Acquitted of Forgery, Not Confirmed as Authentic

Israeli prosecutors charged Golan in 2004 with forging the ossuary's inscription and a related artifact, the Yehoash Inscription, in a trial that ran for years and drew extensive expert testimony on both sides regarding the patina, lettering style and chemical composition of the inscribed surface. In 2012 the Jerusalem district court acquitted Golan on the forgery charges, finding that prosecutors had not proven fraud beyond reasonable doubt, a verdict international media widely reported as vindicating the inscription's authenticity.

The judgment itself was narrower than that reporting suggested: the court explicitly stated that acquittal did not mean the inscription, or at least the words identifying the ossuary's occupant as brother of Jesus, was proven genuinely ancient, only that the prosecution's forgery case had not met the criminal standard of proof. Scholarly opinion on the inscription's authenticity therefore remains split even after the trial concluded, with some epigraphers maintaining the whole text is ancient and others continuing to argue that at least the phrase naming Jesus was added later to an authentically ancient but originally unremarkable ossuary. Golan retained ownership of the object after the acquittal, and its custody remains private rather than institutional.