The Gospel of Judas Manuscript is Returning to Egypt

Nevine El-Aref, 'The Gospel of Judas manuscript is going to Egypt', Ahram Online Sunday, November 10, 2013:

The only known copy of the Gospel of Judas, which casts an unorthodox light on events leading up to the Crucifixion, is returning to Egypt. The gospel of [...] Judas was on show yesterday in Washington's National Geographic Museum before its return to Egypt where it was found 30 years ago. The fragile codex made up of 13 papyrus leaves has been restored with a two-million-dollar fund from the National Geographic Society (NGS) and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery. Its most recent owners, the Basel-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art (MFAA), will now hand the codex over to the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo. [...] 

The codex was found in the late 1970s by a farmer near the village of Beni Mazar, near Minya in Upper Egypt. A year later this man sold it to a Cairo antiquities dealer, but after two years it was stolen along with other objects and smuggled abroad. The Egyptian dealer managed to recover his collection in Geneva and offered the codex for sale, but his price attracted no buyers so he deposited it in a bank in Hicksville, New York. There it languished for another 16 years, deteriorating until it resembled dry autumn leaves. In April 2000 the Zurich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos bought the codex and presented it to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for examination and possible sale. It was there that Yale papyrus expert Robert Babcock discovered that Tchacos held the Gospel of Judas [...] Yale, concerned about its provenance, did not purchase the codex. In 2001, following another failed sale, Tchacos sent it to the MFAA which teamed with the NGS and the California-based Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery to restore, authenticate and translate it. The codex was in a deplorable condition, and the MFAA turned to Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser, formerly of the University of Geneva, and other experts and conservators. Nearly 1,000 small and blackened fragments were reassembled, but closer examination revealed a further problem. The sheets had been reorganised in a random pattern - probably to increase the codex's appeal to buyers by shifting pages in better physical condition to the forefront. The original pagination was lost, complicating the task. Five years later, 90 per cent of the text has been put together - including an additional half page that recently surfaced in New York.

It is interesting to read the 'take' on the significance of this manuscript in a different cultural context.