Secrets of Judas

by James M. Robinson

  At first I had hesitated to publish anything about the discovery of this previously unknown Coptic manuscript, lest it get back somehow to the owner or his agent, and they raise their asking price accordingly. But Steve’s report did have scholarly information that colleagues would of course be eager to know. I was particularly pleased that Steve had been able to read the title of the second tractate, The Letter of Peter to Philip. The copy in Nag Hammadi Codex VIII, Tractate 2, has a title set off at its beginning that reads more fully: The Letter of Peter Which He Sent to Philip. But I had, for purely practical reasons, abbreviated it, for use by scholars, to precisely the title that turned up on the new copy: “The Letter of Peter to Philip.”

  I passed on the information at the time to Hans-Gebhard Bethge, since he was writing a dissertation (at Humboldt University, Berlin, 1984) on The Letter of Peter to Philip, and he mentioned in print this second copy:22

  Ep. Pet. Phil. however was also handed down outside the Nag Hammadi codices, but the text of the parallel version is so far not yet available for scholarly evaluation.

  In a footnote he explained how he had heard about it:

  The first information about the existence of this text, which is in a papyrus codex along with a version of 1 Apoc. Jas. and a dialogue of Jesus with his disciples not identical with NCH III 5, was given by J. M. Robinson and S. Emmel at the Third International Congress of Coptic Studies in Warsaw in August 1984.

  At that time in Warsaw, we would never have dreamed that it would take twenty years, until the Eighth International Congress of Coptic Studies, in Paris, before we would learn on July 1, 2004, what the dialogue of Jesus with his disciples was: The Gospel of Judas!

  My student Marvin W. Meyer, who was preparing the critical edition of The Letter of Peter to Philip, also included in it a reference to the duplicate copy in 1991:23

  According to the reports of James M. Robinson and Stephen Emmel, a somewhat divergent Coptic text of The Letter of Peter to Philip is to be found in a papyrus codex which at the present time is neither published nor available for study.

  I had forwarded to Meyer in March 1991 what I could read from the blurred photographs that I had received from Koenen. He published this very fragmentary transcription, parallel to the text of Nag Hammadi Codex VIII, 135,25–136,2. (Marv, like Harry Attridge and Steve Emmel, will reemerge a generation later as a major player in the story.)

  It is striking that Rodolphe Kasser, when he announced on July 1, 2004, in Paris that he had been authorized to publish the manuscript of The Gospel of Judas, made no reference to these previously published bits of information about the codex. It is normally the scholarly way of doing things, to begin with references to previous publications about such a new text. Surely he knew about them, for he was the Swiss representative on the International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices. Prior to the publication of each volume in The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, which was theoretically authorized and supervised by that Committee, I sent each member a prepublication copy for review, and they all received complimentary copies of each volume as it was published, from the publisher, E. J. Brill. Furthermore, the places where Bethge and Meyer published their comments were the kinds of publications that, though too esoteric for the sellers to know about, were precisely the kinds of standard scholarly tools that were of course on Kasser’s bookshelf. Kasser’s presentation in Paris of a new manuscript discovery seemed more sensational by omitting any reference to it having already been mentioned in publications years ago. What was in fact the only new thing in Kasser’s sensational speech was the title of the last tractate in the manuscript, The Gospel of Judas.

  The experience of not being able to engender enough funds to negotiate successfully for the purchase of the manuscripts in 1983 made me realize that having contacts with wealthy patrons collecting such things might prove useful, if ever I hoped to reopen these negotiations. So I was able to interest Martin Schøyen, a wealthy Norwegian collector of ancient manuscripts, in acquiring them.

  In the late 1980s I was frequently passing through Athens, usually on my way to Egypt to work on the Nag Hammadi Codices. So I made a serious effort to track down the Athenian person whom Steve had met in Geneva. Naturally, I inquired of Koenen, for he had no doubt set up the Geneva meeting through this Athenian as the intermediary, with whom he may well have had previous experience in acquiring manuscripts for the collection at Cologne. Koenen was kind enough to give me his name, John Perdios, and his phone number in Athens, at a travel agency operated by his brother.

