Jordan Lead Codices
On 3 March 2011, The Jewish Chronicle ran an interview with a metallurgist named Robert Feather, who it stated was trying to authenticate a collection of 20 metal books which could be linked to the Kabbalah.
These items were in the possession of an Israeli Bedouin farmer named Hassan Saeda, who claimed that they had been found by his great-grandfather in a cave a century ago.
The article reported that the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) considered them inauthentic and worthless, saying the books are a "mixture of incompatible periods and styles without any connection or logic.
It added that Professor André Lemaire, an epigrapher and director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études, said the inscriptions he has seen make no sense and that it was "a question apparently of sophisticated fakes".
[2] Elkington also stated that the items were discovered 5 years previously in a cave by a Jordanian Bedouin and smuggled into Israel, where they were at risk of sale on the black market or of destruction.
Thonemann replied that the item was a modern forgery, created during the last 50 years in Jordan, because the text copied a truncated tombstone inscription (AD 108/9) from the Archaeological Museum of Amman.
[16] On 4 April 2011, Philip R. Davies posted a statement on Sheffield's Biblical Studies blog suggesting that, while he recognized that the images were modern, the codices were probably not a hoax nor "forgeries".
[19] Robert Deutsch weighed in on 5 April, arguing that the tablets lacked patina and corrosion and, along with others, he noted that all the iconography and script appeared to come directly from coins dating to multiple periods (Hellenistic, Hasmonean, and Bar Kokhba) in antiquity.
[22] On 6 April Dr. James E. Deitrick suggested that the image on one of the lead plates is a replica of a 3rd-century mosaic portrait dubbed "The Mona Lisa of the Galilee.
[28] In the July 2011 issue of Palestine Exploration Quarterly, Philip R. Davies published an editorial surveying some of the information surrounding the tablets, urging caution and the need for further investigation.
This was conducted as a 13-minute segment of Inside Out West (26 November 2012)[30] accompanied by a written BBC News article entitled "Jordan Codices 'expert' David Elkington's claims queried".
I would stake my academic reputation on it" adding that "all of the codices that have appeared in the media in the past year or so are products of the same modern workshop – they’ve all sorts of similarities in style, fabric, and content.
[30] The BBC Inside Out programme shifted focus onto whether David Elkington was the right person to be testing the authenticity of the codices, analysing the true intentions, history and qualifications of the "self styled" academic.
[30] In March 2015, the start of the Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books, a limited not-for-profit company, was announced under the aegis of Richard Chartres, Bishop of London.
[34][35] On 8 December 2016, the University of Surrey Ion Beam Centre published a press release indicating their testing results show "the lead in the codices is more likely to be over 100 years old", and that other studies of the lead give "strong evidence that the objects are of great age, consistent with the studies of the text and designs that suggest an age of around 2000 years" [36] as of 2025, this report no longer appears on the University of Surrey Ion Beam Centre website.
