Is this ossuary proof of Jesus, or is it spurious?

This web page is a repository for information and news articles on this recent find. Please feel free to link to this web page or to pass the URL on to others.

Here is a nice picture of the inscription:

Bones of contention (Nov. 9, 2002)

Owner of Jesus-linked artifact speaks (Nov. 7, 2002)

Ownership battle brews over Jesus-era burial box

A Discovery That's Just Too Perfect by Robert Eisenman (Oct. 29, 2002)

Bone-Box No Proof of Jesus by Acharya S

The ossuary will be on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Apparently the ossuary was packaged in a cardboard box lined with bubble wrap instead of a wooden crate. Shipping was done through Peltransport, a shipping company in Israel.

2,000-year-old ossuary, possible link to Jesus, damaged on way to Toronto

John N. Lupia writes (Nov. 3, 2002):

Moreover, when I first saw digital photographs of the so-called James Ossuary I immediately knew the inscription was fake without giving a paleographic analysis for two reasons: biovermiculation and patina. Biovermiculation is limestone erosion and dissolution caused by bacteria over time in the form of pitting and etching. The ossuary had plenty except in and around the area of the inscription. This is not normal. The patina consisted of the appropriate minerals but it was reported to have been cleaned off the inscription. This is impossible since patina cannot be cleaned off limestone with any solvent or cleanser since it is essentially baked on glass. It is possible to forge patina but when it is it cracks off. Sound familiar? With these observations I immediately knew the inscription could not be authentic regardless of what any paleographer might say in favor of it since the physical aspects [necessitate] forgery. Besides, at this point any paleographic analysis would have been superfluous.

Historian Jack Kilmon writes (Oct. 21, 2002):

My interpretation is this is the ossuary of James, the Just in which his bones were placed 1 year after his execution in 62 CE. Having studied perhaps 80% of all 1st century ossuarial inscriptions, it is the only one where a sibling is used as an identifier along with the father. This would only be done because the brother had some sort of prominence. This is as close as you are going to get for a birth certificate for the historical Jesus.

Jesus myth advocate Earl Doherty comments (Oct. 21, 2002):

As it stands, this is on a level with all those "FRAGMENTS OF GOSPELS FOUND AT QUMRAN" headlines, or "REMAINS OF NOAH'S ARK DISCOVERED IN TURKEY". Without extended examination by a range of scholars, such claims can hardly be taken very seriously, or seriously presumed to have been reliably interpreted. I would also venture that the number of "Jakobs" who had fathers named Joseph and brothers named Jesus might have numbered in the hundreds.

I'll certainly be looking into the media coverage of this "discovery", but we've been had too many times by this sort of thing.

Jack Kilmon responds (Oct. 21, 2002):

Earl's response is exactly what I expected it to be...obfuscation. Certainly this find is not on the level with the Cave 7 "New Testament" fragments and Noah's Ark silliness. The ossuary has been examined by a reliable investigator and it is NOT a forgery. It will be mmade available to other investigators for similar analyses of the patina and inscription. That Doherty estimates "hundreds" of Jakobs with fathers named Joseph and brothers named Jesus is a dumb thing to say. Less than 20 fits the demographics BUT the use of a brother also as an identifier on an ossuarial inscription is unprecedented and I have read 80% if 1st century ossuarial inscriptions. That the brother was prominent enough for the family to add it to the bone box AND contemporaneous with the death of James the Just is almost as good as a birth certificate, IMO. Of course there can be no certainty but this is MOST LIKELY the ossuary of the HISTORICAL brother of the HISTORICAL Jesus. I realize it HAS to be a forgery for the Jesus/Myth crowd, otherwise they would be out of business.

Classics scholar Ed Tyler comments (Oct. 21, 2002):

Needless to say, I'm pretty skeptical about the authenticity of this thing; and even if it turns out to be genuine, it could apply to any one of about 20 known Jameses, and who knows how many unknown ones.

Jim Holman comments (Oct. 21, 2002):

Certainly this does not constitute any kind of "proof." But from what I've read and heard (on NPR this evening) there are several interesting things about this:

1) there doesn't appear to be any evidence of fabrication. Apparently the guy who owns this had no idea what he had. As I recall, a scholar saw it after a chance meeting with the owner.

2) The inscription is in the style of writing of the first century.

