Another Judas mystery: A looted gospel?
By Barry Meier and John Noble Wilford The New York Times
FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2006
NEW YORK:
When the National Geographic Society announced to great fanfare last week that it had gained access to a 1,700-year-old document known as the Gospel of Judas, it described how a deteriorating manuscript unearthed in Egypt three decades ago had made its way through the shady alleys of the antiquities market to a safe deposit box in a New York suburb and eventually to a Swiss art dealer who "rescued" it from obscurity.
But there is even more to the story.
The art dealer was herself detained several years ago in an unrelated Italian investigation of antiquities smuggling. And after she failed to profit from the sale of the gospel in the private market, she struck a lucrative deal with a foundation run by her lawyer.
Later, National Geographic paid the foundation to restore the manuscript and bought the rights to the text and the story about the discovery. As part of her arrangement with the foundation, the dealer, Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, stands to gain $1 million to $2 million from those National Geographic projects, her lawyer said.
Details of how the manuscript was found are clouded. According to National Geographic, it was found by farmers in an Egyptian cave in the 1970s, sold to a dealer and then passed through various hands in Europe and on to the United States. Legal issues surrounding its transit are vague.
No one questions the authenticity of the Judas Gospel, which depicts Judas Iscariot, not as a betrayer of Jesus, but as his favored disciple.
But the emerging details are raising concerns among some archaeologists and other scholars at a time of growing scrutiny of dealers who sell antiquities and of the museums and collectors who buy them. The information also calls into question the completeness of National Geographic's depiction of some individuals like Tchacos Nussberger and its disclosure of all the financial relationships involved.
Terry Garcia, vice president for mission programs at National Geographic, which is based in Washington, said the organization had "heard some rumors" about possible legal problems involving Tchacos Nussberger but could not confirm them. He also noted that the organization had disclosed its relationship with the Swiss foundation, the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art.
Garcia said that issues like Tchacos Nussberger's financial relationship with the foundation and questions about previous antiquities she had sold were not relevant to the story of the Gospel of Judas. He said National Geographic had taken on the project because it had seen an opportunity to help save a unique document.
"It is not every day that you find a lost gospel," Garcia said.
But scholars who have campaigned against the trade in artifacts of questionable provenance said they were troubled by the episode.
"We are dealing with a looted object," said Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, a professional society. "The artifact was poorly handled for years because the people holding it were more concerned with making money than protecting it."
Tchacos Nussberger has rejected any suggestion that she was trying to profit from the Gospel of Judas. She described her run-in with Italian officials as inconsequential.
"I went through hell and back, and I saved something for humanity," she said in an interview about the Judas Gospel. "I would have given it for nothing to someone who would have saved it."
Last week, National Geographic began a large marketing campaign for the Gospel of Judas, featuring it in two new books, a television documentary, an exhibition and the May issue of National Geographic magazine.
The organization did not buy the document. Instead, it paid $1 million to the Maecenas Foundation, effectively for the manuscript's contents.
The foundation was set up some years ago by Tchacos Nussberger's lawyer, Mario Roberty, well before it became involved with the Judas Gospel.
Roberty said the foundation was involved in projects like returning antiquities to their countries of origin. He said that when Tchacos Nussberger turned over the document to the foundation in 2001, he assured officials in Egypt that the manuscript would be returned there. He said the foundation had clear legal title to the document.
In National Geographic's narratives, the manuscript took a long journey through the antiquities trade. The narratives describe Tchacos Nussberger's efforts to sell the Gospel of Judas privately soon after buying it and her subsequent role in its restoration. She is portrayed as an individual driven by religious conviction to save the document.
"I think I was chosen by Judas to rehabilitate him," Tchacos Nussberger, 65, is quoted as saying in one of the society's books, "The Lost Gospel," by Herbert Krosney.
Missing from the book is any mention of an incident in 2001, when Tchacos Nussberger was detained in Cyprus at the request of Italian officials, who wanted to question her as part of an investigation into antiquities that had been illegally taken out of Italy and sold elsewhere. She received a reduced sentence that was suspended.
According to National Geographic, Tchacos Nussberger bought the Judas document for about $300,000 in 2000 from another dealer who had placed it in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, a New York City suburb.
She tried to sell it to the Beinecke Library at Yale University in Connecticut. Yale officials have not specified why they did not buy the document.
But Robert Babcock, curator of early books at the library, said through a spokeswoman that "there were unresolved questions about the provenance."
In 2001, Tchacos Nussberger sold it to an antiquities dealer in Ohio for $2.5 million, but the deal fell apart when the dealer did not complete the payments.
Aided by Roberty, Tchacos Nussberger regained ownership of the document and at his suggestion turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation. Under the deal, she is entitled to receive a sum from revenue generated by the Gospel of Judas essentially equivalent to what she would have received from the Ohio dealer, minus the value of several pages of the manuscript that the dealer bought.
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome for this article.
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