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Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land [Hardcover]

Nina Burleigh
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)

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Book Description

October 21, 2008

In 2002, an ancient limestone box called the James Ossuary was trumpeted on the world's front pages as the first material evidence of the existence of Jesus Christ. Today it is exhibit number one in a forgery trial involving millions of dollars worth of high-end, Biblical era relics, some of which literally re-wrote Near Eastern history and which could lead to the incarceration of some very wealthy men and embarrass major international institutions, including the British Museum and Sotheby's.

Set in Israel, with its 30,000 archaeological digs crammed with biblical-era artifacts, and full of colorful characters—scholars, evangelicals, detectives, and millionaire collectors—Unholy Business tells the incredibly story of what the Israeli authorities have called "the fraud of the century." It takes readers into the murky world of Holy Land relic dealing, from the back alleys of Jerusalem's Old City to New York's Fifth Avenue, and reveals biblical archaeology as it is pulled apart by religious believers on one side and scientists on the other.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In November 2002, the public display of an ossuary (an ancient burial vessel) inscribed James, the brother of Jesus, sent ripples of excitement, doubt and consternation through both the religious and scholarly worlds. But when scholars took a close look, they declared the inscription a forgery based on the lack of provenance and a tremendous disparity between the physical writing of the word James and the rest of the inscription. In her captivating chronicle, veteran journalist Burleigh (Mirage) enters a dark world full of shady dealings, illicit collectors and monomaniacal archeologists. Along the way we meet an improbable cast of characters, including Oded Golan, the ossuary's owner; André Lemaire, an epigraphist who early on testified to the authenticity of the ossuary's inscription; Shlomo Moussaieff, a billionaire collector with a warehouse full of artifacts of uncertain value; and Israel Finkelstein, a maverick Israeli archeologist who questions the historicity of many biblical events. Burleigh draws readers in from page one and brilliantly captures the compelling debates about archeology's relationship to narratives of faith. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Shrewd and piquant journalist Burleigh, whose last book, Mirage (2007), offers fresh insights into the discovery of the Rosetta stone, tells the full story behind one of the “greatest hoaxes of all times,” the ancient stone box that was presented to the world in 2002 as the ossuary that held the bones of Jesus’ brother, James. With brio and acumen, Burleigh follows the trail of antiquities fraud in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, visiting collectors’ lairs, biblical sites, and archaeological digs. She wryly profiles Oded Golan, the man responsible for the fraudulent ossuary, and Amir Ganor, the Israel Antiquities Authority investigator who broke the case, as well as a motley crew of scholars, tomb looters, dealers, true believers, and antiquities forgers. But Burleigh is most intrigued with the mix of science and wishful thinking that characterizes biblical archaeology as Israel struggles to preserve evidence of this bloodied land’s Jewish heritage, and Christians seek Holy Land artifacts that allegedly offer “physical proof of biblical stories.” In all, a provocative inquiry into the age-old pairing of faith and folly. --Donna Seaman

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Smithsonian (October 21, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061458457
  • ISBN-13: 978-0061458453
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #843,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nina Burleigh is the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox. To research the definitive story of the Amanda Knox trial, Burleigh lived in Perugia, corresponded with the three defendants, interviewed Italian authorities and dozens of close friends and families of the accused. She and her husband photographer Erik Freeland enrolled their two children in the town school, and had many adventures.
Her other books include Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land; Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt; The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams and the Making of America's Greatest Museum, the Smithsonian; and A Very Private Woman: The Life and Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer.
Mirage, published in 2008 by Harper Collins, was selected by the New York Times as an editors' choice and won the Society of Women Educators' Award in 2008.
Burleigh was born and educated in the Midwest, has traveled throughout the United States and extensively in the Middle East and lived in Italy and France. As a journalist, she has covered American politics, the White House and Congress for Time and reported and wrote human interest stories at People Magazine from New York. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
She writes a column for the New York Observer and her feature articles on a wide variety of topics have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, New York and Bloomberg's Businessweek, Elle, and many other journals. She has appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS 48 Hours, various programs on CNN, C-Span, as well as NPR and countless radio outlets.


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
38 of 46 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Excavating the Gold From This Pile of Dust July 30, 2008
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
(Review is based upon Uncorrected Proof)

While reading this book I felt at times like a field archaeologist, sifting through piles of rubble and dirt to find a few precious artifacts of gold. The gold is there, to be sure, in small nuggets. You just have to be willing to dig for it.

