James Ossuary Forgery Trial - Verdict: Not Guilty

James Ossuary Forgery Trial, Verdict, Not Guilty, published by the Biblical Archaeology Society in 2012, is the organization's own news coverage of the acquittal of antiquities collector Oded Golan in Israel's forgery trial over the James ossuary and other disputed artifacts. Its strength is that Biblical Archaeology Society has covered the ossuary controversy continuously since it broke and reports the court's actual finding precisely, that prosecutors did not prove forgery beyond reasonable doubt, which is a narrower result than either full vindication or full condemnation of the inscription's authenticity. Its limit is that a magazine's trial report is not itself forensic analysis, and the court's own ruling explicitly declined to affirm the ossuary's inscription as ancient, so a claim about whether the James ossuary inscription is genuinely first century needs the archaeometric literature on the patina and the ongoing scholarly dispute, not the acquittal alone, which settled a criminal case rather than an authenticity question.