Religious artifacts up for auction
Several top-dollar items in the collector’s possession won’t be sold —yet.
AKRON (AP) — An auction to help pay down an art and antiquities dealers’ $5 million debt doesn’t include the most controversial and valuable items in his collection of mostly religious artifacts.
The auction of 153 items seized from Bruce Ferrini includes a 2,800-year-old strip of linen mummy wrap, inscribed with text from the Book of the Dead, and a Babylonian pottery vessel that is 3,800 years old.
Scott Haley, the lawyer charged with raising money to pay Ferrini’s debts, arranged the auction of the items, some that go back hundreds of years B.C.
The items were taken from Ferrini in 2005. Despite their quality, many mainstream auction houses shied from handling the auction, which wraps up Wednesday. Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries is handling the sale with the items on view at Arte Primitivo Gallery in New York City.
The auction does not include the three most valuable and controversial parts of Ferrini’s collection:
UBiblical artifacts featuring fragments from the Book of Exodus and the Letter of Paul to the Colossians and part of a manuscript known as the Gospel of Judas.
UA large marble Assyrian relief believed to have belonged to Alexander the Great.
UFragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their display in 2004 turned into a public fight with disputes over missing money, unpaid bills and claims of fraud.
A legal fight has yet to determine who owns those items, which are worth millions.
“We certainly hope that the receiver gains as much from the auction as possible,” said Charlie Bowers, a Cleveland attorney who represents Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos of Switzerland, who claims to be the sole owner of the papyrus pages of the Gospel of Judas. “But what does still remain to be determined is the ownership of the other items that we still claim.”
Bowers will not say how much the fragments of the gospel — which is far different from the four Gospels in the New Testament in that it portrays Judas not as a sinister betrayer, but as Jesus’ confidant — is worth. But he said it does not matter anyway since his client has promised to donate it to Egypt so that it be properly archived, displayed and studied.
Bowers has said that Ferrini will give up ownership claim. Ferrini’s attorney, Tim McKinzie, did not respond to request to comment.