WRITTEN IN STONE.

Oded Golan, a dark-haired antiquities collector with gentle brown eyes, is a controversial figure in the world of Biblical archeology. To his

promoters and admirers, including Hershel Shanks, the editor of the widely read Biblical Archaeology Review, Golan may be responsible for some of the most spectacular finds in archeological history. Others, including Amir Ganor, the head of the theft unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority, believe that these remarkable artifacts are fakes. Golan, they say, is a central figure in a larger scheme in recent decades to infiltrate fake antiquities, connected directly to the Bible, into some of the leading collections in the world, making millions of dollars and disrupting the delicate chain of transmission that links Western civilization to its sacred founding texts.

Golan's apartment, which is on the third floor of a modest residential building in Tel Aviv, is a loftlike space, with a dark-gray futon on the floor, a white baby-grand piano, and large glass display cabinets. When I visited him last September, Golan, who is fifty-two, spoke like a man who had just been awakened from a dream.

"I can look at my family, and the whole recent history of Israel is reflected in their lives," Golan said, sitting behind a modern wooden desk. His grandfather Ben-Zion Berkovitch, he said, was a socialist rabbi and a successful attorney. His grandmother was a dogmatic atheist. Golan has been, by turns, a student of industrial engineering at the Technion (Israel's equivalent of M.I.T.), an Army officer, a tour operator in Egypt, a dabbler in high-tech ventures, and an investor in Tel Aviv real estate. When I asked to see his collection of antiquities, he pressed a button near his desk, and a curtain rose to reveal a well-lit vitrine containing pottery animals, vases, and altar stands.

"Here you can see, let's say, twenty animals, vessels in the shape of animals, most of them from the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.," Golan said proudly, pointing to a row of clay vessels. "That's a pig over there. A lion. It's a very, very rare one." It is his practice, he said, to repair the items in his collection so that the repair will be easily visible to a trained eye. "I can tell you immediately that this leg is a new one," he went on, pointing to a clay ox. "This has one horn that is a new one. Do you see? The left one is ancient, the right one is a new one. I can see it immediately. But you wouldn't recognize it."

The most famous item from Golan's collection is the ossuary, or stone burial box, of James, son of Joseph, a Jew who died in the first century in Jerusalem. The James ossuary, as it became known, was unveiled at a press conference in the fall of 2002, and was shown on CNN and in newspapers and magazines around the world; it was acclaimed by some scholars as the most important archeological find of the last two millennia. On its side was a short inscription in Aramaic--Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui d'Yeshua'--which was widely translated as "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus." It was quickly put forth that the person whose bones had been stored in the ossuary was the man referred to in Galatians 1:19 as "James the Lord's brother," whom Christian believers call James the Just. Like other significant items from Golan's collection, the ossuary is now locked in a closet in Jerusalem, in the headquarters of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the government agency responsible for protecting the nation's antiquities as well as for policing the trade. The James ossuary was recovered during a police raid on Golan's apartment last July; since October, 2002, Golan has been under investigation by the Antiquities Authority, which believes that he is at the center of a forgery ring that may have done more damage to Biblical history and archeology than anyone since the master forger Moses Wilhelm Shapira, who produced thousands of fake Biblical objects in Jerusalem more than a century ago.

Golan claims that he bought the James ossuary in the nineteen-seventies. He has not been charged with any crime, and says that the authorities have done "damage for many generations to come." He maintains that, without the involvement of dealers and collectors like him, many objects of great historical importance like the James ossuary would be lost forever, adding that he believes the investigation was "driven by the personal ambitions of several Antiquities Authority officials." Proclaiming his innocence--he maintains that he is merely a collector, and has sold only a handful of artifacts over the past thirty years--Golan then related a story about his first major discovery, which he made as a child, during a trip with his parents to Tel Hazor, an archeological site near the Sea of Galilee.