Who finally paid what to whom, not even the expert on connections who lives in London, the 54-year-old Michel van Rijn, knows. His rude internet ser vice “artnews” (Motto: “Hot Art Cold Cash”) otherwise has its profile with constantly new exposure stories, as the “nemesis” of international art racketeers.
Nonetheless his website suggests sufficiently that for Nussberger a juristic coup was successful. Many-years-long business dealings with an imprisoned art mafioso of the Nile scene should be forgiven and forgotten. Madame is to receive a whitewashing certificate that protects her from Egyptian persecution because of illegal art exports.
Whether, in order to achieve this, Nussberger or Maecenas had to deliver the promise to give her book back formally to Egypt? To be sure, corresponding commitments in a publication of the foundation are formulated in a very airy way.
Similar reports are given by Michel Van Rijn:26
Present “owner”—Zurich-based Frieda Nussberger Tchakos —struck a deal with the Egyptian government, under which she was absolved of looting that nation clean. But, unlike Judas, she held out for a bit more than 30 pieces of silver. After all, Frieda was one of Tarek El-Sweissi’s [Egyptian official convicted in 2003 of smuggling ancient artifacts out of Egypt] principal dealers, the latter, of course, sweating in a hot Egyptian cell for the next 30 years.
This then would tend to put in question the lofty ideals used to explain the commitment to return the manuscripts to Egypt.
COMMERCIALIZING THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS
The fact that the manuscript could not be sold for a profit, but rather has to be returned to Egypt, made the commercializing of the contents of The Gospel of Judas the chosen path to riches. Roger Thiede explains:27
Clearly the Swiss now see their salvation in the rapid journalistic marketing of the codex. One lets it be known that the careful restoration has been turned over to the best experts. As scholarly editor, the dean of Coptic-Sahidic literature, the Geneva Professor Emeritus Rodolphe Kasser, the uncontested star of the discipline had been enlisted.
It is apparently due to this strategy of making big money from sensationalizing the text, if not from selling the papyrus itself, that the matter should be kept a secret until the moment of its publication arrives, rather than the suspense being broken by the contents being leaked to the press:28
Further inquiries pointless. For the rest, one stays covered. The Zürich art dealership Nefer at present no longer exists. Even friendly gallery people do not know where the ex-owner is hiding. But she still has the threads in hand. In any case, that is certified by experts who are commissioned as scholarly coworkers of the first edition, yet they cannot give information because of a prohibition to speak out.
Tiede explains:29
Precisely because the “new” text—due to its risky substance—is still unpublished, and Maecenas/Roberty likes to identify only the last page (circulating in the internet) as an original part of his manuscript, the discussion meanwhile overflows.
By way of identifying Roberty, Thiede elaborates:30
The Judas manuscript belongs, after the transactions of the most recent past, to the Swiss “Maecenas Stiftung für antike Kunst.” It supports archeological excavations and advises in museum construction. The institution is led by the Basel attorney Mario Jean Roberty, who appeared already in numerous cultural events. He was attorney of the Japanese Miho museum and contrived the transfer of antiquities back into Egypt. His restrictive politics on information with regard to the Judas book is severely criticized.
THE DETERIORATING CONDITION OF THE DISCOVERY
The convoluted story of the peddling of The Gospel of Judas is full of intrigue, greed, and drama as the text is passed through many hands and across many borders. But such peregrinations have taken their toll on the ancient papyrus manuscript.
The size of the original fourth-century codex, the number of leaves it originally contained, is of course quite a different question from the number of leaves that survive today, though the two tend at times to be confused. Let’s begin with the number of leaves that are thought to have survived, and only then turn to the number of leaves in the original codex, and how many leaves may have been used to copy out The Gospel of Judas, to estimate the tractate’s original length as twice that many pages (two pages are on the front and back of one leaf).
Of course there are different ways to count the number of extant leaves in a very fragmentary codex. When does a fragment become honored with the designation of being a leaf? The policy might be, for example, that, if over half a leaf is extant, we should no longer call it a fragment, but rather call it a leaf. But in some of the transcriptions and translations that have been circulating privately among scholars, there may be a “page” transcribed with parts of only eight lines extant. Neither the beginning nor the end of the lines is extant, but only a middle section. This fragment or leaf is hardly more than an inch high and an inch wide. A few words may be recognized in the extant letters, but there is no coherent sentence that conveys meaning. If a word such as Jesus, or Judas, or Allogenes, is legible, fine! But one is not often so lucky. So: Is this a fragment, or is it a leaf? In terms of what has survived, it may be more documentation for a leaf that did not survive, than it is a surviving leaf in its own right. If the some thirty “leaves” in the Gnostic codex were all like this, we might as well forget it! Fortunately, some, hopefully most, are much more nearly complete. But one must be warned of the problem inherent in a simple list of how many “leaves” are extant.
