As Christians celebrate Easter this weekend, debate over the historical accuracy of the Gospel of Judas, recently released to the world, is capturing the public imagination, but the real story may prove to be the history of the papyrus document itself. While religious scholars are only beginning to discuss the theological significance of the text, already the patrimony police are pouncing. This manuscript, as with so many of its type, has followed a long and winding path to its current resting place, in this case a temporary display case at the National Geographic museum in Washington. That path appears to have led from an Egyptian antiquities dealer through Geneva, Switzerland, to a private owner. It may eventually lead back to Egypt after detours in Akron, Ohio, and Washington.

The document, this copy of which dates from sometime in the fourth century, surfaced in modernity when some Egyptian farmers apparently stumbled across it in the 1970s. It eventually found its way into the hands of an Egyptian antiquities dealer named Hanna, according to the account on the National Geographic Web site. That dealer tried on and off for two decades to find a buyer for the document, with little success; for much of the period between 1983 and 2000, he appears to have stored his find in a safe-deposit box at Hicksville on Long Island. In 2000, he sold it to another dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, who herself tried unsuccessfully to sell it, first to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and later to yet another dealer, this one in Akron.

That, at least, is the official version; some are now beginning to question it, according to a recent dispatch in the New York Times. Rumors are circulating about how much Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos might be profiting from the deal between the National Geographic Society and the foundation that now “owns” the manuscript, a foundation that happens to be run by her lawyer. Her cause in more prurient archaeological circles isn’t helped by the fact that she ran afoul of an Italian patrimony prosecutor in an unrelated matter in 2001.

Even more seriously, some are starting to wonder whether it was legal for anyone to take the manuscript out of Egypt. In 1980, the earliest time at which it is clear the shadowy Hanna possessed the document, the Egyptian government required all such antiquities to be registered, and also controlled their export. Hanna does not appear to have complied, which is part of the reason why Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos’s lawyer’s foundation claims ownership of the translation and press and broadcast rights – in other words, the contents of the gospel – while averring that the piece of papyrus belongs to Egypt and will be returned one day.

Add it all up and you get another misguided conniption by the patrimony zealots. Some archaeologists complain that because the document’s excavation is so shrouded in mystery, part of its worth has evaporated. Other archaeologists profess to be horrified at Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos’s desire to make money. “We are dealing with a looted object. The artifact was poorly handled for years because the people holding it were more concerned with making money than protecting it,” the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, Jane C. Waldbaum, was quoted as saying in the Times.

In fact the phobia about money may be one of the causes for the document’s poor condition and lack of archaeological context. In light of Egypt’s strict patrimony laws, Hanna, or anyone else who might have owned the document when it was first discovered, had no incentive to register it and risk losing any financial gain. Because the only way to enjoy any benefit from the manuscript was to sell it on the gray market, buyers like museums and universities, though theoretically equipped to care for it, were scared away.

It was after the Beinecke refused that Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos found herself transporting the document in her checked luggage in a small plane from La Guardia Airport to Akron, where she briefly handed it over to a dealer who appears to have split up the pages before she regained possession. The scandal is not that private individuals motivated by profit are participants in an antiquities market, but rather that governments, via patrimony laws, force such trade underground, creating new disincentives to preserve valuable antiquities.

As New Yorkers discovered recently, some of the most beautiful and historically important antiquities are disputed – the Euphronios krater, to be returned to Italy under a patrimony claim, is a case in point. Yet such claims could make museums more reluctant to acquire important antiquities, as a prominent New York dealer, Hicham Aboutaam, told the Sun’s Russell Berman in a profile in this morning’s paper. Contrary to the intended effect, patrimony laws make it harder to preserve important works, not easier. The tattered Gospel of Judas on display in Washington demonstrates that truth as clearly as any Gnostic beliefs its text reveals.