c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) They are tiny brown pieces of papyrus with torn edges _ smaller than a playing card, almost woodlike in their appearance _ with lettering most people wouldn’t recognize.

Some of these pieces are being revealed via television and Web images. The fragments were photographed in an Akron, Ohio, law office Wednesday (April 19) morning.

The fragments are believed to be part of the newly discovered “Gospel of Judas,” unveiled last week by the National Geographic Society. The gospel purports to record conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot in the last week of their lives and indicates that Judas only betrayed Jesus at Jesus’ request.

R. Scott Haley made the papyrus available. The Akron attorney has been appointed receiver of art dealer Bruce Ferrini’s extensive inventory of religious artifacts and antiquities.

Haley is keeping them in a secure place until the question of who owns them is resolved: whether it is Ferrini or a Swiss art dealer and the Switzerland-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art.

On Jan. 23, Kenneth Garrett, the same National Geographic photographer who chronicled the bulk of the “Gospel of Judas,” first took photos of the Akron fragments, which now are considered part of the recently discovered gospel.

The fragile pieces were taken out of plastic sleeves so both sides could be photographed. Then they were repackaged in acid-free paper and indexed.

“It was pretty exciting when the photographer commented that the fragments looked identical to the “Gospel of Judas” papyrus that he spent two months photographing in Switzerland,” said Haley.

Emily Helwig, an associate conservator with Cleveland’s Intermuseum Conservation Association, was there on that January day. The National Geographic Society had called her, saying they needed someone with conservation expertise to handle the delicate papyrus.

“The pieces were fragile and fragmented,” she said. “So I used a spatula and tweezers to handle them. We grouped them together in a certain way, so that the Coptic text would be as legible as possible.”

Helwig was a little in the dark about what she was handling. It wasn’t until the photo shoot was almost finished that Haley and Garrett indicated what she had been working with. Still, she didn’t fully appreciate the impact until National Geographic’s April 6 news conference on the “Gospel of Judas” became an international news story.

“So that was very exciting, to have worked with something like this, one of the only things like it that exists in the modern world,” Helwig said.

National Geographic has launched 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 the magazine.

The organization paid $1 million to the Maecenas Foundation, effectively for the manuscript’s contents _ not knowing at the time that a portion might have been missing and in Bruce Ferrini’s possession.

Ferrini reportedly arranged to buy the 1,700-year-old manuscript for $2.5 million from Swiss art dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos in 2000. Later, the dealer claimed that she was never paid, and her lawyers say only part of the manuscript was returned.

Charles Bowers is the Cleveland attorney representing the Swiss art dealer and the Maecenas Foundation, which wants the fragments returned and put in place alongside the rest of the Gospel of Judas.

“Ultimately, what we hope to achieve more than anything else is to have these items properly preserved, studied and ultimately repatriated to Egypt, to the country’s Ministry of Cultural Property,” he said.

MO/RB RNS END

(Evelyn Theiss writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland)