4/14/06

GJudas: The R. Pearse Investigation.

Pearse has chronicled the details of his search for more info on the manuscripts physically related to the GJudas "find." Contact with van Rijn leads me to believe all this is correct. Here are some of the highlights:

From an anonymous source:

Everything except the so-called mathematical codex is in the hands of the Swiss foundation. Ferrini sold off the math codex in fragments, but I think most of it (I dare not say all) wound up in two collections, one a private collector in (I believe) Baltimore, the other the Lloyd Cotsen collection of children's literature in the Princeton University Library. It was a truly despicable act to break it up in this fashion...It has been said that all four were found together. But I am inclined to be skeptical about such a claim, unless there is irrefutable evidence for it. This question was not raised in 1983, and I have not read Herb Krosney's book to see what he has to report from his investigations into the provenance.

I am still having trouble understanding precisely how Ferrini fits into this, but apparently I am not the only one. Pearse notes,

"...if this is correct, then something strange happened. Frieda Tchacos Nussberger sold 4 mss to Ferrini, including the codex Tchacos; Ferrini didn't pay for at least the latter; Frieda then recovered the codex Tchacos. Ferrini sold the Mathematical Codex. Frieda (i.e. Roberty) acquires the other two. Is it really possible that Ferrini paid Frieda for the Exodus and Paul; then Frieda bought them back from Ferrini? Or can we speculate that Ferrini was merely Frieda's agent for whatever he could sell, and returned whatever he couldn't? Who knows?"

From what I can gather, we can only say with confidence that Ferrini never paid for the codex Tchacos, even though he may have sold a few leaves out of it. That latter point is conjecture though and I wouldn't want to make any false statements about the brokerage of the other texts.

More as this develops...

(Update 4/14: Pearse has posted an email response from Ferrell denying any involvement with the Exodus manuscript even though he had been linked with it rather early on. There is, however, some alleged precedent for Ferrell's involvement with such stories.)
(Update 4/14: I did recieve a possible explanation of Ferrini's involvement from an anonymous someone "in-the-know": "Ferrini, knowing he had Frieda by the balls, because of the provenance of the manuscripts, squeezed her out of the mathematical treatise and pages of the Exodus for peanuts, and Frieda, afraid to be exposed and lose the manuscripts, (Ferrini played kamikaze... all or nothing) accepted the cut up Gospel as he handed it to her.")

1 comment:

Robert Wahler said...

We need to do this right. JUDAS is "the man who bears me" -- not Jesus -- and it matters. Christianity is through. judaswasjames.com