3) After 70 a.d. such ossuaries were not very common.

4) An analysis of what we know of the population of Jerusalem pre-70 a.d., and of the frequency of names, shows that a James who had a father named Joseph and a brother Jesus would be rather rare.

5) The placement of a brother's name would only happen if the brother were well-known.

So at a minimum, it appears that there was at least one historical well-known Jesus, with a father named Joseph and a brother named James who probably died prior to 70 a.d.

Again, not a smoking gun, but not like a piece of the "original cross" either.

Let's hope that further research sheds light on the subject.

The following message from Dr. Rochelle Altman, an expert in detecting forgery, is reproduced here by permission. (Oct. 24, 2002)

I carefully checked many photos and writings on ossuaries and covenants
 before sending you my report. I make no claim to be an expert on ossuaries,
 but inscriptions and scripts are another story. It might be in order to warn
 you that I have a great deal of experience at spotting ancient frauds and
 forgeries.
 
There are a few things we have to bear in mind about ossuary inscriptions.
 
First, according to Rhamani (1981, 1982) on Jerusalem burial practices,
 most ossuaries are from the period between 30/20 BCE-70 CE -- but by no
 means all.
 
Second, human remains are not dug up and displaced without very good
 reasons. Ossuaries show up in quantity when burial space is at a premium.
 
Solutions to the burial space problem are quite varied. In Classical Greece,
 for example, low status people were buried in space-saving one-person shaft
 graves (with a tiny round marker on the spot with the necessary data). The
 Keramikon in Athens is full of these. In Italy, from the Renaissance until
 the late 19th-century, after 3 years, unless a family could afford an ossuary
 or pay another three years rent, the bones were dumped in a mass grave site --
 usually a convenient quarry or crevice or what have you, filled with dirt
 layer by layer. In Athens, ossuaries are still used (metal boxes nowadays);
 again, that three-year rent period runs. Even in modern Lousiana, along the
 Mississippi water seepage makes it impossible to dig graves of a reasonable
 depth; burials are in family mausoleums and bones are pushed down to make way
 for the latest arrival.
 
As ossuaries, after all, contravene the normal rules for Jewish burial,
 the appearance of so many ossuaries in the period before the destruction of
 the temple is strong evidence that the cemeteries around Jerusalem were in
 a space-crunch. (The post-70 reduction in ossuaries follows naturally enough
 from the removal of enough people from the area to reduce the need for bone-
 boxes.)
 
It is not a question of "popularity" at all (which when one thinks about
 it, is a most peculiar way to think about the subject), but a lack of
 burial space... which also gives us information about population density
 of a given area. (Oddly enough, there does not seem to be very much in the
 literature that addresses this point for the relevant period; yet the
 correlation between the space constraints indicated by the rise in ossuaries
 and the density of the population of a given area is rather obvious.)
 
Third, while today, grave markers are carved by pros, this was not the
 case in these Jewish ossuary inscriptions. The apparently wide variations
 in ossuary inscriptions comes from a simple fact: these ossuary inscriptions
 are covenants, vows to affirm continuing respect for the deceased in spite of
 having disinterred his/her remains. As any other vow, the text must be in the
 hand of the one making the vow. Thus (as is noted in the literature), a
 surviving member of the family painted on, or scratched into, the (usually)
 limestone box the memorial data. In some cases a professional would carve
 over the handwriting exactly as written. (BTW, this is the standard practice
 for all professionally carved covenants.)
 
In other words, all those ossuary inscriptions are holographs. Needless to
 say, in such a mass of individual writing, literacy varied tremendously from
 semi-literates who wrote only upon occasion to school-boys to scholars.
 [What is relevant to sorting out the apparent lack of relation between
 status and ossuary is not the wealth or social status of the individual(s)
 (up to three sets of same-family bones can show up in an ossuary), but the
 level of literacy and status of the survivors. Thus, there is a relationship
 between status and inscription... but we would need information on the
 *survivors* in each case to know who, what, when, how, and why.]
 
From the writing on the ossuary inscriptions, some are clearly written by
 youngsters and semi-literates who did not have complete control of graph
 sizes and could not hold a straight line. Others are clearly the holographs
 of literate people.
 
The inscription on the "James" ossuary is a bit more complicated. First
 it has been gone over by a professional carver; the words are excised (not
 incised). Second, it was written by two different people.
 
