THE MORAL IS: Don't leave your inscribed ossuaries out in the courtyard:

Mysterious bones of Jesus, Joseph and Mary

By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem (The Telegraph)
Last Updated: 1:34am GMT 24/02/2007

In a scene worthy of a Dan Brown novel, archaeologists a quarter of a century ago unearthed a burial chamber near Jerusalem.

Inside they found ossuaries, or boxes of bones, marked with the names of Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

Then one of the ossuaries went missing. The human remains inside were destroyed before any DNA testing could be carried out.

While Middle East academics doubt that the relics belong to the Holy Family, the issue is about to be exposed to a blaze of publicity with the publication next week of a book.

Entitled The Jesus Tomb and co-written by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, the book promises the inside story of "what may very well be the greatest archaeological find of all time".

[...]

The 10 ossuaries were taken initially to the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Nine were catalogued and stored but the tenth was left outside in a courtyard.

That ossuary has subsequently gone missing.

[...]

I'm skeptical. Whatever the authors say about their statistics, this is rather like having a family burial plot with John and Mary Smith and their son John in it. Rather difficult to claim that they must be a particular Smith family. For more on the Talpiot Tomb, see here. Sorry about the bad links. The final link, which I'll fix when I get a chance, is here. For more on Simcha Jacobovici, see here. Too bad the DNA is gone.