Part travelogue, part human interest story, part crime report, part reporter's notepad, the genre of this book is difficult to pin down. It reminded me in many ways of Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses (P.S.) (without the religious insight) or Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy(without the recipes). My initial annoyance and disappointment with "Unholy Business" was ultimately tempered when I realized that I was not reading a scholarly work on archaeology, history, linguistics or even criminal forensics, but a kind of breezy and highly personalized travelogue. In hindsight this is not surprising, as Nina Burleigh is listed as a staff writer for "People" magazine, which I dip into briefly during almost every visit to my doctor. The writing of "Unholy Business" fits precisely within the human-interest story found in "People." As a history, I would give the book a single star. As human-interest story cum travelogue, it deserves two stars, possibly the three awarded here.

Three supposed archeological artifacts figure prominently in this book: The James Ossuary (supposedly the repository for the bones of James, the brother of Jesus), the Joash Tablet (supposedly bearing an inscription which proved the existence of the First Temple) and a carved ivory pomegranate (supposedly an ornament for a small priest's scepter used in the First Temple). These are--or ought to be--the heart of the book. The problem is that Burleigh spends most of the book talking about background issues--the teeming and corrupt antiquities market in Jerusalem, the 30,000 archaeological sites in Israel, the tension between Orthodox Jews and American Evangelical Christians, and so forth--and only really gets to the crux of the matter in the latter half of the book. Hence, I feel like a digger on an archeological grid, sifting through sand, hoping to ultimately uncover the precious artifacts.

Some additional comments and observations:

1. My chief problem with this book was Burleigh herself and her decision to write this book. I kept asking myself, "What qualifies this person to write a book about the world surrounding the cradle of Judaism, Islam and Christianity?" I never found a satisfying answer. To be sure Burleigh is a fine reporter. Indeed, much of the book reads like a verbatim transcript of a reporter's notebook. But what really qualifies her to write this story? To her credit, Burleigh admits that she has virtually no background in the world of religion. "My own religious training was nonexistent," she says on page 19. Her only admitted contact with "believers" from any religious tradition came from Mennonite missionaries who visited her childhood home in the 1960's and 1970's. "From them I learned that there are some very decent people who live every waking minute in a state of unshakeable faith in an otherworldly power," she wrote. I question whether this fleeting contact with Mennonite missionaries in the United States qualifies her to get into the heads of any "believer" of any tradition. Her true bias against "believers" is revealed by her description of Jerusalem, as the location of "the death match between reason and superstition--monitored by laughing commerce." To her, belief is tantamount to "superstition." I am suspicious of any writer, reporter or otherwise, who presumes to understand a subject as complex as Jerusalem from that smug, self-satisfied height of self-delusional "reason."

2. I also question her understanding of the historical background of her subject. She exhibits a shallow understanding only--a reporter's understanding--of archaeology, of linguistics, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, of politics. For example she says innocently, "No one had ever found an archaeological object linked to the First Temple." (Page 17). My slack-jawed reaction was, "Uhhhh.. you mean, other than THE TEMPLE MOUNT ITSELF!!" Later she says of the Temple, "the remains of the platform that once supported this temple are known as the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall." (Pg. 16). This is ridiculously false and simplistic. The Temple Mount covers many acres. The western wall is only the smallest of the remains of a retaining wall--mostly Herodian--some distance removed from the actual foundation marks of the First Temple, plainly visible under the Dome of the Rock. Later she makes the wide-eyed claim that the purpose of the Temple was solely house the Ark of the Covenant. This is all very Indiana Jones-like in its simplicity, but it fails to do justice to the richness, the depth, the complexity and the profound significance of the First Temple, its environs, its service, its priesthood and everything that flowed out from it culturally, historically and spiritually.