Translated, with the emendments to the original spelling as given in the
 article, the inscription reads:
 
Jacob son of Joseph brother of Joshua.
 
The emended translation does not indicate the way the words are actually
 written, which is in two distinct groups:*
 
Y(KOBBRYWSF )XWW(Y#W(
 
Nor does the translation give any indication of the change from the
 carefully executed and expertly spaced *inscriptional* cursive --
 including careful angles and the cuneiform wedge on the bet's, the
 resh, and the yod -- in
 
Y(KOBBRYWSF
 [jacobsonofjoseph]
 
to the less than expertly executed *commercial* sans-wedge cursive in
 
)XWW(Y#W(
 [brotherofJoshua]
 
While it is customary to dismiss such differences as unimportant ("scribes
 are not typewriters"), here the differences between the two parts are
 glaring and impossible not to see.
 
In part 1, the script is formal, the ayin has an acute angle, the bet's,
 resh, and yod have the cuneiform wedge, and the yod's are consistent in
 size and cannot be confused with the vav's.
 
The person who wrote the first part of the inscription [ Y(KOBBRYWSF ]
 was necessarily a surviving member of the family. He was fully literate;
 he clearly was familiar with the formal square script (those cuneiform
 wedges), the writing is internally consistent, and this part of the
 inscription is his expertly written holograph.
 
In part 2, the script is informal, the two ayin's are completely different
 from each other and differ yet again from the ayin in part 1. When we compare
 the yod in Y(KOB with the (amended) three yod's in )XWW(Y#W( we immediately
 can see that this is a different person writing. First of all, the yod in
 'brother of' and the first yod in W(Y#W( are written as vav's. With the
 model of the correct way to write the yod-ayin [ Y( ] right in front of his
 nose on 'Jacob', there is no reason at all for the extended vav or the extra
 vav in what should be Y(#(. Then, the yod in the peculiarly misspelled W(Y#W(
 does not resemble the yod in Joseph [ YWSF ] as written in part 1 which also
 has a wedge. The shin in W(Y#W( [damned if I can figure out how to trans-
 literate this abberrant spelling of Joshua] is wedgeless and does not accord
 with the first part of the inscription... but then, none of the forms in the
 second part agree with the script of the first part.
 
The person who wrote the second part [ )XWW(Y#W( ] may have been literate,
 but it is doubftul that he was literate in Aramaic or Hebrew. Again,
 aberrant spelling is dismissed as dialectic. True, there are dialectic
 variants, but there is always some linguistic logic behind these variants.
 There is nothing logical about these misspellings. They smell of someone
 guessing how the words "brother of" and the name "Joshua" would have been
 spelled a couple, three hundred years earlier. Once again, the writing in
 this part is internally consistent in its semi-literacy. Part 2 has the
 characteristics of a later addition by someone attempting to imitate an
 unfamiliar script and write in an unfamiliar language.
 
There is yet another tell-tale sign of fraud here. As noted, the text
 is excised. (Which indicates a wealthy family.) Nobody excises an entire
 block of stone to raise the text; not even the Yadi stele is entirely
 excised. In "name" plates or other small inscriptions, if excised rather
 than incised (cheaper), the normal practice is to excise the text and a
 frame, which frame itself is excised by incised limits but never beyond
 them. Only the area within the frame will be excised; the rest of the
 block will be left alone. Far too much here has been excised from around
 the names. More to the point, where is the original frame?
 
Well, to anybody who knows something about anti-fraud techniques as practiced
 in antiquity, it is rather obvious. The frame was removed to add the second
 part of this inscription. The original frame would have been the barest
 minimum distance from the text and have appeared something like this:
 
 |-----------|
 |Y(KOBBRYWSF| )XWW(Y#W(
 |___________|
 
If the entire inscription on the ossuary is genuine, then somebody has to
 explain why there are two hands of clearly different levels of literacy and
 two different scripts. They also have to explain why the second hand did not
 know how to write 'brother of' or even spell 'Joshua'. Further, they had
 better explain where the frame has gone.
 
The ossuary itself is undoubtedly genuine; the well executed and formal
 first part of the inscription is a holographic original by a literate
 (and wealthy) survivor of Jacob BenJosef in the 1st century CE. The second
 part of the inscription bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition
 and is questionable to say the least.
 
