The Caiaphas Ossuary is a limestone bone-box, richly carved with rosettes, found in 1990 in an intact first-century tomb in Jerusalem. Twice incised in Aramaic with a form of the name "Joseph son of Caiaphas," it is widely identified with the family, and quite possibly the person, of the high priest Caiaphas, who in the Gospels presides over the interrogation of Jesus and whom the historian Josephus names as high priest from about 18 to 36 CE.
The two inscriptions differ slightly in form and placement. The fuller reading, Yehosef bar Qayafa, runs along the ossuary's long decorated side, while a shorter Yehosef bar Qafa is cut into one of its narrow ends, a common pattern on inscribed ossuaries where a briefer second notation supplements a fuller formal one. The tomb itself came to light when construction workers broke into its roof with a bulldozer in November 1990, in the Peace Forest near North Talpiot in south Jerusalem; archaeologist Zvi Greenhut of the Israel Antiquities Authority then excavated a chamber holding twelve ossuaries across four burial niches, six of them already disturbed by robbers before his team arrived.
Unlike most of the objects in this account, the ossuary is attested: it was recovered in a controlled archaeological excavation, its context and materials support its antiquity, and the Israel Antiquities Authority regards it as genuine. It stands here as a deliberate counterweight, showing that the same honest-status framework that labels forgeries as debunked also recognises a genuine artifact when the evidence supports it. What remains open is the precise identification of the individual, not the authenticity of the box.