3. On its face, the book appears well-organized. The chapters have appropriate titles, and even insightful and inviting quotations leading into the prose. The chapters are divided into distinct sections, usually focusing on personalities involved in the antiquities trade, scholars, archaeologists, police, etc. But the Prologue and Epilogue are rather jarring and disjointed. The Epilogue ought in some ways to be a satisfying culimination of the Prologue, or its mirror image. The Epilogue ought to bring us full circle, perhaps returning even slightly to the not unsympathetic portrait of Ada, the idiosyncratic epigrapher toiling in her fascinating home. But here Burleigh's epilogue seems unrelated stylistically or thematically with the strong Prologue. This Epilogue is more of a Joe Friday, Dragnet-style denouement: "In 2004 the Jerusalem District Attorney submitted Criminal File 482/04 with the District Court of Jerusalem..." (Page 243). We almost await Joe Friday's laconic voice intoning, "In a moment, the results of that trial."

4. Overall, her multitude of character sketches are beautifully done, but there is also much by way of very lazy description. Particularly annoying were the many character descriptions related to popular culture. When Burleigh gets lazy and can't come up with her own description, she uses the shorthand of popular movies and culture. Some examples of weak personal descriptions: "Her gap-toothed smile and sleepy eyes suggest the sultry actress Ellen Barkin" (Pg.1); "[A]n impish face reminiscent of Joel Grey in the movie Cabaret..." (Pg. 12); "an odd duck--lawyer, crank, P.T. Barnum, and Indiana Jones all rolled into one man" and comparable to "a Saul Bellow character" (Pg. 33); "Seeking a real-life Indiana Jones, one could do worse than visit Seymour Gitin...." (Pg. 91); and "A tanned, jocular man, he greeted us in the standard uniform of the dirt archaeologist--Indiana Jones hat, sweat-stained T-shirt, shorts and sandals" (Pg. 95). If Burleigh mentioned Indiana Jones one more time in her book, I was ready to jump off of the top of the Wailing Wall.

5. Really, this book reads much like the unredacted notepad of a newspaper reporter. We get too much here. There is too much Nina Burleigh here, and not enough James Ossuary. Her prejudices and quirks and likes and dislikes, continually obtrude themselves into the narrative. Examples: "In an interview over rugelach and black coffee at Morty's Deli in Washington..." (Pg. 54); He was "barely into his first cup of Nescafe when he received a call..." (Pg. 64). This is way too much information for my taste.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Story about Archaeological Fraud August 3, 2008
By Sires
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
I read this book because I wanted a journalist's eyeview of the trade in looted and forged artifacts as well as the full story of the James ossuary that disappeared from the press after making such a splash in the early part of this century. In my opinion Nina Burleigh does a very good job of introducing the reader to the characters of the drama-- the scholars, the dealers, the buyers and the agents who are supposed to police them all. Far from finding them distracting, I thought the details she provided about the various people are entertaining and give good visual references. If this doesn't become a documentary then I will be very surprised.

She clearly showed the interests that individuals had in the various sites and the finds that might (or might not) connect them to the Bible-- monetary, reputation, political and religious. And then she brings her story back around to the detective work that led to the discovery of the hidden items, the scientific investigation of the various items that led to the prosecution.

She isn't terribly unkind to anyone, not even Hershel Shanks-- who I first read about when a misguided friend gave me a subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review-- a publication that is indeed quite shiny. Mr. Shanks at the time was being sued by Elisha Qimron, a scholar working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, for publication of his copyrighted work without permission. Mr. Qimron won, I later learned.

Anyway, I found this book informative and entertaining without sliding into the shrillness that can be found in a lot of discussions about religious claims on the Near East and its history. I can safely predict a few hackles will be raised anyway.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Proof, lies, and antiquities... August 27, 2008
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
During my twenty-four years as an evangelical Christian I devoured anything remotely validating the Bible's authenticity, such as the Noah's Ark expeditions and other key archaeological findings in the Middle East like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Two recent discoveries came to light as I was leaving my faith: The James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet. After much debate and analysis it turned out that these controversial items were sophisticated fakes, and their rise and fall is smartly documented in this fascinating book.

"Unholy Business" takes us into the seamy underbelly of the Middle East antiquities trade, specifically within Israel and the Palestine territories. Nina Burleigh covers the recent period when the above finds were unearthed, tested, and found wanting. The James Ossuary, a stone burial box, was inscribed with a phrase that made it the first archaeological object to substantiate Christ's existence (not to mention his father Joseph and brother/cousin James). As for the Jehoash Tablet, it was touted as proof of Solomon's Temple, thus augmenting the Jewish claim to the Temple Mount.

