THE final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark shows workers boxing the Ark of the Covenant and wheeling it into the middle of an impossibly huge warehouse—an object of incomprehensible significance is lost forever. It’s a bit of ironic humor at the end of a rollicking movie.
What’s not funny, however, is that the same fate might have awaited the most interesting Biblical object to surface in some time, a first-century ossuary with a tantalizing inscription: “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” If these words are authentic, they represent the earliest historical reference to Jesus outside of the Bible. And yet the most important professional organizations for scholars in the field of Biblical history have policies that ban them from studying the object or even acknowledging its existence.
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