NEW YORK: A few words carved into a limestone box stolen from a cave in Al Quds 15 years ago could be the earliest known reference to Jesus Christ, theologians said on Tuesday. One even hailed the find as the most important since the Dead Sea Scrolls. The limestone ossuary, used in the first century AD to store the bones of the dead, carries an Aramaic inscription reading: ”James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

The reference may be to St James, described in the New Testament as the brother of Christ, according to Andre Lemaire, a historian at the Paris-based Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, who announces his conclusions in next month’s issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review.

He was led to the ossuary by chance after he met a collector at a party in Israel, who said he had paid between US dollars 200 and US dollars 700 for the box 15 years ago, after it was looted from a cave in an Al Quds suburb.

Mr Lemaire said: “I immediately wondered if it was the same James who was said to be the brother of Jesus of Nazareth.”

He claims that the style of writing and the fact that ossuaries were in common use only until about AD70 support his case. St James was executed in AD62. But archaeologists warned that looted artefacts would always be treated with scepticism.

“When something appears out of nowhere, and we don’t know what place it comes from, there are all sorts of possibilities — that it may not be ancient, or that it may be ancient and modified more recently,” said Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service