The gospel of Judas saga continues

Herbert Krosney, who wrote much the best book on the skullduggery around the finding, selling and dismemberment of the manuscript of the ps.Gospel of Judas has written an update on events since then.  This can be found here, at a page run by Marvin Meyer.  It’s explosive stuff.

The manuscript floated around the art world for 20 years.  It was then sold to an Akron art dealer, Bruce Ferrini, who had started to dismember it and sell it piecemeal.  But he was unable to pay the seller, who repossessed it.  There was always a question, therefore, of whether Ferrini had actually handed back all that he still had.  Ferrini then went bankrupt.

… on March 17th, 2008, St. Patrick’s Day, when Ferrini was finally deposed (after many attempts to get him on the stand) in Akron. The proceedings took a full day.  Ferrini not only admitted that he had withheld materials in 2001.  He also left the court-supervised proceedings at lunchtime, along with his lawyer, and returned to the court an hour or so later with a sort of lawyer’s briefcase with what appeared to be full page fragments inside.

These were delivered to the custody of the court-appointed receiver, and it was agreed that they would be photographed and identified by an expert, a Coptologist, but under strict conditions of secrecy and not for public distribution or knowledge.  No one in the know – very few people outside the lawyers, I should add – were allowed to see the photographs, nor was any public report on their contents permitted.  This secrecy was court-ordered and agreed to by all the lawyers and claimants in the case.

The photographs were sent to Prof. Gregor Wurst … What [Gregor Wurst] discovered within these materials was essentially the balance of the Gospel of Judas.

The site also gives more detail on the missing material.

The question remains, however, as to what has become of the other three manuscripts from Egypt, sold at the same time to Ferrini and given the same treatment.  The Sahidic ms. of three letters of Paul seems to have been recovered, thankfully.  But of the Coptic Exodus, we know little.  The Greek mathematical treatise is still unpublished also.  All this secrecy…

Thanks to Evangelical Textual Criticism for this one.