Sotheby’s auction house is selling a stone version of the Ten Commandments that it says is the world’s oldest, dating to A.D. 300 to 800.

The artifact even comes with a fun story about missing one of the commandments and having been used as a paving stone.

But as with many artifacts from so long ago, experts have questions about its provenance and even its authenticity.

The story recounted by its discoverer in 1943, Jacob Kaplan, is that the stone was found in 1913 while a railway was being built near the coast of what is today southern Israel.

It is 115 pounds, 2 feet long and carved in Paleo- Hebrew, but at the time no one seemed to recognize or appreciate its significance. It was used as a paving stone at a home and was sunk into the earth with its inscription facing up, Kaplan said at the time.

Kaplan, who died in 1989, published his findings in 1947 in a scholarly journal, The Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society.

“Fortunately, the text is all still legible, but it is most worn in the middle where people walked across it,” said Selby Kiffer, the international senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s.

The auction house estimates that the item will sell for $1 million to $2 million.

The tablet made its way to an Israeli antiquities dealer in 1995 and then to the Living Torah Museum in New York City.

It was bought in 2016 by a collector, Mitchell Cappell, for $850,000; he is now selling it at auction Wednesday at Sotheby’s New York.

Still, experts in the field offered words of caution.

Brian Daniels, director of research and programs at the Penn Cultural Heritage Center in Philadelphia, said in an interview: “Objects from this region of the world are rife with fakes.”

Still, he said of the item, “maybe it’s absolutely authentic, and this truly is a historic find.”

Christopher Rollston, chair of the department of classical and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at George Washington University, said in an email that people had been producing modern inscriptional forgeries for more than a century and a half.

It’s possible, some scholars say, that this stone could have been carved back around the time it was discovered, not long ago.

“Sotheby’s is stating that this Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription is circa 1,500 years old,” Rollston said. “But there is no way that this can be known. After all, these were not found on an archaeological excavation. We don’t even know who actually found them.”

“The script is a key to” the dating process, Kiffer of Sotheby’s said. “We know when it went out of common usage.”

He also cited the wear and weathering of the stone as a key to determining its age.

The outside experts wondered about the tale of the discovery and the supposed use of the tablet as a paving stone: “It is a compelling story, but do we trust the initial story of its discovery?” Daniels asked. “It’s not just this object. It’s not uncommon for spectacular finds to have elaborately embellished stories of discovery.”

Rollston said: “The problem is that we have zero documentation from 1913, and since pillagers and forgers often concoct such stories to give an inscription an aura of authenticity, this story could actually just be a tall tale told by a forger or some antiquities dealer.”

The commandments on the stone are written in an early version of Hebrew now called Paleo-Hebrew.

By the time the stone was thought to be chiseled, “really, only the Samaritans were using Paleo-Hebrew. The Jewish people had adopted a more modern Hebrew alphabet,” Kiffer said.

Still, he said, a modern Hebrew reader could read it, at least as well as a modern English speaker could parse Middle English.

A close examination of the stone, at least to the Paleo-Hebrew literate, reveals something a little unusual.

There is a missing commandment.

At least according to this tablet, murdering and stealing are still bad, and you had sure better honor your father and mother.

But taking the Lord’s name in vain seems not to be as big a problem: The third commandment isn’t there.

The tablet does include an additional instruction not normally found in the canonical commandments: to worship on Mount Gerizim, in what is now known as the West Bank.

The omission rings a bell for Rollston: “Forgers during the past 150 years, when they fabricate their forgeries, often throw in surprising content. And they do this so as to garner more interest in their forgery.”

Cappell, the seller putting it up for auction, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kiffer said texts of the Ten Commandments were common on paper or papyrus in the era.

Texts carved into marble, which is much more effortful and expensive work, would have been reserved for the wealthy or for public display.

The stone appears to be the oldest complete inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments, he said. “There are some from roughly the same period, but they are fragmentary or virtually illegible.”

Bidders will have an opportunity to show where they stand on the stone’s authenticity, and its worth, on Wednesday.