Regards,
 
Rochelle
 
--
 Dr. R.I.S. Altman, co-coordinator, IOUDAIOS-L
 
* Michigan-Claremont Encoding for ASCII
 
alef ) patah A
 bet B qametz F
 gimel G hireq I
 dalet D segol E
 he H tsere "
 waw W holam O
 zayin Z qibbuts U
 het X shureq W.
 tet + schwa :
 yod Y holem waw OW
 kaf K hateph-pathah :A
 lamed L hateph-qametz :F
 mem M hateph-segol :E
 nun N maqqeph -
 samek S dagesh .
 ayin ( rape ,
 pe P ketiv *
 zade C qere **
 qof Q
 resh R
 sin/shin #
 sin &
 shin $
 taw T

There may be flaws in Dr. Altman's discussion. First, the inscription seems to be incised, not excised. On page 28 of his article in the Biblical Archaeology Review, Lemaire states that the Aramaic letters "reveal a classical script carefully incised." Second, part of the discussion is based on a possible misreading of a letter daleth as a letter ayin. (This point is due to Stephen Carlson.) However, part of Altman's discussion may yet prove helpful.

Bryan Cox has submitted this response to Altman's report.

I find the James ossuary inscription fascinating for many reasons, not least of which are the reactions it has produced. Its discovery has sent many people scurrying into separate ideological camps to prepare for battle. Some already believe that the box is truly authentic and once held the bones of Saint James, while others declare, seemingly without a doubt, that it is obviously a fake.

The inscription is currently a hot topic on several online scholarly forums. A few individuals posting to these forums have garnered quite a bit of public attention (or at least netwide public attention) for their views. One such individual is Dr. Rochelle Altman.

Dr. Altman believes that the newly discovered ossuary, itself, and the "first part" of its inscription are authentic while the "second part" of the inscription is a fake. She has expressed these views in the Ioudaios-L (of which she is a co-coodinator) and Crosstalk2 forums as well as in an online web magazine by the name of Jewsweek.


I believe that her challenge to the authenticity of the James inscription can be summarized as follows:

1) Two different scripts can be seen which divide the inscription into halves. The first half is an expertly executed script while the second half is poorly executed.

2) There appear to be two different levels of literacy. The first half of the inscription was carved by a literate relative of the deceased. The person who inscribed the second half seems not to have known how to spell "brother of" or "Joshua".

3) The text is excised (i.e. raised or in bas relief), and excised text normally had surrounding frames to protect it from alteration. Since no frame can be seen, it must have been removed to make room for the fake second half of the inscription.


I would like to address these concerns in turn using the corresponding number found before each.

1) I must admit that I do see a change in the text as it progresses from right to left. I am not sure, however, that the change is as extreme and obvious as Dr. Altman would have us believe.

She labels the first half of the inscription ("James, son of Joseph") as "formal", "expertly spaced", and "internally consistent". Though I agree with the relative formality of the script, I disagree that it is any more expertly spaced than the "second half" of the inscription and neither is it more internally consistent.

With respect to spacing, the first yod seems a reasonable distance from the the ayin. There seems to be a larger space between the ayin and qoph. The serif of the qoph nearly touches the vav. There is a relatively large space between the bet of "Jacob" ("James") and the bet of "son". Granted this extra space could be a name/word separation, but then the space between the resh and the yod of "Joseph" is very minimal, closer that the internal separation of the letters in "Jacob". The yod and vav in "Joseph" are spaced extremely close. The distance between the vav and samekh is about the same distance as the resh was from the yod. Finally, the samekh and pe are separated by a resonable distance. Ultimately, the spacing of the letters in "first half" of the inscription seems as haphard as in the "second half".

I also do not see internal consistency in the style of the "first half" of the inscription. While there are visible serifs on the qoph, bets, and resh, I would have expected them on at least the ayin as well and perhaps other letters.

The bets seem inconsistent. The first bet has a rounded upper right corner whereas the same corner of the second bet forms a sharp right angle.

The "first half" of the inscription does not hang consistently from what would have been the scribe's invisible upper guide-line. As Jack Kilmon pointed out on Crosstalk, the letters begin to drop after the resh. The samekh then appears to pop above the line, and the pe falls well below it. In fact, the top of the pe seems to be on the exact same lower level as the beginning of the "second half" of the inscription.

