Medieval pilgrims would have understood the throngs who crowded Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to see the James Ossuary. Only six years ago, the stone box inscribed "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" in Aramaic, made Time magazine's cover and drew 100,000-person lines to see the limestone box that, by implication, may have once held the skeletal remain of Jesus' brother.
But like so many religious relics before, the ossuary, a two-foot-long box that Jewish inhabitants of burial-site-poor Jerusalem typically used to store remains around the First Century, A.D., turned out to have a checkered past. The 2002 vetting of the box's authenticity described in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review came under fire quickly, from experts who complained the box's origins were unknown. Oded Golan, the antiquities dealer who owned the ossuary, only said he had bought it from another dealer in the 1970's....