Herbert Krosney

Lost Gospel

I am trying to read or reread in succession three books having to do with the three year-old Gospel of Judas hoopla. I took some interest in the controversy at the time, but I like my controversies aged because time allows for further reflection, and, often, as in this case, insightful perspective.

The first book on my list is The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot by Herbert Krosney, a Harvard educated journalist and documentary filmmaker who is obviously promoting National Geographic 19s side of the story. National Geographic, which published this book, also co-published and distributed the published version of the Gospel of Judas which was produced by a Swiss group that owned and restored the seriously damaged seventeen hundred year-old papyrus book before ultimately returning it to Egypt. Krosney 19s book also has a forward by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, a good writer and highly regarded teacher who adds his perspective, beginning with the mysterious way that he was introduced to the Gospel of Judas.

Krosney is a bit of a shill for the ultimate product, the newly restored and published Gospel of Judas. While his judgement about the antiquities business seems justifiably wary, his explanation of why the Gospel itself is culturally valuable and relevant buys into the silly hype about the republication of the book having implications for Jewish-Christian relations. I like the response of a Vatican official to a reporter 19s question about whether the Gospel of Judas opens a new dialogue between the Catholic Church and Judaism. The Church, he said, already has open channels for such dialogue. (Indeed, I believe that since the mid-twentieth century the Holocaust has been a far greater impetus to new dialogue between Christians and Jews than the publication of the Gospel of Judas ever could be.)

Krosney has access to a lot of information that was closely guarded by the publishers before and during the publication process. The story he tells about the journey of the only known copy of the Gospel of Judas is fascinating and convoluted 14and that just describes the parts of the tale that are not completely shrouded in mystery. While real life antiquities dealing might not be quite as exciting as an Indiana Jones movie, it nevertheless has its share of intrigue and even occasional murder mysteries and robberies. At one point, the Gospel of Judas was stolen from one of its owners in a burglary that has never been solved even though the return of the goods was negotiated on a no-questions-asked basis; yet Krosney gives the reader enough evidence to suggest a likely suspect.

The already secretive 1Cjewelers, 1D as Egyptian antiquities dealers are called, have only become more cloak-and-dagger in recent decades because of increasingly strict national laws claiming all antiquities to be government property. Paradoxically, those who find jewels and manuscripts buried in the desert of Upper Egypt (the Nile flows from south to north, so Upper Egypt is south of Lower Egypt) are more than ever likely to be uneducated grave robbers. Law-abiding professional archaeologists have to get eight different permits to do more carefully what the grave robbers do most carelessly. Further, even though 1Cprovenance, 1D the ability to say exactly where an object came from, is considered more important than ever by scholarly antiquarians and archaeologists, the criminals who find these objects decline to say exactly where they find them precisely because they would be admitting evidence of a crime in doing so. Because the 1Cjewelers 1D who deal in these antiquities want to protect their sources, they perpetuate false stories or plain silence with regard to where these objects come from. Buyers of antiquities cannot really know whether the objects they are buying are stolen. The alternative is to decline to buy anything at all and, as we shall see, risk leaving potentially priceless antiquities to disintegrate in the hands of ignorant robbers and barely more scrupulous 1Cjewelers. 1D

One of Krosney 19s tasks is to tell what little is known about the discovery of the Gospel of Judas ( 1CPeuaggelion Nioudas 1D in the language of the ancient text 14if you know any Greek, just drop the initials 1CP 1D and 1CN 1D and the title ought to make sense to you.) It was probably in the mid-1970s that robbers found the book 14or codex, the technical term for the earliest, non-scroll book 14in a fourth-century grave in the Egyptian province of Al Minya. (Probably.) They had no idea what it was other than that it was some sort of a book, so they sold it to a local dealer who in turn sold it to a wealthy but rather ignorant Cairo 1Cjeweler 1D who tried selling it to Europeans and Americans for the next quarter century. First he asked for ten million dollars, then three million and finally one million.

Complicating the process was the fact that while the owner expected to be paid an exorbitant sum, he would not let scholars inspect the pages for more than five minutes at a time. As a result, the scholars who got the best look at the papyrus codex did not have time to recognize that it contained the Gospel of Judas. Part of this is due to the fact that such codices were customarily anthologies with three or four different short books combined into one volume. One of the scholars who peeked at the codex in 1983 recognized that one of its components was an apocryphal letter from Peter to Philip, and he knew that this meant that the codex contained only the second known copy of this particular epistle. The same scholar just had time to notice that another component book mentioned the name 1CJudas 1D before he had to give the codex back to the seller. When the scholar and his colleagues then heard the asking price of three million, they balked and walked. Why should they pay so much for something they had not had time to fully evaluate? Besides, they had expected to pay less than 200 thousand and they did not have anywhere near one million 14let alone three million 14at their disposal.

