c. 2005 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Indictments in a sophisticated antiquities forgery ring have cast a pall over the entire field of biblical archaeology and could provide new arguments for those seeking to delegitimize Jewish claims to the Holy Land.

That’s because religious leaders and even governments use the presence or absence of archaeological discoveries to bolster their claims to truth and territory, or to refute someone else’s.

“There is a huge fight over who has a claim to the Land of Israel,” says David Hazony, editor in chief of Azure, a Jerusalem-based journal. “When archaeological finds emerge that show certain aspects of the Bible are historically true, it strengthens the claim that there were Jewish people in this land and therefore have a right to be here.”

When such biblical artifacts aren’t discovered or, worse, are shown to be hoaxes, some draw the opposite conclusion.

“There are people,” says Hazony, “who say the Bible is false, so the Jews had no right to come to Israel, that Zionism is a modern colonialist effort to expand Jewish power in the rest of the world. There are scholars throughout the world, some European and even some Israelis” who seize on this.

So do some political leaders. The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat often asserted that Jews had no connection to the Temple Mount, the site of the long-destroyed First and Second Biblical Temples and the present-day home of the Al Aksa mosque, and pointed to the dearth of Bible-bolstering artifacts as proof.

Israeli and other archaeologists counter that the artifacts may indeed exist atop the disputed mount, but that the Wakf, the Islamic trust that has overseen the site for decades, has blocked international teams from excavating there.

Due to these political sensitivities, and the public’s thirst for any documentation that can bolster biblical narrative, artifacts from the time of King David or Jesus are highly prized _ and scrutinized.

Hershel Shanks, publisher of the Washington-based Biblical Archaeology Review, created great excitement when, two years ago, he announced that an ancient burial box that may have held the bones of Jesus’ brother James had been found. It bore the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

Believing the ossuary to be one of the most concrete links to Jesus ever discovered, tens of thousands of Christian believers flocked to the Royal Ontario Museum when the stone ossuary was exhibited there from November 2002 to January 2003, only to be disappointed in December 2004 when teams of Israeli experts declared it a forgery and four people were arrested in the alleged scam.

“The ossuary itself was authentic but the inscription was not,” says Yuval Goren, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist and member of one of the teams that performed extensive scientific testing on the box. “The inscription was covered by a patina that wasn’t created under natural conditions.”

At the request of the police and a suspicious Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the teams also examined a stone tablet called the Yoash Inscription, which provides instructions, supposedly in ancient Hebrew, for how to operate the First Temple, erected by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C.

Had it been authenticated, which it was not, the Yoash Inscription would have provided unprecedented historical evidence that the Jewish Temple had functioned the way the Bible says it did. Both artifacts found their way to the world via Oded Golan, the Israeli antiquities collector and trader the police indicted in December.

Golan, who continues to deny any wrongdoing, said he purchased the ossuary some 30 years ago from another dealer from the eastern part of Jerusalem. He said he failed to realize its worth until an expert saw his collection and singled out the ossuary as a biblical gem.

Goren, who collected antiquities prior to launching a career in archaeology, finds this explanation outlandish.

“When you collect and you buy something, especially if it bears an inscription, you study it in depth. I can’t believe (Golan) lived with it all those years without knowing Jesus had a brother,” the archaeologist says.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Shanks, who put his reputation on the line when he unveiled the ossuary, says its authenticity is still an open question. “Forgers don’t let their forgeries sit around for 20 years, and Golan says he owned it for even longer,” Shanks says. “I do not know for sure whether any of the artifacts alleged to be forgeries are authentic or not, but the Israel Antiquities Authority has not demonstrated that any particular artifact is a forgery.”

Shimon Gibson, the archaeologist who last year announced that he had discovered a cave that may have been used by John the Baptist to anoint his disciples, says that “the entire archaeology community is reeling” as a result of the indictments.

“It’s now quite clear that if these allegations are credible, it means that some artifacts which are in museum collections are now known to be forgeries.”

Gibson says that museums, private collectors and individual believers of various faiths often fall prey to a “factory of fakes.”

The problem arises, he says, when a certain item suddenly comes on the scene without the scientific documentation to back it up.

“We have to be very clear in the way we view artifacts” that come from unproven sources, Gibson says of the objects that arrive at antiquities shops, auction houses and even the most famous museums in the world without exact documentation.

“Artifacts that do not come directly from excavation or sites, but via dealers and collectors, must be suspect.”

But what of finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which initially appeared to turn up out of nowhere?

“The difference,” Gibson underscores, “is that scholars were able to go back and trace the scrolls back to the Qumran,” the area in the present-day West Bank where hundreds of authentic ancient parchments were subsequently discovered.

While the debate over the authenticity of some of the most famous Christian and Jewish artifacts continues, theologians warn of the dangers of conditioning one’s beliefs on what is dug out of the ground.

“Once you go down that road, then you make your faith dependent on the latest scientific discoveries, which are tentative until the next discovery either supports or denies it,” says the Rev. Michael McGarry, director of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem.

“There were those who said the James ossuary proved that Jesus had a brother,” says McGarry. “If the ossuary was a fake, does it prove that he didn’t?”

MO/PH END RNS