The point of departure for any estimate can only be based on Steve Emmel’s report cited in chapter four:
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…. Page numbers were placed above the center of the column and decorated with short rows of diples 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.
Schutten reports Emmel as saying:31
The numbers of the pages went up to sixty, while most papyrus codices are at least twice as big. I suspected half of the manuscript to be missing.
Emmel was of course thinking of the Nag Hammadi Codices, where a good number of them have over one hundred pages.
Ferrini indicates that by this time some leaves had been removed from the lot for individual sale, so that Emmel’s estimate of 1983 does not apply to the present state of the manuscript:32
Ferrini suspects that in the meantime several single pages of the manuscript were put on the market. “When I saw the work for the first time in 1999, only 25 pages remained intact, so at least half of them were missing. I cannot be absolutely sure if the manuscript was found incomplete or if its writing was never finished. But from time to time new pages would appear. Five or six different documents in total without page numbers, it was just a mess.”
There is also the report of Mia being responsible for some loss. Thiede had said:
Large parts land in Mia’s purse, and then evaporate for a long time. One folio leaf is lost forever.
Van Rijn paraphrased: “Mia had ended up stealing a few of the pages.” (One does not know whether to believe such details in these more sensational reconstructions of the story.)
Hedrick reported an alarming detail about fragments:33
He [Ferrini] did tell me that he had paid for the codex and then when the provenance was in question that he called his money back in and returned the codex to whoever was selling it to him…, and the individual became angry and slammed the codex down on the table and tiny pieces of papyrus flew all over the place. The seller picked up the codex and left angrily saying well maybe I will just burn it.
Hedrick later clarifies this important detail:34
My understanding is that the person who slammed the book on the table was not Frieda, but no names were used. Frieda wou
ld not have threatened to burn the book when her price was not met, I do not think.
I agree with Hedrick that Frieda is far too good a businessperson to burn something worth big money. But she may also be a good enough businessperson to make such dramatic statements during ongoing negotiations!
Regarding page numbers at the top of leaves, Hedrick reports from his photographs:35
I do not have the top of the last page of Judas and hence I do not have a page number…. There is a top of which I can read “60.”
But the number of extant leaves may well have been fewer that the highest page number that was observed. Hedrick reports:36
At one point I heard that there were only 50 pages in the entire codex (per Ferrini).
This statement from Hedrick may serve to correct the report of Schutten, quoted above, that Ferrini said there were only twenty-five pages left. Perhaps this is to be understood as the frequent confusion between leaf, a piece of papyrus with two sides and hence two pages of a book, and page, which refers to only one side of a leaf. Ferrini may have counted twenty-five leaves and correctly inferred that this meant fifty pages, which he reported to Hedrick.
And yet Schutten continued his report on Ferrini by quoting: “so at least half of them were missing.” This suggests that Schutten took Ferrini to be speaking, after all, of pages rather than leaves, from fifty pages down to twenty-five pages. (Could this be a confusion with Emmel’s report? Schutten had reported Emmel saying that “the pages went up to sixty” but that Emmel suspected “half of the manuscript to be missing.” Of course Emmel meant that the codex may well have had 120 pages originally, but that only half, “up to sixty,” were still extant. Schutten may have reconciled the two reports as best he could, but inaccurately.) Of course this remains speculation. All that seems clear is that Ferrini thought the total seen by Emmel had shrunk appreciably.
Hedrick reports in terms of what he could see on the photographs he received from Ferrini:37
You must think in terms of jumbled mess. There is only one stack (not two if you had a neat book and the book were opened with some leaves on left and right). The top with the page number has leaves behind it, but because of the breaks in the stack (the breaks seem to go completely through the stack) and because of the jumbled character of the stack, it is not possible to tell which top goes with which of the two pieces of papyrus in the two bottom breaks. The text cannot be read from my poor digital photographs except for the occasional letter, and reading fibers is impossible. There are definitely tops however.
He clarifies still further:38
There is only one stack of leaves one on top of the other. I see three breaks in the stack. One about two-thirds of the way up and then the top third has a break. There are tops of some pages in the stack and the Coptic page number 60 is clearly distinct. (I found no other page numbers.)
Of course Hedrick’s parenthetic comment that “the breaks seem to go completely through the stack” suggests the kind of wrenching experience associated with Mia, when the personages in the story more or less literally fought over the codex, and may well have broken it literally in two (or four)!
Hedrick was asked by Kasser to turn over his photographs to him, in hopes of finding there material that he was missing in the papyri themselves. Hedrick reports:39
Kasser was talking about material missing completely from the material he had. He specifically asked me about three bottoms of pages he identified among the photographs I sent him that he did not have among the extant papyrus material in his possession. I suspected, however, he was also concerned about tops of pages.