Another problem noted by the scholars who saw the codex in 1983 was that it was badly deteriorating. For more than a millennium, it had been buried in the dry Egyptian desert, but from the 1970s until the late 1990s, it was kept wrapped up in old newspapers in shoe boxes and in safe deposit boxes in a couple of different banks. None of this was good for the ancient papyrus which tends to crumble under such conditions. It undoubtedly deteriorated more in the last thirty years than it had in the seventeen centuries before that. The scholars who looked at the codex realized with horror that the codex might turn to dust before anyone who knew what they were doing got hold of it, and they knew, too, that added to the cost to them of buying the codex for more than a million dollars would be the enormous expense of painstakingly restoring the decaying papyrus with its already faded ink and often gaping lacunae (holes in the pages).

Along the way, there were several potential buyers who did not necessarily know about each other. One scholar who tried to buy the codex was Professor James Robinson, the author of the next book on my list. (This will be a reread since I read his book a couple of years ago.) Krosney gives Robinson some due respect but notes that he has a reputation for being a prima donna; he is the leading American expert on early Christian texts, having edited the Nag Hammadi library, the most important collection of non-orthodox Christian writings ever discovered. Krosney repeats criticism made by other scholars that Robinson 19s lengthy and oft-repeated (by him as well as others) account of how the Nag Hammadi library was discovered is probably not true. It is not that Robinson himself is accused of lying but rather that he was too credulous of the grave robbers and antiquities dealers who told him an elaborate yarn 14or, actually, several sometimes contradictory yarns 14about how the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered and kept before they found their way onto the documented portion of the antiquities market.

Krosney is sympathetic as he describes Robinson 19s multiple attempts and failures to buy the codex that would turn out to contain the Gospel of Judas. Part of the problem was that the Greek middle man that Robinson contacted was no longer on the best terms with the Egyptian jeweler who owned the codex. Another problem was that while the codex was actually decomposing in a box in a bank on Long Island, New York 14where the Egyptian jeweler had deposited it during an aborted sales attempt to a New York Antiquarian book dealer 14the jeweler only possessed one of the two keys to the box while the other key was in the hands of a third party with whom the jeweler was on even worse terms than he was with the Greek. On top of that, Robinson attempted to buy the codex in January 1991 14just as the Gulf War was beginning; the jeweler was convinced that World War III was about to begin, and he had no intention of leaving his family at such a time.

Finally, a Swiss-based antiquities dealer bought the codex for much less than one million. After a misadventure in which the Swiss dealer sold it too an American dealer who both failed to pay her and failed to find a good home for the codex, the Swiss dealer got it back and gave it to a Swiss foundation which had the resources to begin the laborious process of arresting further deterioration, piecing together the fragments that had already fallen apart, and finding a competent scholar, Professor Rodolphe Kasser, to translate the codex into a modern language. A publication deal was then made with National Geographic and the whole enterprise was massively hyped to recoup the enormous expenditures of the investors. (Not that Krosney would put it that way because the "investors" are the same people who are buttering his bread.)

If the Gospel of Judas is unlikely to have any impact on Christianity or even on Christian-Jewish relations, what is its significance? This is a topic that, I think, Krosney does the poorest job of discussing, so I 19ll save it for my discussion of Robinson 19s book, which is next on my list.… (mere)

L'ÉVANGILE PERDU

C'est d'une découverte archéologique majcure - la plus spectaculaire
depuis les Rouleaux de la Mer morte-dont il est question dans ce livre:
celle de l'Eangile de Judas.
Judas. Le traitre de Gethsémani, celui qui embrassa Jésus avant de
le livrer Judas, l'homme aux trente deniers, universellement détesté.
Rien de bon ne saurait venir d'un tel homme. Et pourtant..
Pourtant, cet évangile présente Judas comme celui que Jésus choisit
pour le livrer-en somme le plus fidèle de ses disciples !Mais condamné
comme hérétique par l'Eglise, ce texte du le siècle devait disparaître
dans les oubliettes de l'Histoire... Jusqu'à aujourd'hui.
Car il s'en est fallu de peu que son message soit perdu pour toujours.
Enfoui dans une tombe du désert égyptien pendant dix-sept siècles,
le papyrus, découvert lors de fouilles clandestines à la fin des années 70,
a circulé sur trois continents et pendant vingt ans dans le monde
ténébreux des marchands d'antiquités et certains cercles scientifiques
tout aussi avides. Il a fait l'objet de toutes les convoitises. Manipulé sans
ménagement, traité comme une vulgaire marchandise, conservé en
dépit du bon sens, congelé,c'est en lambeaux qu'il est parvenu, en 2000
aux experts qui l'ont authentifié, puis au professeur Rodolphe Kasser
qui en a entrepris avec une équipe le lent sauvetage.
Dans cette enquête fourmillante de personnages et de détails, Herbert
Krosney nous fait revivre la véritable histoire de ce texte miraculé.
15:08
Herbert Krasney, diplomé de Harvard, est journaliste d'investigation
Il réalise également des documentaires bistoriques pour la BBC et la revue
National Geograpbic… (mere)