The best point Dr. Altman has here, I believe, is that the "first half" of the inscription contains some formal letters with serifs and the "second half" does not.

Though she states her article in Jewsweek that one would "have to be blind as a bat not to see that the second part is a fraud", I do not agree. I, personally, find this statement somewhat irresponsible for someone with a doctoral degree. It flies in the face of the esteemed scholars who have looked at the ossuary inscription and stated otherwise.

The change in script style could possibly be due to a broken tool, a hurried scribe, or other reasons. I do not believe that someone would be "blind as a bat" for not seeing the "second part" of the inscription as a fraud.


2) Dr. Altman seems to believe that the "first part" of the James inscription is probably authentic and written by a literate relative of the deceased. The "second part" she believes to have been added later by a person who was either semi-literate or illiterate in Hebrew/Aramaic. This is due mainly to what she believes to be strange and/or incorrect spellings of "brother of" and "Joshua".

Please refer to the Crosstalk2 website for the following transliterations.


Dr. Altman transliterates the "second part" of the James inscription as follows: )XWW(Y#W(

I believe this is an incorrect transliteration that leads her to much of the confusion she expresses about the phrase in her Jewsweek article.


I believe that the proper transliteration should be: )XWYDY#W(

She seems to spend a great deal of time troubling over what she sees as two vavs followed by an ayin. Indeed, her transliteration would cause one to see the inscriber as nearly illiterate. It would be difficult to make much sense out of what she reads in the inscription.

However, in close-up pictures of the inscription one can see (I believe rather easily) the difference between the two letters that she reads as adjacent vavs. In the following picture, one can see that the downward stroke on the left is barely over half the length of the downward stroke to its right. The longer letter would be a vav and the shorter one a yod.

After this vav/yod pair, Dr. Altman sees an ayin (though she has since changed her mind about this). The letter stands too upright to be an ayin and would be completely different from either of the other two ayins in the inscription.

Though I have questions of my own surrounding this seemingly malformed letter, I lean toward experts in semitic paleography like Andre Lemaire, who have transliterated it as a dalet.

There are at least two examples of similar dalets in Ada Yardeni's Textbook of Aramaic, Hebrew and Nabataean Documentary Texts from the Judaean Desert, volume 1 (1986). According to the article in Biblical Archaeological Review (BAR), there is another similar dalet that can be found in L.Y. Rahmani's A Catalog of Jewish Ossuaries.

Dr. Altman has since decided that the letter is actually an "archaic Greek upsilon"! She further states in her post to Crosstalk2 that the "inscription actually reads what both Yardeni and I reported: Y(QOBBRYWSP )XWWuY#W( "!

I find both of these statements incredible and would like to see them explained more thoroughly. Why would a forger have inscribed an archaic Greek upsilon in the middle of otherwise ledgible Hebrew letters? As to the other statment, Ada Yardeni's transcription may suggest to Dr. Altman how the inscription "actually reads", but has Yardeni herself actually made a transliteration of the inscription?

Assuming )XWYDY#W( is the correct transliteration of the inscription, there are still some oddities. For one, "brother" is spelled )XWY instead of simply )X . The Aramaic word "di" is abbreviated and attached to "Joshua" ("Jesus") as a prefix: DY#W( .

The spelling )XWY is indeed rare, but there are a couple of examples of its use according to Joseph Fitzmyer. One example is actually from another ossuary inscription which reads: "Shimi, son of Asiya, brother of Hanin". The phrase "brother of Hanin" is written similar to the James inscription: )XWYDXNYN . (See entry #570 of A Catalog of Jewish Ossuaries by L.Y. Rahmani.)

The other example given by Fitzmyer is from the Dead Sea Scroll called the Genesis Apocryphon. Specifically, the strange spelling for "brother", )XWY can be found in column 21, at the end of line 34 (refer to A Genesis Apocryphon by Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin, 1956).

I feel that I must note, however, that Fitzmyer wrote in his 1971 book, Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1, that the form (XWY "is probably a scribal error for )XWHY ".

)XWY

)XWHY

Finally we come to the spelling of "Joshua" ("Jesus"). I see no problem with the spelling Y#W) . It seems to be a relatively common contraction and can be found many times throughout Rahmani's catalog of ossuaries.

