Anyone who reads Hebrew or Aramaic can look at the tracing for the "Jesus son of Yosef" box (it's on the Discovery Channel website) and immediately see that the name "son of Yosef" is clearly discernable towards the left, but that the letters yod, shin, vav and ayin (Yeshua) are only (at best) by remote conjecture to be found in the scrawled writing etched into the stone following the big X-like marking on the right.

Indeed, in the Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries where the tracing of the inscription was first published, the transcriber carefully puts a dot over the letters yod and shin, indicating in standard fashion that his reading is conjectural, and he puts a question-mark after the entire name Yeshua meaning that he is doubtful of that entire part of his transcription. He was clearly groping, because the letters vav and ayin are also not discernable and he should have put dots over that part of the transcription as well. As everyone knows, there is another ossuary with the name Yeshua bar Yosef legibly inscribed on it, and it seems that the transcriber may have been influenced by that one in trying to figure out what this one says.

As for James Tabor, the Charlotte-based professor who is promoting the "Lost Jesus Tomb" film, he is the same character at the center of the claim that an "Essene latrine" has been found near the site of Khirbet Qumran, where so-called traditional Qumranologists (including, it would appear, Tabor himself) continue to insist, in the face of mounting contrary evidence, that a sect of Essenes lived. Tabor is also involved in the current biased and misleading exhibits of the Dead Sea Scrolls traveling around the country.

For details, see http://jesus-crypt-fraud.blogspot.com/ and the other postings published by the authors of that blog.

For Tabor's other recent attempt to hoodwink the public, see also pp. 9-10 of the most recent article by Professor Norman Golb on the Oriental Institute's website, http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/scr/.

Professor Jim Davila’s blog (March 6, 2007) http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/ quotes Tabor as asserting to him in an email: “I have never excavated even one tomb, and I am not even an archaeologist and have never claimed to be such.”

Yet Tabor himself, in an article published in the Charlotte Observer, excerpted on the same paleojudaica blog a year ago (February 13, 2006), wrote: “As an archaeologist, I have long observed and experienced the thrill that ancient discoveries cause in all of us. The look on the faces of my students as we uncover ancient ruins from the time of Jesus, or explore one of the caves where the scrolls were found, is unmistakable.”

Tabor's Ph.D. was awarded to him by the University of Chicago’s Department of New Testament and Christian Literature, housed in that institution's Divinity School building. The title of his dissertation was “Things Unalterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise”. He clearly has no training as an archaeologist or historian, and we are only left to wonder at the motivations that led him to become involved in these phony scams.