(soft mysterious music)
Downloaded from YTS.MX
In recent years,
a series of extraordinary finds has been made
in the Holy Land.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
These astonishing discoveries are linked
to some of the most famous events in the Bible.
They appear to be new evidence for the burial of Jesus
and for the legendary Temple of Solomon.
This is something that biblical scholars
have been waiting for, have been dreaming of,
for many years.
Here is a proof.
We can touch it, we can smell it, we can go see it.
This is where we came from.
It's an earthquake, a revolution.
Or is there another darker story
behind these mysterious objects?
(soft ethereal music)
Jerusalem, the Holy Land's most important city.
For centuries it's been the center
of a flourishing antiquity trade.
Government Inspectors try to monitor the trade,
but thousands of artifacts change hands here every day.
Genuine pieces 2,000 or more years old
can be bought for a few hundred dollars.
And many collectors have learned not to ask
awkward questions about how the dealer came by them.
And it was here more than 25 years ago,
in Jerusalem's Antiquity Market,
that one of the most remarkable artifacts
in the Holy Land's history first came to light.
(soft relaxing music)
It was a tiny object, just four centimeters long,
badly damaged, and no one knew where it came from.
But it will be hailed as a unique piece of history.
It became known as the ivory pomegranate.
It was thought to be the ornamental tip
of a priest's ceremonial staff.
But what amazed the experts was the inscription.
(Man speaking in Hebrew)
Holy to the priests of the House of God.
It suggested that this exquisite little ornament
was used by priests in the first Temple of Jerusalem,
which, according to the Bible, was built by King Solomon.
If the pomegranate was what its inscription claimed,
it was a revolutionary find.
Before it came to light there was no independent evidence
apart from the Bible that Solomon's Temple
had actually existed.
3,000 years ago, Jerusalem was a small Iron Age city
whose ambitious King, the Bible tells us,
decided to build a house for his God.
In the fourth year
of Solomon's reign over Israel,
the construction of the Temple of the Lord was begun.
The existence of Solomon's Temple
is central to traditional Jewish belief.
The house which King Solomon built
for the Lord, the length thereof was threescore cubits.
The breadth thereof, 20 cubits.
And the height thereof, 30 cubits.
Over 12 meters high and over 30 meters long,
the House of God would have dominated the city
and its people.
(soft relaxing music continues)
Since then, Jerusalem has suffered nearly 2,500 years
of turbulent history.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims
all claim a stake in the city that features so large
in the history of their faiths.
A vast Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock,
now occupies the site where Solomon's Temple
is presumed to have stood.
According to biblical history,
the temple was destroyed by fire in 586 BC
by invaders from Babylon.
(crowd murmuring)
The Western Wall, where Jewish pilgrims now come to pray,
is all that's left of a second Temple
built on the same site as Solomon's Temple
by King Herod the Great, 500 years later.
(crowd murmuring)
In a country where cultural and territorial rights
are the essence of politics,
the story of Solomon's Temple
has special significance for the Jews.
But there's no trace of the Temple itself
and archeologists are not allowed to dig
in such a politically sensitive area.
(wings fluttering)
Archeologist Israel Finkelstein has amassed
thousands of artifacts from that period of history,
but not a fragment of evidence to back up
the Bible's account of Solomon's Temple.
There's no archeological evidence for the simple reason
that we cannot excavate in the Temple Mount.
I think also that even if it was possible
to do something on the Temple Mount,
there's a big question whether
we could have discovered anything from the first Temple
of the biblical times,
because there was a huge building operation there
in the time of Herod the Great,
and there's good reason to think
that everything was eradicated.
(soft ethereal music)
So the pomegranate was an extraordinary find.
The tiny artifact with a large chip on one side
was the first physical link to the lost Temple of Solomon.
(dramatic pulsing music)
But was the pomegranate authentic?
In Israel, many genuine antiquities
find their way onto the market from dubious sources.
