THE ‘MISSING OSSUARY’

Scathing review of the film from prominent archaeologist Joe Zias:


Here's one part - (read the rest here - http://www.joezias.com/tomb.html)

"The film makers try to fool the public into believing that as ten ossuaries were discovered in the tomb and only nine were published by Kloner that the tenth ossuary was the controversial James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus ossuary which was declared to be a forgery by a panel of experts. The attempt to deceive the public can be clearly seen here in terms of an ‘agenda’.

Two members of the BAR Crowd who appear prominently in the film had earlier declared that the ossuary had originally come from a robbed tomb which they had cleared a few years ago in Silwan and not purchased by the collector decades earlier as he claimed. They clearly had attempted to draw media attention to their robbed tomb in Silwan and when the media attention flagged they now suddenly claim that they were mistaken and the ossuary no longer comes from Silwan but from the Talpiot ‘Jesus Family tomb excavated in 1980 by the Israel Antiquities Authority!

Well, last week ago a small problem suddenly arose when Oded Golan the owner of the ossuary in question, who is on trial for forging objects, produced a photograph of the ossuary with a time stamp 1976, four years before the Talpiot tomb was accidentally discovered!

Moreover, they maintained that the missing ossuary, their James son of Joseph brother of Jesus ossuary was of the same identical dimensions as the ‘missing’ ossuary from Jesus Family tomb at Talpiot. Sounds convincing until an enterprising skeptic here in Jerusalem checked the dimensions of the two ‘identical’ ossuaries and found that the Talpiot plain white “missing’ ossuary is approximately 20% longer than the James brother of Jesus ossuary ! So much for ‘identical’."