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THE SOURCE OF THE ACCUSATION? Former IAA employee Joe Zias told several archaeologists and BAR editor Hershel Shanks in 2003 that he had previously seen the James Ossuary in a Jerusalem antiquities shop without the words “brother of Jesus” at the end of the inscription. This was apparently the source of the IAA’s charge that Oded Golan forged the last part of an otherwise authentic ossuary inscription. A few months before the forgery trial verdict was handed down, Zias wrote an e-mail suggesting that he had been joking when he made the claim. At the trial, he admitted he had not seen the inscription and could not read it if he had.