Just beyond the walls of the old city of Jerusalem,
Amir Ganor, Chief Investigator
for the Israel Antiquities Authority,
is checking an underground tomb from the time of Jesus,
the first century AD.
(loud scraping)
(door banging)
Israel has thousands of ancient historic sites.
Many are untouched and still contain valuable artifacts
from biblical times.
But all too often when archeologists arrive to explore them,
they find that looters have beaten them to it.
This is only one of thousands of caves
that we have in this area.
And unfortunately, most of them are looted.
You could see the damage that they done here.
They took everything, they destroyed this tomb.
(soft upbeat music)
The Holy Land's heritage
is being plundered for cash.
We assume that 95% of the antiquities
that now are in the hands of the dealers,
they are stolen property or they looted.
(soft upbeat music continues)
Most of the loot
is brought to the Jerusalem Market
where the ivory pomegranate first appeared.
The man who came across it in the Jerusalem Market
happened to be one of the world's leading experts
on ancient inscriptions, Professor Andre Lemaire.
One of the sellers told me,
"I know an inscription which belongs to somebody else.
"And would you be interested to see it?"
He examined it closely.
This is a very small object.
You have to be aware that it is only about
four centimeters high.
And the inscription is still smaller, of course.
And looking at it very carefully,
I found that from what I could see, everything was okay.
There was no problem.
After inspecting
the engraved Aramaic text,
Lemaire had no doubt it was genuine.
He published his report,
declaring it to be authentic from the eighth century BC,
the time of Solomon's Temple.
(dramatic orchestral music)
The tiny pomegranate would have played a humble part
in the magnificent Temple.
It would have been carried on precessions
through the two great halls,
whose walls were paneled in sweet smelling cedarwood.
If the pomegranate belonged to one of the high priests,
it would have accompanied him
into the Temple's inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies,
where winged cherubim guarded the Ark of the Covenant
and the towering walls were encrusted with gold.
But however humble its role might've been then,
it was now the only artifact to survive from the Temple.
(relaxing flute music)
The Israel Museum, home to a world renowned collection
of biblical artifacts, was now very keen to acquire it.
It was an object of some excitement
because when first identified,
it was considered that it might be an object
directly connected to the first Temple, to Solomon's Temple.
And we really have very little material
that comes from that period from Jerusalem
and that can be directly connected to that moment in history
and to the physical existence of the Temple.
But when the museum
tried to track down the owner, it ran into a wall.
The pomegranate had already changed hands.
There wasn't a dealer in Israel
who seemed to know where it was.
The word was it had been smuggled out of the country.
Then several years later in 1987, out of the blue,
the museum received a mysterious phone call.
(Man speaking in Hebrew)
The pomegranate was now available,
but at a price.
(Man speaking in Hebrew) million dollar.
Desperate to get their hands
on this unique piece of Jewish heritage,
the museum bartered the price down
to just over half a million dollars in cash.
Israel's leading expert was asked to check it out.
When he too decided it was genuine,
the cash, provided by an anonymous donor,
was paid into an anonymous Swiss bank account.
The pomegranate was returned to Jerusalem
and there in the Israel Museum,
along with such priceless national treasures
as the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was given pride of place,
an authentic link to King Solomon's Temple.
(soft relaxing music)
For nearly 20 years,
it was regarded as the only physical evidence
for the Temple.
Then in uncannily, similar circumstances,
another extraordinary artifact became headline news.
In 2002, the Chief Investigator
for the Israel Antiquities Authority, Amir Ganor,
was given a special mission,
to track down a brand new piece of biblical history
that had gone missing.
It was a hunt that would take him
the length and breadth of the country
and provide a major scoop
for a young Israeli newspaper reporter.
The story begins in 2001.
A professor from the Jerusalem University
receives a call from a mysterious person
who refuses to give his real name
and asks this professor to come to a hotel in Jerusalem.
He arrives and another professor,
he receives another call saying,
"We are changing the location of the meeting.
"Please take a taxi to a different hotel."
