Christian lead books discovered

[Caballo]

Based on an article in the Times Literary Supplement, it seems a fake. Peter Thonemann was asked to examine the Greek text on one.
"the three lines of Greek all turned out to be variants of the same two puzzling phrases "...without grief, farewell! Agar, also known as Eision....".....half an hours work in the library turned up the two phrases in their original context; a perfectly ordinary Roman tombstone from Madaba in Jordan, datable 108/9 and currently on display in the Archeologiclal Museum in Amman. .......Now, if you were looking for a plausible-looking sequence of letters in an ancient language , you coukd do worse than to pop into the British Museum , pick a stone , and copy the letter shapes."

"the forgers repertoire is fairly predictable; pseudo Christian symbols copied from ancient Greek and Judean coins ...interspersed with gibberish inscriptions clumsily adapted from real ancient texts , Greek and Hebrew."

He informed the man at the centre, David Elkington, who had contacted him originally to look at the Greek inscriptions, but strangely, seems to have been omitted from the press releases.....
(TLS, April 8, 2011)