  I went to Athens, and he received me in his elegant home. His own specialty was buying and selling paintings of the nineteenth century Bavarian tradition because, he explained, Greece had imported a royal family from Bavaria at the time, and imported along with the royal family their Bavarian art and paintings. Perdios took me to dinner at the best outdoor restaurant in Athens, to go over, in such a leisurely atmosphere, plans for acquiring the manuscripts. The outcome was that he agreed to meet Schøyen and me in New York along with the Coptic owner.

  Perdios never divulged to me the full name of the owner, perhaps lest he be charged by the Egyptian government with illegal excavation and exportation, and/or lest Perdios be bypassed in favor of direct negotiations with the Coptic owner. Perdios would of course not want to be cut out of his share of the profit! He did give the person’s name as Hannah, but this, a nickname for Greek and Coptic Johannes, English John, would not serve to identify him for me or for the Egyptian authorities, since it is as common a name among Copts as it is among Christians elsewhere. (“John” Perdios is of course just the anglicized form of his Greek name, Johannes.)

  I inquired why he proposed New York for the meeting. He said his brother lived there, and he would like to visit him. I assumed that the more basic reason was that the codices were there. He would have known that we would want to see them before committing ourselves, and indeed would want to take possession of them if the negotiations succeeded. Of course I could only conjecture that they might be in the custody of his brother, or of someone in the large Coptic community of New Jersey. They are now reported to have been in a safety deposit box in Citibank, Hicksville, Long Island, New York. Michel van Rijn has been even more specific:24

  After Hannah and Koutoulakis worked out their differences, the gospel was sent to a cousin of Hannah in NY, without declaring it at customs.

  Schøyen agreed to attend the meeting on a date in January 1991 agreeable to the sellers. I had gone so far as to check out New York hotels! Thus, we were actively making preparations late in 1990 for the meeting. But just at this time Iraqi president Saddam Hussein decided he needed to annex Kuwait to expand his oil empire on the way to Saudi Arabia. President George H. W. Bush sent him an ultimatum to withdraw, with the threat that if he did not do so the United States would begin bombing Baghdad in January. Thereupon I received word from Perdios that the Copt was not willing to abandon his family at the beginning of World War III. The trip had to be called off!

  Early in 1992 I was a guest professor at the University of Geneva, and phoned Perdios from there, in case I needed to go quickly to Athens to see about setting up the New York meeting again. He said he would contact his Coptic friend, when the friend next came from Middle Egypt to Cairo, and would let me know. But I never heard from him again. The meeting never took place. But my interest in these elusive Coptic codices did not die.

  A French Canadian team of scholars at Laval University in Québec is publishing the French edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, and I have functioned as a consultant for the Canada Council on their behalf. They have also received grants from the Canadian Bombardier Foundation. They thought that this foundation might also fund the acquisition of the new Coptic manuscripts that Steve Emmel had viewed in Geneva, making it possible for them to stay together as a team and continue their work even after the completion of their edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices.

  Their funding from the Canada Council included a stip
end for a visiting professor in Coptic, to strengthen their own limited faculty resources. They had once inquired of me if I could recommend someone. I suggested one of the world’s leading Coptic scholars, the German Wolf-Peter Funk, whom I expected to see shortly when I visited East Berlin. As it turned out, I was approaching Funk at a propitious time, and he expressed his willingness to go to Canada, where he has been ever since as the authority on Coptic grammar in charge of Laval’s ongoing seminar as they prepare each volume for publication. But he has no permanent chair at the university, so that his future, after the completion of the Nag Hammadi project, is uncertain. It is understandable that the Laval team hoped that they could acquire the new Coptic manuscripts. I told them how they could contact Perdios by phone, and a member of their team, the Norwegian Einar Thomassen, did phone him in September 2001, but nothing came of it. Of course by this time the manuscripts had long since been sold. Thus my efforts to acquire the new Gnostic manuscripts came to naught.

