By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 21, 2002; 12:30 PM Scholars say a nondescript limestone box, looted from a Jerusalem cave and held secretly in a private collection in Israel, could be the first-ever reference to Jesus in the world's archaeological record. The box is an ossuary, used by Jews at the time of Christ to hold the bones of the deceased. The ossuary has almost no ornamentation except for a simple, yet riveting, Aramaic inscription: Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui diYeshua, it says: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." "I was very excited," said French philologist and epigrapher Andre Lemaire, who was invited by the ossuary's owner to take a look at it this spring. "Could it be James the brother of Jesus? There was no mention of Nazareth, but it was very impressive.." Since Lemaire's visit, scholars and scientists have examined and analyzed the box, seeking to expose it for a fake, or to show that it is otherwise impossible for it to be the ossuary that once held the bones of St. James, founder of the Christian church of Jerusalem, and, in the words of St. Paul to the Galatians, "the Lord's brother." So far the ossuary has withstood scrutiny, but even those who have studied it concede it cannot be fully authenticated: "It will always be controversial," said Aramaic scholar Rev. Joseph Fitzmyer, an emeritus Biblical Studies expert at The Catholic University who studied the inscription. "The problem is how do you determine that the people involved are the people in the New Testament?" he said. "It's certainly possible that they are, but I can't see going beyond that." The journal Biblical Archaeological Review, which formally announced the appearance of the ossuary at a news conference today, is publishing Lemaire's findings in its November-December issue Lemaire, an expert in ancient Aramaic and Hebrew at the Sorbonne, was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Israel's Hebrew University when he he met the owner of the ossuary "by chance" at a reception this spring. The owner, whom Lemaire would not identify, "said he had some things he wanted to show me," including the ossuary. "I agreed, since I am accustomed to visiting private collections," Lemaire said. The Jewish custom of using ossuaries to collect the remains of the deceased lasted from about 20 B.C. until the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Corpses lay in long caves for a year until flesh and soft tissue decayed and fell away, after which the bones were placed in a box and put in caves. Fitzmyer noted that one Israeli scholar, who has examined 895 ossuaries, had found inscriptions on about 200 of them, "the overwhelming majority in Greek." Some have inscriptions in two languages, he said, while others are carved or etched with other artwork. Early historians place the martyrdom of St. James around 62 or 63 A.D., when he was stoned to death for teaching the divinity of Jesus. Until the ossuary's appearance, the earliest known artifact mentioning Jesus is a papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, dated about 125 A.D. Scholars date the Gospel of Mark, the earliest chronicle of the life of Christ, around 70 A.D. Review publisher Hershel Shanks said the James ossuary was looted and sold to the owner 15 years ago for between $200 and $700: "The Arab dealer told the owner it came from Silwan," Shanks said, a Jerusalem suburb honeycombed with ancient tombs. Lemaire said the owner of the James ossuary "didn't know about Christian traditions," and had little interest in them: "The inscription caught his attention because of its length," which could indicate that the box held the remains of a titled person or noble. Lemaire said the ossuary currently contains no bones. It is about 20 inches long, made of porous limestone and slightly trapezoidal in shape. It closely resembles a flower box like those mounted in windows. Lemaire told the owner that his ossuary was "interesting," but he knew the box posed immediate and serious questions. How likely was it that the names James, Joseph and Jesus--all popular names in New Testament-era Jerusalem--referred to the family of Christ? Was the Aramaic inscription as old as the box, or had it been etched in later to enhance its value? Did the cursive lettering used in the inscription match characters used in contemporary scripts? Yet even if these questions were answered satisfactorily, scholars understood that the ossuary's mongrel pedigree would ensure that it would never acquire legitimacy among scholars: "If it's looted, archaeologists would say its useless, because we have no idea where it came from, and it has no context," said Near Eastern studies specialist Glenn M. Schwartz, of Johns Hopkins University. "Also, the object, if real, would be hugely valuable, so anybody interested in forging it would make it as believable as possible."

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