- Part one -
But if Fritz did it, what was the motive?
Many scammers are driven by the desire to make money, and by 2010, Fritz's financial affairs were, to put it mildly, deplorable. The owner of the papyrus agreed to lend it to Harvard for 10 years, but that doesn't justify him. Confirmation of the authenticity of the fragment by university scientists would give the effect of an exploding bomb, and the fraudster could sell the rest of the pieces much easier, without unnecessary checks.
But there was another option. If Fritz felt that his dreams of Egyptology had been undeservedly destroyed, he could harbor a grudge against leading scientists who failed to appreciate his intellectual talents, recognized his level of Coptic as mediocre, and accused him of lacking his own, original ideas. A lot of scammers decided to commit a crime because they wanted to wipe their nose to the experts.
However, perhaps this theory is too simple. When we decided to check if there were other domain names registered on Fritz besides gospelofjesuswife.com, we were shocked. Since 2003, Fritz has launched several pornographic sites where he posted videos of his wife having sex with other men. The dates and approximate areas where the next "orgies" will take place were also posted, so that all interested men could send their photo and phone number to be sent an invitation to the meeting. "Orgies" were free, the only condition was consent to filming.
“I wanted to thank you for the wonderful time I spent with you on Friday,” someone named Doug wrote on the reviews page of one of the sites. "Don't get me wrong, you're a great guy, but your wife is something!"
All sites were closed in late 2014 - early 2015. However, archived pages and free photos and videos were still online. In an interview with a German website, Fritz's wife described herself as the daughter of an American military officer who ended up in Berlin as a teenager. They met Fritz in Berlin in the 1990s, and he convinced her to fulfill their joint fantasies of her having sex with other men.
Fritz also appeared in several videos, but more often he was the cameraman. On one site his short biography is posted under the pseudonym “Wolfe”: “I am 45 years old, I am an administrative employee, living in Florida. Weight - 80 kg, dark hair, slender, no belly, clean-shaven, provided. Then there was a list of his achievements in education and the professional sphere: “I graduated from college at a large university with a technical degree, I have a junior arts degree. I speak three languages fluently and read two ancient languages."
Promotional video:
On one of his wife's sites, the opposition of lust and art literally screams about itself. Along with candid photos and videos, there are excerpts from Goethe, Proust and Edna St. Vincent Millay, philosophical reflections on the teachings of Christ, the elusive nature of reality, etc.
But what if the answer to the Fritz riddle is also to be found in the literature? For example, in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. What if this book will be able to reveal the secret of the secret motives of the fraudster?
Of course, Dan Brown's bestseller is just fiction, but it tells about the work of religious women scholars, just like King. At the heart of the entire work is the story of the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church, which is doing everything possible to silence the representatives of early Christianity, who viewed sex as a holy sacrament, and women as equals, or even as saviors, men. Fearing the "pagan" praise of women as goddesses, the church fathers defiled the image of Mary Magdalene and legalized the male structure of worship.
Brown's book revolves around a Catholic conspiracy to destroy evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child with her. A secret society, which in the past included Leonardo Da Vinci and Isaac Newton, seeks at all costs to preserve the memory of the marriage of Jesus and the ancient rite that reflects the sanctity of carnal love. It is no coincidence that one of the central scenes of the film demonstrates to the audience a ritual orgy in which all members of the secret brotherhood participate.
“For the nascent institution of the church, the use of sex as a means of direct communication with God posed a serious threat to the Catholic tradition,” explains the book's protagonist, Robert Langdon. "For obvious reasons, they tried to denigrate sex at all costs, turning it into something disgusting and sinful."
Perhaps Fritz and his wife decided that the book fully justified their non-standard sex life and that it was time to tell the world about it. The couple launched their first porn site in April 2003, a month after The Da Vinci Code was published. Perhaps they imagined that Fritz, whose birthday, by the way, falls on Christmas, is Jesus, and his wife is the very Mary Magdalene.
Did Fritz and his wife really believe that they were led by a supreme deity? To turn the fantasy plot of The Da Vinci Code into reality, it was necessary to present physical evidence that Jesus was married. In the book, Harvard University professor Robert Langdon finds the modern descendants of Jesus' daughter and Mary Magdalene thanks to an encrypted message on a piece of papyrus. Perhaps Fritz and his wife found their Langdon at Karen King.
Four months later, a new telephone conversation took place with Fritz.
We told him everything we had learned: his study of Egyptology, his connections with the Free University, the fact that he registered gospelofjesuswife.com a couple of weeks before King spoke.