  Despite his opening claim to the contrary, a sensationalistic, and perhaps to some extent fictional, version of the selling of The Gospel of Judas was published in a German news magazine by Roger Thiede:25

  The following story is true, even though on first glance it might seem to be a remake of John Huston’s film “The Maltese Falcon.”

  His story begins:26

  At the endless haggling over the coveted antiquity in the Swiss hotel room, there surface first of all: the unscrupulous jeweler Hannah from Cairo, who wants to hawk an anthology with three early Christian tractates in a foreign country, in a very stubborn way for exactly three million dollars, no cent less; further, as buyer, the art dealer who was a resident of Geneva, Nikolas Koutoulakis.

  He then provides otherwise unattested information about the provenience:27

  The mysterious manuscript had survived 1600 years in a stone box in the desert sand of the Middle-Egyptian location Muh Zafat al-Minya.

  Then the story promptly turns sexy:28

  Now, to be sure, its last hour threatens. For the pair of dealers have a falling out with each other. The cause is the indispensable femme fatale, who, as fits her genre, sees to it that there is chaos. Due to his lack of knowledge of human nature, Koutoulakis wants to entrust to his young love Mia detailed negotiations—promptly the lady attempts to get one over on him. In the counter-attack the furious sugar daddy forces his way into the apartment of the Egyptian. In the tumult the loot is ripped crosswise. Large parts land in Mia’s purse, and then evaporate for a long time. One folio leaf is lost forever. The remainder Koutoulakis is able to secure. Later the Greek avenges himself on the Cairo opponent: Massive threats of murder had their effect.

  Michel Van Rijn tells the story on his Web site briefly, though with more detail, not to say humor:29

  Egyptian jeweller Hannah received a stone box from a man who thought he’d come across something big. What he found was unbelievably huge: inside that box was The Gospel of Judas. Hannah hunted around for possible buyers, quite aware of its value, demanding US$3 million for it. Finally, Geneva-based Greek dealer Nikolas Koutoulakis sent his girlfriend Mia (or was it Effy?) to scope out the situation. Working behind her lover’s back, she struck a private deal with Hannah, but too late. The Sneaky Greeky was leagues ahead of his two-timing wench of a girl, and robbed Hannah’s home of all manuscripts including the pages of Judas’s glory.

  He then smuggled them to Geneva, where they were offered for $3,000,000. In the madness of smuggling, theft and deception of sex and religion, Mia had ended up stealing a few of the pages. In the interim, Koutoulakis showed his papyri to fellow Greek antiquities dealer Frieda Tchakos, who was based in Zurich. This was in 1982.

  If the cliché is ever appropriate, then here: This is too good to be true! But the story goes on:

  In spite of the clearly emaciated manuscript, Hannah is on the lookout further for clientele. Newly recruited evaluators from American elite Unis fly in. They should help transfer the discovery over into academic domains. Yet all transactions break down on the price. Even Yale is not willing to come up with such an exorbitant sum.

  The dating to 1982 would of course make this encounter prior to the occasion when Steve saw the material in Geneva on May 15, 1983! One may well wonder whether anything can be done with this story other than enjoy it. But we pedantic scholars do look for bits and pieces of information even in such more-or-less fictional stories.

  It is of course possible that efforts by the owner to sell to Koutoulakis took place, indeed went so far as to involve Frieda Tchacos, but when they broke down, Perdios approached Koenen on behalf of his friend. But really all that we can know with any certainty about The Gospel of Judas in Geneva is the eyewitness report of Steve Emmel:

  REPORT ON THE PAPYRUS MANUSCRIPTS OFFERED FOR SALE IN GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, MAY 15, 1983

  The collection of papyri being offered for sale consists of four separate manuscripts, and possibly fragments of some others. A system of numeration and designations was agreed upon with the owner and his intermediary for referring to the four manuscripts, as follows:

  1. “Exodus” (Greek)

  2. “Coptic Apocalypses Codex” (Coptic)

  3. “Letters of Paul” (Coptic)

  4. “Metrodological Fragment” (Greek)

  The material was being stored in three cardboard boxes lined with newspaper. Items 1, 2, and 4 were each in a separate box, with the fragments of item 3 mixed together with items 1 and 4. This report is concerned only with the Coptic items, mainly with item 2, briefly with item 3.