Both artifacts generated religious and political firestorms while being subjected to the scrutiny of reputable scholars. After rigorous analysis, the experts came to the conclusion that both items were bogus due to various inconsistencies and anachronisms. The persons held responsible for the frauds were charged with "creating a series of forgeries and scheming to sell them," and were subjected to a drawn-out legal ordeal that further tainted the situation, thus enabling some quarters to still claim that the items are genuine. Indeed, the title "Unholy Business" is an apt description of the entire affair.

The author does a good job documenting this fascinating ride with a well-written whodunit style that keeps us guessing. She draws us into the antiquities world and highlights its impact on Israel's complicated past and tumultuous present. We meet and get to know a cast of rogues, saints, and those in-between: Shady collectors, obscure academics, true believers, fervent nationalists, and intrepid law enforcement agents. Although we see good folks of both religious and secular persuasions, it was troubling how faith, politics, and profit corrupted the search for truth in "Unholy Business."

As a former Christian and current agnostic, I was particularly affected by religion's quest for relevance via the antiquities trade. I still remember how stoked my Christian friends and I became when something was unearthed that confirmed the Biblical record, how we rationalized away other items that contradicted it, and even our fervent desire to visit "our" Holy Land. The author's interactions with various pilgrims showed that these trends continue within the ranks of believers. It was sad how easily persons of faith and those seeking a national identity allowed their rationality to be compromised by profiteers.

In the end, some Christians will probably not be thrilled with this book due to its stance on the non-authenticity of the Ossuary and Tablet. However, the author performs a necessary service by shining a harsh light on those engaged in historical fraud, as well as on people who are willing to forego rigorous scholarship in order to validate their religious or political beliefs. "Unholy Business" is a well-written detective story about how archaeology's quest for truth can be corrupted by outside agendas and the lust for mammon. Recommended.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Unholy Business : A true Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in Holy Land
This book details the discovery of an old limestone box 2002. It was called the James Ossuary and was pitched as the burial box of James, the brother of Jesus Christ. Read more
Published 8 days ago by Santeria
1.0 out of 5 stars way too many inaccuracies...
"the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple" (page 59)--they did??? "the Bible says that Golgotha, or Calgary.." (page 66) really??!! Calgary?!! Read more
Published 21 months ago by S. Schafer
4.0 out of 5 stars NEEDED AN EDITOR
I was a subscriber to Biblical Archaeology Review during the whole James ossuary debacle. I grew wearly of Hershel Shanks one sided presentation of the debate and not allowing... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Michael
5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Burleigh's 'Unholy Business'
Burleigh's account of fraud in Israeli antiquities is insightful and exciting. Hers is a fast-paced reporter's vision of a market where collectors and ideologues compete to control... Read more
Published on September 14, 2010 by Ryan S. Mease
4.0 out of 5 stars Digging up the dirt...
Having just returned from the Biblical Archaeology Society's annual conference, this topic is fresh in my mind. Read more
Published on November 24, 2009 by FrKurt Messick
4.0 out of 5 stars Breezy and addictive story of archaeology and faith in the Holy Land
In Unholy Business, journalist Nina Burleigh uses the story of the James Ossuary, a purported relic supporting the historical existence of Jesus that is now widely believed to be a... Read more
Published on September 17, 2009 by Cynthia S. Froning
3.0 out of 5 stars Fact checking, please
No point in competing with the many probing critiques of this book already posted here. Just want to express annoyance at Ms. Read more
Published on September 5, 2009 by A. Pfeffer
2.0 out of 5 stars Yesterday's Headlines, Warmed Over
As numerous other reviewers have noted, this book is written by a person who's not well-versed in any of the subjects that she's chosen to cover: Israel, Christianity, Biblical... Read more
Published on August 13, 2009 by Avid Reader
4.0 out of 5 stars Faith and Fakes
I really want to give UNHOLY BUSINESS three and a half stars. Since Amazon won't let me do that and since I really did enjoy the book, I decided to round up to four. Read more
Published on June 14, 2009 by Collin Garbarino
5.0 out of 5 stars "The Fraud of the Century?"
UNHOLY BUSINESS: A True Tale of Faith, Greed & Forgery in the Holy Land
by Nina Burleigh

There are two different types
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Published on May 25, 2009 by John R. Guthrie
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