temperature in the plane, or by inept cargo handlers. “You have to remember that we have to return it to Israel,” he said.

Right.

This brings us to another matter - the inscription.

Dr Rochelle I. Altman is co-coordinator of IOUDAIOS-L, a virtual community of scholars engaged in on-line discussion of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. She is an expert on scripts and an historian of writing systems. She has written a report on the ossuary which is available online at a number of sites - www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Official_Report.htm is a good one.

She says, bluntly: “You have to be blind as a bat not to see that the second part (of the inscription) is a fraud.” Dr Altman's report is sometimes technical, but always fascinating. Her conclusion is as follows: “If the entire inscription on the ossuary is genuine, then somebody has to explain why there are two hands, two different scripts, two different social strata, two different levels of execution, two different levels of literacy, and two different carvers...

“The ossuary itself is undoubtedly genuine; the well-executed and formal first part of the inscription is a holographic original by a literate (and wealthy) survivor of Jacob bar Yosef, probably sometime during the Herodian period. The second part of the inscription bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition, probably around the third or fourth centuries, and is questionable to say the least.”

Her verdict is born out by her fellow scholar, Dr. John Lupia, art historian and expert on the materials involved: “When I first saw digital photographs of the so-called James Ossuary, I immediately knew the inscription was fake without giving a palaeographic analysis for two reasons: biovermiculation and patina.

“Biovermiculation is limestone erosion and dissolution caused by bacteria over time in the form of pitting and etching. The ossuary had plenty, except in and around the area of the inscription. This is not normal. The patina consisted of the appropriate minerals, but it was reported to have been cleaned off the inscription. This is impossible since patina cannot be cleaned off limestone with any solvent or cleanser since it is essentially baked-on glass. It is possible to forge patina, but when it is, it cracks off. This appears to be what happened with the ossuary.

“With these observations, I immediately knew the inscription could not be authentic regardless of what any palaeographer might say in favour of it since the physical aspects are prima facia evidence of forgery.”

The James ossuary is almost certainly not what it is claimed to be. You may share my suspicion that that is the reason its owner was unwilling to claim insurance for the damage supposedly done in transit. Will it ever find its way back to Israel? Don't bet on it. Was Mr Golan telling the truth when he told the press he would never sell it? Don't bet on that, either.

But will people choose to believe in this fraud, nonetheless? Hock the house! That's the safest bet you'll ever make.

gshorto@ibl.bm