A person who he has never met before
arrives with a briefcase.
The man with the briefcase
claimed to be acting on behalf of a client.
He couldn't reveal his client's identity,
but was sure the professors would be very interested
by what he had brought to show them.
(soft mysterious music)
He opens up the briefcase,
takes out a gorgeous piece of black stone
with a ancient writing on it
and asked the two professors to authenticate the piece.
The inscription on the shiny black stone
describe repairs made to the Temple of Solomon
by a King called Jehoash in the eighth century BC.
(soft mysterious music continues)
If it was genuine, it was priceless.
Like the ivory pomegranate, it appeared to confirm
that Solomon's Temple had actually existed.
Better still, it provided unique confirmation
of events described in the Old Testament.
The professors wanted to know who the owner was
and where the object had come from.
(Man speaking in Hebrew)
(Man with sunglasses speaking in Hebrew)
All the stranger would reveal
was that it had been found near the Temple Mount.
They wanted to take the stone.
They wanted to, you know,
perform a thorough investigation of it
and to authenticate it or reveal it as a forgery.
The person refused, of course, to give the stone.
Said, "That's impossible because of,
"you know, complications."
There was no way the professors
could properly authenticate the tablet
after such a brief examination.
You know, he takes the stone,
he puts it back in his briefcase.
He says, "Thank you very much,"
to the two bewildered professors and leaves them behind
in the Jerusalem lobby.
(dog barking)
(soft relaxing music)
The place where the tablet
had allegedly been found
was at the foot of the Temple Mount,
the heart of Old Jerusalem, where,
according to legend, Solomon's Temple once stood.
(dog barking)
(soft relaxing music continues)
But how could anyone be sure that a blackened stone
allegedly found in a pile of rubble
was a genuine 3,000 year old relic?
The owner, whoever he was, realized this
for shortly afterwards,
other experts were secretly approached by intermediaries
and asked if they could authenticate the tablet.
One of them, Geologist Amnon Rosenfeld,
has spent his working life
studying the rocks around Jerusalem
used by masons and engravers in biblical times.
We were asked to examine something
that should be kept secret called the Jehoash Tablet.
Our starting point was that this is a fake
and we should find some signature of a forgery.
Dr. Rosenfeld and his colleagues
were allowed to examine the stone over several months
in his lab at the Geological Survey of Israel.
We couldn't find anything that lead us
to the conclusion that it's a forgery.
We find many criteria that point out
that it might be an authentic inscription.
If the tablet was genuine,
it was precisely what Jewish archeologists
have been seeking for ages.
I was very excited because this type of inscription
is something that biblical scholars
have been waiting for, have been hoping for,
have been dreaming of, for many years.
(soft upbeat music)
The inscription on the tablet
corroborated the Bible's account
of how King Jehoash decided to refurbish the Temple.
The Book of Kings tells us that repairs
were needed to the building,
which would by then have been over a hundred years old.
From its benefactor.
They in turn shall strengthen the damage in the house,
wherever damage may be found.
And this is how the tablet records those events.
I repaired the construction
and I made the repairs in the Temple
and the walls all around and the side buildings
and the lattice work and the trap doors
and the recesses in the doors.
Then I think that we're speaking about
the same royal act of repairs in the Temple.
And the language is also rather similar.
Meanwhile, analysis of the tablet
by the scientists had revealed more.
They found the surface contained tiny flecks of charcoal,
which proved to be over 2,000 years old.
And they found tiny specks of gold,
just what might be expected if it had survived a fire
when the gold encrusted Temple of Solomon was destroyed.
(soft mysterious music)
(Reporter speaking in Hebrew)
The astonishing revelation
was widely regarded as proof that the tablet was genuine.
Everyone was dumbfounded by this discovery.
I mean, it was like a, you know,
an alien spacecraft landing in the middle of Jerusalem.
Here's a stone with an inscription
that is actually quoted from the Jewish Bible.