  Item 3 is fragments of a papyrus codex from the 5th (possibly 4th) century AD containing at least some of the letters of St. Paul. The leaves are approximately 24 cm tall and 16 cm broad. The scribe outlined his writing area with pink chalk. His handwriting is cursive in style, as though somewhat quickly written. The pages are numbered above the center of a single column of writing, the highest page number observed being 115. There are some nearly complete leaves of the codex preserved, and many smaller fragments, which might be reassembled into at least a sizeable portion of the codex. There is also part of a leather binding (either the front or the back cover, including the spine, lined with scrap papyrus) which probably, though not certainly, belongs to this codex. The contents identified with certainty are Hebrews, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians. The texts are in a non-standard form of the Sahidic dialect.

  Certainly the gem of the entire collection of four manuscripts is item 2, a papyrus codex from the 4th century AD, approximately 30 cm tall and 15 cm broad, containing gnostic texts. At the time that the codex was discovered, it was probably in good condition, with a leather binding and complete leaves with all four margins intact. But the codex has been badly handled; only half of the leather binding (probably the front cover) is now preserved and the leaves have suffered some breakage. The absence of half of the binding and the fact that page numbers run only into the 50’s lead me to suppose that the back half of the codex may be missing; only closer study can prove or disprove this supposition. The texts are in a non-standard form of Sahidic.

  The codex was inscribed in a single column in a large and careful uncial hand. Page numbers were placed above the center of the column and decorated with short rows of diples [hatch-marks] above and below. At least pp. 1–50 are represented by substantial fragments which, when reassembled, will make up complete leaves with all four margins intact. The portion of the leather binding preserved is lined with cartonnage, layers of scrap papyrus glued together to form a kind of cardboard. At least some of this cartonnage is inscribed, offering hope that the date and location of the manufacture of the codex can be determined with some precision once the cartonnage has been removed and studied.

  The codex contains at least three different texts: (1) “The First Apocalypse of James” known already, though in a different version, from Nag Hammadi Codex (NHC) V; (2) “The Letter of Peter to Philip” known already from the NHC VIII (in the new manuscript this title, [in Coptic] TEPISTOLH M
PETROS SHAFILIPPOS, is given as a subscript [cf. the superscript title, slightly different, in NHC VIII 132:10–11] accompanied by decorations to fill out the remainder of the page on which the text ends); and (3) a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples (at least “Judas” [i.e., presumably, Judas Thomas] is involved) similar in genre to “The Dialogue of the Savior” (NHC III) and “The Wisdom of Jesus Christ” (NHC III and the Berlin Gnostic codex [PB 8502]).

  The leaves and fragments of the codex will need to be conserved between panes of glass. I would recommend conservation measures patterned after those used to restore and conserve the Nag Hammadi Codices (see my article, “The Nag Hammadi Codices Editing Project: A Final Report,” American Research Center in Egypt, Inc., Newsletter 104 [1978] 10–32). Despite the breakage that has already occurred, and that which will inevitably occur between now and the proper conservation of the manuscript, I estimate that it would require about a month to reassemble the fragments of the manuscript and to arrange the reassembled leaves between panes of glass.

  According to the owner, all four of the manuscripts in this collection were found near the village of Beni Masar, about 8 km south of Oxyrhynchus (modern Behnasa). It is difficult to know how seriously to take such information. Study of the cartonnage in the two surviving covers will probably provide more certain information as to the provenance at least of the manufacture of the codices.