SIXTY-TWO EXTANT PAGES?
Pöhner wrote that “the book contains 62 pages.”40 Thiede published a photograph of the page with the subscript title The Gospel of Judas clearly visible, with the caption for the photograph:41
In the manuscript of p. 62 at the end, placed one under the other the designation of the title: “Gospel” and “Judas.” The foto circulating in the World Wide Web shows, according to the information of the owner of the codex, the last page of the manuscript that is in his possession.”
Then Hedrick’s provisional draft translation of that page is translated into German, with this caption:42
Not all letters of p. 62 are to be deciphered; text according to C. Hedrick.
How does he know that it is “p. 62”? Or, putting the question more carefully (since it probably isn’t p. 62): Where does the figure 62 come from? Possibly: if one takes literally the comment “one folio leaf is lost forever,” and follows Thiede’s chronology, to the effect that the juicy story preceded the visit of “evaluators from American elite Unis [universities],” then one might assume that two more pages than those seen by Emmel would have originally been involved. If then one takes literally Schutten’s version of Emmel’s memory, “up to sixty,” rather than Emmel’s written report, “at least pp. 1–50 are represented by substantial fragments,” one could postulate (probably inaccurately) that there were, when Emmel saw them, in fact sixty pages, plus the two pages already lost in the fray. In this way one reaches a total of sixty-two pages. If then the title The Gospel of Judas is on the last page, that last page would be p. 62. Voila! One arrives at the pagination listed (very probably incorrectly) by Pöhner and Thiede! And then they seem to assume that this page number can apply as well to the number of extant pages.
Such a calculation would of course not have been made by a careful scholar. For Emmel did not literally count sixty pages. The tattered papyrus leaves were too fragile for him to thumb through and count thirty leaves. Did someone else actually count the sixty-two pages? Or did Pöhner just assume that two pages had been removed, on the basis of the story that Thiede tells, and add two to Schutten’s comment “up to sixty”? This may be only a garbled version of Emmel’s report to Schutten, but in any case Emmel did not mean to be exact. He is a very exacting person, and would have made an exact statement if he had had an exact figure. Furthermore, a problem with this explanation of “p. 62” is that Thiede published his article later than did Pöhner!
Hedrick did find a reference to the page number “60” in the top margin of a page. But since the page with the title The Gospel of Judas does not have the top margin, it is hard to imagine that the immediately preceding leaf does have the top margin with the pagination 59–60. Usually leaves near each other have a similar profile of damage and deterioration. For this reason, the page with the pagination 60 was probably not immediately under the leaf with the top missing, but with the title The Gospel of Judas visible at the bottom of the page.
Of course anything is possible, when one has no concrete information. But in any case one should not refer to pagination in connection with the title of The Gospel of Judas. And the page number “60,” much less an invented pagination “62,” does not inform us about the number of leaves that were extant when Emmel saw them, or are extant today.
THE AMOUNT OF LOSS SINCE 1983
The exact amount that has been lost since the codex was first seen in 1983 is unclear. A few years ago Roberty is reported to have been rather pessimistic:43
Roberty hopes passionately that one day another copy of The Gospel of Judas will turn up, because the copy as owned by the Maecenas Foundation is only 65 to 70 percent complete. “We assume that some fragments are still wandering around on the market here and there, but I am afraid that a quarter of the manuscript has been lost forever.”
But Thiede’s comment that Mia’s fragments “evaporate for a long time” does tantalize the imagination: Does this mean that they did not evaporate forever? Henk Schutten reported that Michel van Rijn helped search for the missing fragments, and in the process made up with Roberty:44
But lately they settled their disagreements. Van Rijn even conducted some research for the Maecenas Foundation regarding the missing fragments of The Gospel of Judas, and successfully, so he said. “Roberty offered me to act as project consultant,” says Van Rijn: “I was offered 50,000 pounds and a share in
the foundation. My name would also be mentioned as one of the discoverers of the manuscript.”
This much Roberty has confirmed:45
Mario Roberty confirms that Michel van Rijn did some work for the Maecenas Foundation. “Van Rijn would provide us with further information about the lost fragments of The Gospel of Judas. He received a payment of 50,000 pounds.”
Later on, in his interview with Stacy Meichtry on February 13– 14, 2006, Roberty provides more details of the damage, but also a more encouraging estimate of what has survived:46
You will see it’s in awful shape…. Initial estimates, when you looked at it, were just desperate.
It was painstaking puzzle work. It will probably be going on for some time.
Each page is put under glass. It’s incredibly brittle and in bad shape. I marveled myself to see how they were able to work on such material.
As to the original sequence, Roberty conceded:
Not received in original sequence, but they are confident to have the right order now. Small fragments that couldn’t be precisely attributed…
Secrets of Judas Page 14