And that proves that a Jewish Temple
actually stood in Jerusalem.
Here is a proof that our national heritage is,
can be basically, you know, we can touch it,
we can smell it, we can go see it,
we can take our children.
This is where we came from.
The Israel Antiquities Authority
urgently wanted to know how the owner, whoever he was,
had come by an artifact of such national
and historical significance.
Amir Ganor, the Authorities' Chief Investigator,
pumped his contacts in the market for information.
He suspected it had been illegally looted.
But the word on the street told a different story,
as Journalist, Boaz Gaon soon discovered.
I traveled to Jerusalem
and started to dig and try and find out
who the owner of this new tablet is.
And the people in the antique industry
who, you know, do not like to expose their identity,
they told me straight away that they think it's a hoax.
(soft pulsing music)
Whether it was a hoax or loot
or the genuine article, Amir Ganor was determined
to track down the owner and the tablet itself,
which had now disappeared again.
He had many rumors to follow,
but it would take a long time to get a clear picture.
We spent three months on the road
to try to find this tablet.
The months of detective work
finally led him to Tel Aviv,
Israel's modern commercial capital
and in a fashionable residential quarter,
to the home of a businessman.
One of Israel's leading antiquity collectors, Oded Golan.
Golan has been collecting ancient artifacts
since he was a boy.
Here you are looking now
at the oldest, the most ancient dictionary
ever found in the world.
I found it when I was 10 years old.
He admitted he had been helping
to sell the missing stone tablet,
but denied he had ever been its owner.
He was a dealer, Palestinian dealer,
who had a shop in East Jerusalem.
Abayasa was his nickname.
So I didn't have enough money to buy it.
And he asked me if I can help him to sell it
or to offer it to somebody.
And I had actually only one condition.
It should stay in a museum for the public.
How much was he asking for it?
700,000 of dollars.
But the authorities were not convinced
by the story.
And what made them highly suspicious
was that the same collector, Oded Golan,
had recently been involved in another sensational discovery
that had suddenly appeared.
(soft relaxing music)
In the vast collection of ancient treasures
held by the Israel Antiquities Authority,
there are hundreds of stone boxes,
all dating back to the time of Jesus.
Simply engraved, some bearing a name in Hebrew or Greek.
They had a macabre purpose.
They are ossuaries,
receptacles for storing the bones of the dead.
In 2002, one of these ancient bone boxes
became the center of worldwide media attention.
Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua.
The inscription translates as, "James, son of Joseph,
"brother of Jesus."
For these familiar names from the New Testament
to appear together seemed a remarkable coincidence.
The ancient bone box was hailed
as the final resting place of Saint James,
the brother of Jesus of Nazareth,
and the first archeological evidence
linked to Jesus Himself.
It caused a sensation
and was viewed by nearly 100,000 people
at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Another extraordinary biblical artifact.
And its owner was Oded Golan.
Two dramatic artifacts were discovered
in the space of six months by the same collector.
This was very, very difficult to believe.
I mean, you know, what's next?
The shoes of Muhammad?
I have to admit it, it sounds quite strange.
But if you have the good context,
the good relationship, you'll get the good stuff.
It's very simple.
He claimed he had owned the ossuary for years.
In the mid-70s, I bought several ossuaries,
actually three, and I bought it in East Jerusalem.
So why had it taken him 30 years
to realize the possible significance of the inscription?
The first person who actually gave me the idea
that it could belong to the family of Jesus Christ
was Professor Andre Lemaire.
Back in the 1980s,
Professor Lemaire had been responsible
for authenticating the ivory pomegranate.
20 years later, his reputation as an expert
in ancient inscriptions proved valuable to Oded Golan.
I was amazed with the name,
but mainly with the appellation, brother of Yeshua,
James the brother of Jesus.
For me, there is no problem about the fact
that the inscription is genuine.
Professor Lemaire's opinion
that the inscription was genuine
transformed the Brother of Jesus' Ossuary
into an archeological sensation.
