Final arguments have been offered in the James Ossuary forgery case against Oded Golan and Robert Deutsch and all that remains is for the judge to issue a verdict.  Matthew Kalman, the only reporter covering the case, writes that “the feeling in the tiny courtroom, where fewer than a dozen people (including only one reporter) have followed the proceedings, was that the prosecution had failed to prove that the items were forgeries or that Golan and Deutsch had faked them.”  It may be several months before the judge rules on the case that began five years ago.  The story at AOL News has the background and quotes from one of the defendants.

Time Magazine has an article this weekend on the continuation of the trial of Oded Golan and Robert Deutsch for forging the James Ossuary and other spectacular artifacts.  Matthew Kalman, the Jerusalem correspondent who has been the primary reporter on this case for the last couple of years, spends the better part of the article on a technical discussion on the issue of patina in the inscribed letters.  Here are a few portions of the report:

The director of the Israel Antiquities Authority will soon take the witness stand for the first time since he declared, in December 2004, that the ossuary and other items seized in a two-year investigation were the "tip of the iceberg" of an international conspiracy that placed countless fakes in collections and museums around the world. He promised more arrests. But no other fake items have been seized, no-one else has been arrested, and Judge Farkash has hinted strongly that the prosecution case is foundering. Next week, defense attorneys will present evidence suggesting that scientists testifying for the prosecution have disproved their own findings against the ossuary. The scientific evidence against Golan is largely based on measurements of the oxygen isotopic composition (in technical terms, d18O — Delta 18 Oxygen) of the thin crust — or patina — covering the ossuary inscription…. The trouble with this kind evidence is, of course, that the formation of patina isn’t yet explainable in science everyone can agree on. The patina on one letter could be the result of one particularly wet winter that happened to leave its evidence on the ossuary — but perhaps not in a stalagmite in a cave. Or vice versa. "The analogy between the formation of cave deposits and the formation of patina on archeological objects is imprecise and more work is needed," says Professor Aldo Shemesh, an isotope expert at the Weizmann Institute who was also called as a defense expert. In the end, it is a numbers game — figuring on averages of statistics over which all the experts disagree. Says Shemesh: "Scientific debates should be discussed and resolved in peer-reviewed literature and scientific conferences, not in court."

The full article is here.

It must be a slow news day if the Jerusalem Post is reporting on the James Ossuary forgery trial without apparently any new developments in the last 8 months.  The judge rebuked the prosecution last October, saying “Not every case ends in the way you think it will when it starts. Maybe we can save ourselves the rest.”  Shuka Dorfman therefore seems determined to convict the accused in the court of public opinion if he cannot do it after four years of trial.  “I believe we have revealed only the tip of the iceberg. This industry encircles the world, involves millions of dollars,” said Dorfman. 

That may well be true, and those who love the ancient world will be happy to see the forgery business destroyed, but this does not mean that Oded Golan forged the James Ossuary.  From the JPost:

Golan and his co-defendants went on trial in the summer of 2005, but after more than 70 prosecution witnesses and 8,000 pages of testimony, Judge Aharon Farkash warned the prosecution that he was not convinced they had proved their case and advised them to consider halting the trial.
“After all the evidence we have heard, including the testimony of the prime defendant, is the picture still the same as the one you had when he was charged?” Judge Farkash pointedly asked the prosecution in October 2008. “Not every case ends in the way you think it will when it starts. Maybe we can save ourselves the rest.”
“Have you really proved beyond a reasonable doubt that these artifacts are fakes as charged in the indictment?” Judge Farkash said. “The experts disagreed among themselves. Where is the definitive proof needed to show that the accused faked the ossuary? You need to ask yourselves those questions very seriously.”
In an exclusive interview with The Media Line at his Tel Aviv home, Golan said he was confident that new scientific research undertaken by defense experts would finally exonerate him. Prosecution scientists had accused Golan of faking patina – a thin layer of biological material covering ancient items – in order to make the inscriptions on the artifacts seem old.
“No, I never faked any antiquity,” Golan told The Media Line. “During the last several years there were several tests and examinations of those items by prominent experts from different countries in different laboratories and I think we succeeded to prove that these inscriptions could not have been inscribed in the last century. There is a thin layer of patina – it’s a thin layer of crust made actually by a micro-organism that was developed inside the grooves of the inscription and this product made by the micro-organism could not have been developed in less than a hundred years.”

More here.

UPDATE: As Jim notes in the comments, the above report is related to a video produced by The Media Line in which Joe Zias claims that he saw the ossuary with part of the inscription in an antiquities shop in the 1990s. 

Maybe it was the way that the producers edited the video, but I didn’t hear Zias make an unqualified assertion that he saw this exact ossuary and declare precisely what was inscribed at the time.  (Zias’s words on video: “I remember that I seen a thing in an antiquities dealer in the 1990s, so it couldn’t have been in the hands of Golan.”) Of course, he need not make such a claim to the media.  But one supposes that in the trial he would have made the strongest statements possible while under oath. 

Apparently that, combined with the other evidence, was unconvincing to the judge.

As someone has noted in a comment on this blog before, exoneration in a criminal court will not prove that the ossuary’s inscription is authentic.  But it should serve to silence the mouths of the (failed) prosecuting parties and allow the matter to be discussed by the experts on the merits of the evidence.

Matthew Kalman, writing for the Jerusalem Post:

One of Israel’s best-known antiquities dealers said this week he was the innocent victim of a “witch-hunt” initiated by the Antiquities Authority aimed at destroying his career and reputation.
Robert Deutsch, 58, has been on trial at the Jerusalem District Court since September 2005 on six charges of faking and selling priceless antiquities. He is the owner of the Archeological Center, with shops in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and runs twice-yearly antiquities auctions that attract the world’s top collectors of ancient Judaica.
Deutsch’s co-defendant, leading antiquities collector Oded Golan, is charged with faking the burial box of Jesus’s brother and an inscribed stone attributed to King Jehoash that once adorned the First Temple, plus dozens of smaller items.
As Deutsch took the stand this week for the first time after more than three years in court, 120 witnesses and 8,000 pages of testimony, he said the charges against him were “lies and hallucinations.”

The story continues here, and the author does a good job of presenting both sides of the story. 

Kalman has a blog dedicated to the trial.

HT: Joe Lauer