outhouse

Because you wont refute what ive posted.


We are talking about the law, you know the police! not the IAA.

What part of convicted, dont you understand. :constern01:

TedM

I would like to read the transcripts or a summary, but haven't been able to find anything very helpful for the forgery ring charge.

Just read all the reviews. Not sure I'll get it as it sounds like not much is pinned on Golan, but I may just to see if there is something new.

TedM

The IAA led the police. It was guided by them. What they found is not clear from the media reports. Anyone can make it SOUND damning, but that doesn't mean it WAS damning, and the fact that he wasn't CONVICTED of any kind of forgery ring association, where SURELY there would have been numerous people ABLE to call him out on having DUPED them. But, apparently there weren't ANY. Is that just due to 'good lawyering'?

You may be completely right. But something here just doesn't smell right to me about it. I admit I may simply be too naive...I'll probably get that book and see if it has anything of substance relevant to Mr Golan. It wasn't clear from all the reviews I read that it does.


Why don't you tell me what he was convicted of -- nice and clear like?

Duke Leto

Shanks got sold a lemon and he's been desperately trying to convince everyone, presumably including himself, that it's a "classic car".

On another level, the discussion of the (in)authenticity of the thing is serving an additional role as page filler for BAR. They had to fold Bible Review and Archaeology Odyssey a few years back because the market could no longer bear three magazines and theological material and archaeology that doesn't strictly fall into the Biblical area have been appearing in BAR's pages ever since.

On still another level, Shanks has a problem with getting fresh "Biblical Archaeology" material. As I understand it, the pace of Archaeology in Israel proper has declined in the last 20 years because its too damned dangerous. Shanks has also poisoned his relationship with the IAA and that hasn't done him any favors.

Thus stirring controversy is the best way to go about selling magazines for him. He did the exact same thing with the Dead Sea Scrolls 25 years ago.

So anything Shanks writes on the subject of the stupid thing has to be seen through that lens. I won't go so far as to say he's being consciously self-serving, but there's no doubt the agenda is there.

That said, saying that the forger had to have known Aramaic better then some priest isn't all that high a hurdle to leap. If I were in the antiquities forging business I'd have access to some pretty decent technology and the people to use it. Getting someone with the language skill is pretty trivial.

And like I said in my first post where I said I didn't want to be drawn into a discussion, I don't think I've ever hear an adequate explanation as to how the James the Just of conventional historiography, whose death was described in Josephus, managed to get buried in an ossuary of the type used for Jerusalem aristocrats. This is especially true if this is supposed to have been the same James who wrote the epistle.

I don't accept the official Christian history for a minute, but assuming you did credit it, the Ossuary flunks the "Indiana Jones Test". Ostentation was NOT Jesus' style. Why would it have been his brother's?