But not every expert was convinced
the inscription was authentic.
I laughed. I couldn't believe it.
You gotta be kidding.
It's not the same script.
It's not even a complete script design.
To Dr. Rochelle Altman,
it seemed that the inscription had been cobbled together
from bits of genuine inscriptions.
She thought the first part of the inscription,
James son of Joseph, was probably authentic,
but that the brother of Jesus
had been added later by another hand.
Ya'akov bar Yosef is original.
This is the ossuary of this man.
All of a sudden here's this,
and this is totally different script,
it's made out of different pieces and pasted together.
And that's exactly what we have here.
This thing's obviously a fake.
(Reporter speaking in Hebrew)
With allegations of fakery flying around,
the authorities decided to crack down.
Police and Antiquities Authority Agents
raided Oded Golan's home.
They found an incriminating photograph
of the collector clutching the missing Jehoash tablet,
which he had always denied owning.
They made him hand it over then confiscated the ossuary too.
The artifacts and their collector
were about to be subjected to intensive scrutiny.
The Israel Antiquities Authority set up a task force
to decide on the authenticity of both objects.
In charge of the scientific investigation
was Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University.
He began with the stone tablet.
He wanted to establish whether it could have come
from the site of Solomon's Temple on the Temple Mount.
The stone surface should provide valuable clues.
Over time, all objects develop a patina,
a thin crust bonded to their surface.
It's created by chemical reactions
between the object and its environment.
But when Goren examined the patina,
he found that it was different on the front
and the back of the stone.
The patina on the front did indeed appear
to come from Jerusalem,
but instead of being bonded to the stone,
it lifted off quite easily.
The patina is very loosely connected to the stone.
Here you can see how it reacts to
me scraping it with a matchstick.
And you can see that it easily peels off the letters
as opposed, again, to the patina on the backside.
The patina on the back was different
and appeared not to come from Jerusalem at all.
(hammer banging)
He concluded that someone had taken
an old stone from somewhere else
and carved an inscription on the front,
which had then been concealed
under a new artificial patina.
He could even see evidence that the carving was recent.
When the letters are cleared,
the inner part of the letters is exposed.
And as you can see here, it is very freshly cut.
You can see even the little lines,
the little parallel lines, of either the chisel
or even maybe some drill, some electric bit or drill
with which the letters were engraved.
Which is, of course, very unusual for ancient inscriptions.
And what of the ancient charcoal
and traces of gold which had convinced earlier scientists?
Goren concluded they had simply been added
to the artificial patina applied to the front of the stone.
And, therefore, I believe that the inscription
is not genuine.
Then he turned to the Brother of Jesus Ossuary.
The bone box itself appears to be genuine.
The stone was covered by a chalky patina,
just what he'd expect if it had spent many years
in an underground tomb.
But the patina in the grooves
of the inscription was different.
Like the Jehoash tablet,
it was not firmly bonded to the surface.
It looked as if the engraver
had cut through the original patina,
then filled in the grooves with a new material
to make it look ancient.
On June the 18th, 2003,
the Israel Antiquities Authority goes public.
Both objects are declared fake.
Certainly that the patina in the letters
in both items is a modern forgery.
It hits the headlines worldwide.
Experts who authenticated the artifacts
have their names dragged through the mud.
It was manipulated.
It was really very, very politicized.
For me, it's clear it is not a forgery.
(soft mysterious music)
But more damning evidence now comes to light.
When police and authority inspectors
raid Oded Golan's premises again,
they find engraving tools, chemicals,
and soil samples taken from sites all over Israel.
Together with scores of artifacts,
many look freshly minted or half-finished.
They confiscated several tools that they had in my home.
These kind of tools are existed in the hands
of any collector and any dealer in Israel.
But the evidence leads to Golan
being charged on 15 counts of forgery and fraud.
Four other dealers are accused of being accomplices.
I never forged anything in my life.
Of course I shall have to defend myself,
but I have nothing to do with forgeries at all.
