HARSH WORDS for the James Ossuary inscription in a book review in Time Magazine:

Exposing the Jesus' Brother Fraud
By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008

[...]

The extraordinary story of how Israeli detectives built a case against Golan and his alleged cohorts is the subject of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh, a former TIME staffer who now writes for People. In fast, noir-ish prose — imagine Sam Spade in the Holy Land — Burleigh tracks her story through the twilight world of Arab grave robbers and smugglers to the glimmering salon of a billionaire collector in Mayfair whose mission, writes Burleigh, is "proving the Bible true." Past accounts of the James Ossuary are fiercely partisan, written by debunkers or true believers. But Burleigh keeps her balance, and her humor, as she sifts — far more diligently than many archeologists — through the evidence. She also has unprecedented access to all the major players in the James Ossuary debate: dogged police detectives, sharp-witted antiquarians, Bible-besotted collectors and suspected forgers of near-genius.

[...]

Believers and scientists alike were shocked by the accusations that not only was the James Ossuary a fake but so were two other rare objects of Biblical significance — an inscribed pomegranate and the gold-flecked Jehoash Tablet which both supposedly came from Solomon's Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century B.C. Those two relics are linked to Golan's workshop, say police. As Burleigh describes it, the debate over the authenticity of these sacred items pitted scientists against believers. She writes: "The faithful — those who believe in a higher, supernatural power that leaves a material record of itself for man to literally hold and behold — must also confront and grapple with the painful presence of doubt."

Meanwhile, Golan's trial, with its parade of more than 75 scientists and Biblical scholars, is likely to drag on for another year. But Golan maintained, in an interview with TIME, that he is innocent of all charges and that since the trial began experts have come forth, he says, to prove that both the inscriptions on the James ossuary and the Jehoash table are genuine. Even after the judge finally decides whether Golan was an innocent collector or a master forger, it's likely that the debate between skeptics and believers over the James ossuary — and its supposed proof of Christ's historical existence — will rage on long afterwards.

It was kind of a shock to hear that the Ivory Pomegranate inscription was a fake, but it was pretty obvious early on the the Joash/Jehoash inscription was.