The news show 60 Minutes had a segment on this, tonight. Nothing new, and no answers that helped me make up my mind.
Can we please have further lab work on this artifact? The inconsistancies in lab results have yet to be explained. Particularly, can we have identifying tests done on the "James Bond", the substance found in the letters? Looking at it through a microscope is all well and good, but we are no longer in the 1800's and have more tools at hand. If this or other artifacts were forged by cut-and-pasting then a long afternoon's work should allow skeptics to assemble a partial replica, with sources. (Epigraphic publications (and private collections) are not infinite. Then it is a simple matter of showing the forger had the sources and equipment -- and forensic work on both could cinch the case. ) If the patina on the front of the ossuary is fake, then why has no one claimed the substantial prize for its replication? (Hmn, or was that for replicating the patina on the Jehoash tablet?)
If this is a forgery I'd like to see it exposed, quickly and decisively. What is the trouble doing so, given that scientists and scholars have a decided advantage of knowledge over even the most enthusiastic collector?
(Note that the question of the ossuary's authenticity adds little to the scholarship on the family of Jesus, we already have non-Biblical references to him and without the bones and an archaeological context the ossuary itself tells scholars little. )
For background:
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/bswbOOossuary.html
-Kushana