Three years on, the prosecution of Oded Golan
on fraud and forgery charges continues.
And there's still no end in sight.
But whoever was responsible,
it seems a sophisticated fraud is beginning to unravel.
The scandal has provoked anxiety about every artifact
supposedly from biblical times that has come from dealers
or sources unknown.
Could they all be forgeries?
Yuval Goren has checked scores of items
that museums and collectors have acquired on the market.
He has concluded that almost all of them are fake.
Some archeologists believe there's only one answer
to the problem.
The antiquity trade should be shut down
and its products should be shunned.
Objects must come from
an archeological excavation done by archeologists.
Then they are genuine,
there's no question about them.
Then they are okay
and you can use them for historical research.
Then whatever comes from the market is forgery
until otherwise proven.
This is a country where the antiquities market
has been thriving ever since Medieval Crusaders
came hunting for holy relics.
Some shops are as old as the antiquities they sell,
but in this city, the buyer should beware
and assume that if material isn't looted,
it's probably fake.
Though not in this shop, of course.
Rami, Where do you get your antiquities from?
(Rami sighing loudly)
Well, probably you should ask my dad about this.
We, I inherited them really from my family.
We used to get them from the people that dig,
but not anymore.
Why not?
Not allowed, against the rules here in Israel.
Not allowed to buy from people that dig.
Whether an artifact is genuine or looted or fake,
there are ways of enhancing its market value.
The collectors always want special things.
This is authentic jar.
This is from the Iron Age,
from the seventh century BC.
If it's ordinary jar without any decoration
or inscription, it would cost something between
700, 2,000 dollar.
But if someone add some inscription here in ancient Hebrew,
it will be cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Adding an inscription is less work
and less expensive than faking a whole artifact.
And as investigators have uncovered more fakes,
they feel a pattern is emerging
of ancient objects being embellished with inscriptions
to enhance their value and historical significance.
(chisel banging)
They even have a good idea how forgers
are producing inscriptions good enough to fool the experts,
using a standard reference book
published by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Details of inscriptions from genuine artifacts
are copied precisely then reassembled
as the template for a new engraving.
This is Ya'akov, James in ancient Hebrew.
(air whooshing)
Next, son of Yosef.
(air whooshing)
To create brother of Jesus,
letters are taken from several ancient sources
to complete the template.
James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus
and it looks completely authentic.
(chisel banging)
Any artifact of unknown origin with a compelling inscription
has now become suspect.
So it was inevitable that attention would return
to that priceless object in the Israel Museum,
the ivory pomegranate.
The pomegranate was now the only item believed
to have survived from Solomon's legendary Temple.
Over 25 years had passed
since the pomegranate had first been authenticated
by one of the world's experts on ancient inscriptions,
Professor Andre Lemaire.
Since then experts have discovered
that it wasn't actually made of elephant ivory,
but came from a quite different beast.
(soft relaxing music)
It is a little pomegranate
made of a tooth of a hippopotamus.
But the big question was,
did the pomegranate really come from Solomon's Temple?
When professor Goren examined
the surface of the pomegranate,
he saw little to suggest that it was not a genuine artifact.
You can see that it is old.
It is worn.
There were signs of a few repairs,
traces of what looks like glue.
But the patina looked ancient.
Then he turned his attention to the inscription.
(speaking in Hebrew), which means
holy to the priests of the House of God.
And this is why this pomegranate
was considered to be from the Solomonic Temple.
But the pomegranate was badly damaged
sometime in its history.
You can see that the break that took off
about 1/3 of the body of the pomegranate.
Most of the inscription is intact,
but a large chunk is missing.
The letters that are supposed to spell out House of God
are just fragments on the border of the break.
It was these that caught Goren's attention.
He noticed that the grooves cut by the engraver
appeared to stop short of the break, which was odd.
He would have expected them to be sliced cleanly
when the pomegranate was damaged.