I do not, therefore, see any difference in "literacy" great enough to divide the inscription or to definitely call the "second half" a fraud.


3) Dr. Altman sees an "excised" text (i.e. raised or in bas relief) in her pictures of the ossuary inscription rather than an incised text which other scholars see. She claims that ancient anti-fraud techniques would have required that a frame be placed around the text. Since she considers the "second half" of the inscription to be a forgery (though I believe the above reponses demonstrate that this is not necessarily so), she believes that the frame surrounding the "first half" of the inscription must have been removed to make room for the forged "second half".

In her own words, "...the words are excised (not incised)."
And also, "Well, to anybody who knows something about anti-fraud techniques as practiced in antiquity, it is rather obvious. The frame was removed to add the second part of this inscription. The original frame would have been the barest minimum distance from the text and have appeared something like this:

|------------|
|Y(KOBBRYWSF | )XWW(Y#W(
|____________|
"

(To find the above quotes, see Dr. Altman's Jewsweek article and post to Crosstalk2.)

She has put much emphasis on this challenge to the authenticity of the "second half" of the James inscription. Unfortunately, I find this much emphasized last challenge to be the least credible. As a matter of fact, I believe that it is more than likely based on an optical illusion played on her by the picture she was using.

She mentions several times that the text of the inscription is "excised" or in "bas relief". Others have said that they believe she means that an area around the text was excised. From her own words, she seems to or seemed to mean both:

"There is yet another tell-tale sign of fraud here. As noted, the text is excised. (Which indicates a wealthy family.) Nobody excises an entire block of stone to raise the text; not even the Yadi stele is entirely excised. In "name" plates or other small inscriptions, if excised rather than incised (cheaper), the normal practice is to excise the text and a frame, which frame itself is excised by incised limits but never beyond them. Only the area within the frame will be excised; the rest of the block will be left alone. Far too much here has been excised from around the names. More to the point, where is the original frame?"

Please note her wording in the above phrase: "...excises an entire block of stone to raise the text".

Rahmani states in his Catalog of Jewish Ossuaries, "By far the greatest number of inscriptions were finely incised, presumably in front of or inside the tomb itself at the time of burial."

I believe that the "excised" text that Dr. Altman saw was an optical illusion. If one stares long enough at pictures of the inscription, the text may suddenly appear to pop out and look like it is in "bas relief". I have had friends notice this while looking at the picture in BAR.

I believe this optical illusion can also make erosion pits on the surface of the ossuary appear to be raised chunks of limestone that were left by a crude job of excising the area around the "raised text".

However, if this is not the case, perhaps she was actually making reference to inscriptions such as the Uzziah burial inscription.

In the Uzziah inscription, one can see a frame was carved into the stone and then the text nicely incised within the frame. If the James ossuary originally had a similar frame surrounding the "first half" of the inscription, then one would expect to notice a concave area around the inscription where the edges of the frame were chipped away and smoothed upward, level with the rest of the ossuary. From the pictures that I have seen, there is no such concave area around the inscription, and there are no signs that a frame was chiseled away.

Dr. Altman said that the frame would have been "the barest minimum distance from the text". This would lead one to expect to see some sort of strange anomaly after and near the pe of "Joseph". I don't see any signs of tampering.

This "frame" theory seems like pure speculation. Perhaps Dr. Altman will point out exactly where she sees an anomaly in or around the inscription where a frame must obviously have been.

Finally, I took the time to glance at every single picture in Rahmani's catalog of Jewish ossuaries. I do not remember seeing any inscriptions that were surrounded by a frame that was meant to specifically frame the text. As a matter of fact, most of the inscriptions seemed to be scrawled on the sides, lids, and rims of the ossuaries almost as an afterthought using whatever tool that was handy to do the inscribing.

Rahmani states, "Inscriptions are rarely incorporated into the decoration of soft limestone ossuaries...". Indeed, the majority of the inscriptions seemed to have no decoration around them at all.

Ultimately, I do not see much merit in this particular argument of Dr. Altman.


Dr. Altman has recently posted her "Final Report" concerning the ossuary on several websites. Unfortunately, though she has modified her position slightly from what I have addressed above, I believe that many of the things that I have proposed still stand against her arguments in a fairly strong way.

Bryan Cox
Plano, Tx