MORE ON THE "JAMES OSSUARY" INSCRIPTION: Stephen C. Carlson analyses the latest challenge to the IAA's report, which challenge he thinks does not significantly weaken the case for it being a forgery. Excerpt (but read it all):

Harrell's proposal suggests that there might be an innocent explanation for the modern, gray coating, but this assumes that the modern cleaning was innocent in the first place. So what was the intent behind the modern cleaning of the inscription? As I discussed in my note on scribal intent, there is a presumption (at least in law) that people intend the reasonably foreseeable effects of their actions. The owner of the ossuary had been an avid collector of antiquities for nearly 40 years. Such a collector would reasonably foresee that the effect of cleaning an ancient inscription is to remove the main evidence that could authenticate it, thereby reducing its value. For the modern cleaning to be innocent, it would also have to be irrational. Blaming one's mother for cleaning just pushes the analysis back one more level but does not change the result: what reasonable collector permits his mother to ruin his collection? On the other hand, a placing the gray coating over a modern inscription is a rational way to hide evidence of modern tool use, and modern tool marks were observed under the gray coating.