The lines are ending before the edge of the break,
which means that whoever engraved it was very careful
not to make other breaks into the old break.
It looked to Goren
as if the inscription had been engraved
after the pomegranate had been damaged.
It is clear when you look at it through the microscope
that the inscription was engraved in it,
on it, when it was already broken.
So someone must have added the inscription
to boost the pomegranate's value.
It is probably a fake.
It's probably a forgery.
But Goren's analysis makes no sense
to the pomegranate's champion, Professor Lemaire.
He make a mistake because it is not his field.
Although the pomegranate is authentic, it is ancient,
the inscription was most likely engraved in modern times.
Yuval Goren is working out of his field.
And in this case,
when even if it is a professor at university,
if somebody is working out of his field,
out of his specialty, he is not especially to be trusted.
But the man
who first authenticated the pomegranate
now finds himself in a very small minority.
The pomegranate has been declared a fake
and removed from display in the Israel Museum.
(horn blowing)
But there's no let up in the sensational claims.
Jerusalem can prove a nightmare for archeologists
with major monuments of three religions
crowding on top of each other.
And in a quiet residential quarter called Talpiot,
apartment blocks overlook one of the most
contentious archeological sites in the world.
In a tiny rose garden, a large concrete slab
conceals the entrance to a 2,000 year old tomb.
The crudely built structure offers no clue
to the potential importance of what lies beneath.
Cut into the rocky hillside,
the tomb was discovered accidentally in 1980
when the whole area was still a construction site.
Before it could disappear under the new buildings,
a small team of archeologists
was allowed to examine the tomb and its contents.
Among them was Shimon Gibson, then 21 years old.
His job was to map the inside of the tomb.
(insects buzzing) (birds chirping)
Well under this cement slab is a shaft which descends
for a couple of meters down into the ground.
At the bottom of the shaft is an opening,
which is situated here, which leads into a barrel chamber,
which is still intact.
It's really nice.
After 27 years, the tomb is still here.
The tomb itself was full of soil at least up to knee level
at the time of excavation,
which meant that the door had been opened in antiquity
and that soil had flowed in to the cave itself.
So this wasn't an intact tomb.
Questions about when it was broken into
have recently ignited speculation
about what the tomb originally contained.
Since they were discovered,
the ossuaries from the tomb have been kept
at the Antiquities Authority store.
And it was there 27 years later in 2007,
that the names inscribed on the ossuaries
provoked intense media speculation
about the occupants of the tomb.
Most of the names are well known
from the New Testament of the Bible.
Mariame, a form of Mary, Mary Magdalene perhaps.
Jose, a short form of Joseph.
Maria, another Mary.
And then most astonishing of all, Yeshua bar Yosef,
Jesus son of Joseph.
Could this be the resting place of Jesus Himself?
The suggestion that this might be the tomb
of the family of Jesus received worldwide publicity.
Now the man involved in the original excavation
wants to examine the tomb again.
Anything which is sealed up
creates a kind of sort of atmosphere of conspiracy.
So I think opening up the slab
and allowing cameras to go down
and to have a look at the tomb would be a good thing.
Permission has been given to examine the tomb,
but it soon becomes clear that some residents
don't want an excavation in their backyard.
(crowd murmuring in Hebrew)
An area which is there's a lot of emotion.
It highlights the problems
that can arise for archeologists in a country
where religious passions run high.
He's going to call the police
that he doesn't want us excavating.
And he's quite angry.
(crowd murmuring in Hebrew)
Pressing on now
could provoke a worst disturbance,
so the Talpiot tomb remains sealed.
But from the map Gibson drew of the tomb when it was opened,
we can still get a good idea
of how the remains of the family were laid out.
(soft mysterious music)
There were bones and skulls lying on the floor.
The ossuaries lay in small chambers
cut into the walls of the tomb.
The one bearing the name Jesus son of Joseph
was one of the smallest,
tucked in the back of one chamber.
Most archeologists are very skeptical
that this could have been Jesus of Nazareth.
