Michel van Rijn (1950-2024)

So … Michel van Rijn is dead. Art dealer, forger, smuggler, conman, criminal, informant and inkslinger: whose long-vanished eccentric website exposed many a dirty deed in the art world.

Apparently he died last year, aged 73, on 25 July 2024, in Italy.  There was a notice in Het Parool, which published material from him in the past, and another Dutch site here.

The art world is not my area of expertise.  Men have always bought and sold precious things, and always will.  Other men have sometimes tried to stop them, for various reasons.  Some of those involved are villains.  Some are rich men rescuing what would otherwise be destroyed.  Consequently the world of art dealing is one of secrecy and rumour, and no small amount of slander and dishonesty.  In addition the world of Coptology has long been dominated by people whose self-interest exceeds their devotion to scholarship, as James M. Robinson makes clear in his many articles on the Nag Hammadi codices.

But it is well for those interested in antiquity to be aware of this world.  More than twenty years ago, I became aware that four Coptic manuscripts had been discovered somewhere, around 1983, and had found their way into the hands of the Cairo dealers, and then onwards internationally.  This is entirely normal.  Most such discoveries are made by fellaheen, tilling the soil, and the dealers keep agents in the villages for precisely this reason. Indeed if they did not do so, it is likely that papyrus finds would simply be destroyed by the finders.

Among these manuscripts was a previously unknown gnostic “Gospel of Judas.”  This was published in 2006.  The whole story is told by Herbert Krosny in his The lost gospel : the quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2006), which I used to have but seems to have vanished in a recent house move.

My own interest led me to the website of Dutch art dealer Michael van Rijn.  This was a huge farrago of art-world gossip, obviously unreliable – and probably by design – hurling accusations of dodgy dealings at all sorts of people.  It was strangely formatted, and yet deeply entertaining.  How widely read it was I cannot say.

Van Rijn had become aware of the find, and he had also acquired photographs of some of it, and a rough translation.  I corresponded with him, and found him by email to be a charming yet clearly very unreliable person.  He published what he had on his website, and I mirrored some of it on my own.  The trail of what I could find out is still online here.  He was even interviewed by the BBC, who seemingly did not realise the importance of what he had, and chose to run end-credits over footage of him reading unpublished material from the work.

A 2006 photograph of Michel van Rijn.

In the end his website was shut down, in 2006.  This shut-down took place well before the orchestrated censorship of the last few years, in days when such things were still unthinkable.  So I can only infer that he had annoyed some very important people indeed.  What happened afterwards I know not.  There is a 2012 interview with him by Jake Hanrahan here, although, as ever, I do not know how much of it you can believe. He cultivated his image as a rogue.  He appeared in a 2016 film.  The last I heard of him, he was living in Italy.

And now… he is gone.  Whether he made the world a better place, or a worse one, I cannot say.  But there is no doubt that he made it a more entertaining one.

Farewell, old inkslinger.  May you find mercy at the hands of One to whom all answers are known, and from Whom even fewer secrets are hidden.

Share

Gospel of Judas, Coptic Paul, Greek Exodus

Sometime before 1983, peasants in Egypt found four manuscript books somewhere. They were smuggled out of the country, and first seen by scholars in 1983, in boxes. They were hawked around the art market for more than 20 years. One of these contained the ps.gospel of Judas; the others were a Greek mathematical treatise, a Coptic version of three of Paul’s letters, and a copy of Exodus.

In an evil hour, these papyrus books went sold to a US antiquities dealer named Bruce Ferrini, who dismembered them and sold them, a bit at a time, to his contacts.  Ferrini eventually double-crossed his supplier, and then went bankrupt.

It seems that Ferrini retained fragments of the books, despite undertaking not to.  Despite being bankrupt, he seems to have operated a shop on e-Bay at one period.  Some of fragments then bought by collectors are now going around again on e-Bay.  A scholar is intending to purchase at least some of them and thereby get them out of this circus.

Silence has largely descended on this business.  Dutch art-dealer turned game-keeper Michel van Rijn used to expose all the dealings, but his site shut down after death threats.  Yet three of the four manuscripts are still missing.  In all this silence, it’s impossible to say whether all the pages and fragments that went to Ferrini are recovered.  I think I know where the Greek mathematical treatise is; and the anti-social scholars who have been commissioned to publish it but have not done so.  The Exodus may be in pieces; the whereabouts of the majority of the Paul are utterly unknown to me.

The fact that shreds of the gospel of Judas are turning up online can only mean that even now the find is not in safe keeping.  And every shred, remember, is a word of the text.  It’s a little bit of ancient knowledge, gone forever unless we are lucky.  It’s enough to make anyone weep.

Later:  I’ve just been to look for pieces of “manuscripts” generally on e-Bay.  There are offers of what is plainly pages from one manuscript, being dismembered and sold page by page by some reprehensible and greedy individual.  There are obvious fakes being offered.  The vision of destruction and dispersal, of the sheer lack of ethics, is horrible to see.

Share

The silencing of Michel van Rijn

There are people out there who love secrecy.  The manuscript of the gospel of Judas and three other texts were traded around the art world for 20 years, suffering considerable damage in the process.  Dutch art-dealer Michel van Rijn exposed much of this, and indeed many other evil deeds in the art world.  Unsurprisingly those he exposed want his site off-line.

Some years ago his first site was the target of an injunction by James Ferrell of Ferrellgas.  I’ve corresponded with the latter, and found him a pleasant and helpful man.  The injunction seems to suggest that the action was taken mainly because material on van Rijn’s site was compromising a suit by Ferrell against the notorious Bruce Ferrini, the man who did more damage to those four manuscripts than any other single source.

Someone also persuaded Google to remove all reference to his site.  He moved to http://www.michelvanrijn.nl/, which also never appeared in Google. 

I recently noticed that the site had vanished.  It seems that it vanished in October 2006, after death threats to his children.

We are all the poorer for this.  It’s understandable, but why haven’t the police stepped in? I hope that we will see you again, old inkslinger.

Share