One thing I can tell you for certain,
and that is that there were no remains of a crucified man
in this tomb.
And the coincidence of the names,
however striking, fails to impress specialists
in this period of history.
These names are extremely common
among the local Jewish population in the time of Jesus.
It's also problematic because everything that we know
about Jesus and His family
indicates that they were a relatively poor family
who could not have afforded a rock-cut tomb.
If they had owned a rock-cut tomb,
presumably it would have been in Nazareth, their hometown,
not in Jerusalem.
We have good evidence for this
from other wealthy families around the country.
And while the historical controversy rages,
some scientists think it would be a good idea
to re-examine the ossuaries
that came from the disturbed tomb.
American researchers now want to subject them
to forensic-style scrutiny,
especially the most controversial,
Jesus son of Joseph inscription.
Because it looks like
these scratches are new.
They wonder whether dirt
that's been impacted in the inscription
could be concealing signs of recent tampering.
We're actually trying to remove some of the soil
that's been impacted in the inscriptions and scratches.
Not only that, try to remove the soil safely
as not to destroy any patina.
The grooves of the inscription
contain traces of mud, which have to be removed
if they are to examine the inscription in detail.
It seems that Jesus son of Joseph
may not be the only name engraved on the box.
It appears that the name Yeshua,
if this is the actual name,
because it's a very difficult name to read,
is not the original name on this ossuary.
Yeshua appears to be super-inscribed over an earlier name
that appeared before that.
It could be something like (speaking in Hebrew),
or a number of possibilities,
but Yeshua was not the first one in the ossuary.
The name, Yeshua bar Yosef, Jesus son of Joseph,
has been inscribed very crudely
and incorporates some of the underlying inscription.
Could this have an innocent explanation?
Or has Jesus being carved later
as a deliberate deception by adding a few extra strokes,
then using mud to make them look older?
It's coming. Patina is coming away there.
Maybe you're right about the mud here
that it was put as a disguise, you know?
To cover up things, yeah.
The existence of this hardened mud inside,
we have to look for some explanation known for it,
'cause we don't really have a good explanation yet.
But that's what we're in the process of doing
is trying to figure out if this hardened mud
was something that somebody pressed into the inscription
in order to make it look better or whatever.
It's not very clear yet.
So now you're starting
to get some of the patina away.
If we're able to remove the mud successfully
without damaging the inscription itself,
this would hope to at least dispel any ideas
that this has any problems in terms
of some kind of tampering.
Take some of that there.
An area that we know has been perfected
by tape and the mud.
But these questions
are not likely to be answered just yet.
Worried that removing the mud
might risk harming the ossuary's delicate patina,
the Israel Antiquities Authority has now called a halt
to further investigation.
But whatever the eventual conclusions about tampering,
the scientists' concerns are symptomatic
of the widespread anxiety and alarm
caused by recent revelations of fakery and fraud.
I do think that the recent sensational claims
have made a mockery of the discipline of archeology.
(soft ethereal music)
When a real and important archeological find is made
the public are unable to evaluate
whether it's true or false.
In a country where three powerful religions
stake their claim to be the heirs of history,
where believers will seize on any evidence
that backs up their faith,
archeologists have a tough job separating fiction from fact.
(soft upbeat music)
This matters a lot to us
if we ever want to live in a real world,
because what we have is fiction invading the real world.
It stains archeological research, first of all.
It stains the known reconstruction of biblical history.
And there is a whole, a complete contamination
of our research.
And I think that we need to make a statement against this.
As scores of fake artifacts
have been sold around the world,
academic reputations have been trashed
and millions of dollars have changed hands.
But it's not just museums and wealthy collectors
who are being defrauded.
Distorting history has profound consequences for everyone.
You know, you feel betrayed.
You feel that you were deceived.
It's one thing to lie about something
that is not important to people
and it's something else to lie
about something that is intrinsic to their identity.
(dramatic orchestral music)
(upbeat mysterious music)