"What would you like to know?" - he asked.
Of course, the truth about the papyrus. After all, all the facts indicated that he was the owner.
“Perhaps I know the person to whom it belongs,” Fritz said. He stated that the owner of the papyrus was his friend, whose identity he had no right to disclose. As for Karen King, they never met in person, but he contacted her to "clarify something."
When it came to fraud, Fritz said, "Nobody ever claimed the papyrus was real." And he was right. In his letters to King, the owner never wrote that he had a genuine fragment of papyrus in his possession. He asked King for his opinion on each issue, and in the end neither she nor the experts she consulted found a single sign of a fake.
Fritz also confirmed the accounts of a number of Berlin acquaintances that, for example, he received a degree in architecture from a Berlin university and that he had a drawing board in his apartment. It turns out that he not only studied Egyptology, but also could draw, which means he had the skills and ability to forge any ancient font. So questions about his participation in a possible fraud were asking themselves.
But could he create an almost perfect fake if he wanted to?
“To some extent, yes,” Fritz said. “But I don’t know that this is not recognized by the latest scientific methods.”
However, when Fritz was asked head-on about whether he had forged the Gospels of Jesus' Wife, he quickly and bluntly replied, "No."
Fritz denied that he had financial problems at the time of his contact with Karen King. In addition, he refused to acknowledge the conflicts he faced at the Free University and the Museum of the Ministry of State Security. Although he agreed that some items had disappeared from the vault during his tenure as director, he noted that too many had access to the building, so he was powerless at that moment.
According to Fritz, he resigned from that position only because he realized that the native of East Germany would do better with such a job. He even sent us a photo of a short recommendation letter written in 1992 by Jörg Drizelmann (Drizelmann himself never remembered whether he wrote this letter, but did not rule out the possibility.)
Regarding the Free University, Fritz said he left the faculty because he realized that he could reach much greater heights in real estate and business. In addition, he denied that he had ever been in conflict with Osing, but called him an "idiot" who takes perverse pleasure in humiliating students. In his opinion, the entire faculty was literally teeming with traitors, and Egyptology itself is rather a "pseudoscience".
He was even more contemptuous of critics of the papyrus of Jesus' wife, calling them "country" scientists, who suddenly decided that their analysis of individual phrases in the Coptic language could compete with the scientific tests of Columbia University, which ruled out any possibility of forgery.
Two weeks later, Fritz sent us a letter with the following content:
“I, Walter Fritz, hereby testify that I am the sole owner of the fragment of papyrus called“The Gospel of the Wife of Jesus”.
I warrant that neither I nor any third party has tampered with, altered, or otherwise altered the fragment or the inscription on it since the moment I got it. The previous owner also did not indicate that the fragment was distorted in any way."
Over the next four and a half hours, Fritz told us the following story. He met Hans-Ulrich Laukamp in Berlin in the early 90s of the last century at a lecture given by the famous Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, who became famous in the 60s for his theory that space aliens, or “ancient astronauts ", Helped to build pyramids, Stonehenge and other monuments, the massiveness of which went far beyond the abilities of a" primitive "person.
After the event, Fritz said he spoke to Laukamp himself, arguing about von Daniken's theories over a beer in a nearby bar. He said that Laukamp enjoyed attending classes at the Free University, and they often dined together. Subsequently, they periodically went to the sauna together, but that was after von Daniken's lecture.
Laukamp first told Fritz about his collection of papyri in Berlin in the mid-90s. Then in November 1999, in Florida, Laucamp sold him half a dozen fragments - for only $ 1,500. Fritz took pictures of the papyri, placed them between sheets of glass and placed them in a bank vault.
According to Fritz, in 2009 he came to London for work and went to a friend of an antique dealer. Fritz told him about the papyri, and the merchant asked for the photos to be sent to him by email.
Fritz said he would have been happy to receive $ 5,000 for a piece about Jesus' wife, but three months later he received a call from an antique dealer and offered $ 50,000. Then Fritz wrote to King, whose books and articles he read. He wanted to understand why the merchant was offering him such a large sum. But when the antique dealer found out that Fritz had turned to an expert, he immediately stopped negotiations. In December 2011, Fritz traveled to Harvard to hand over the King Papyrus.
The logic is iron. And most importantly, you can't check it. In his letters, King Fritz claimed that "a man from Germany" translated a passage about Jesus' wife in the 1980s, and that a Coptic priest "recently" translated another of Laucamp's papyri. However, as Fritz himself later admitted, in fact both fragments were translated by him himself with the help of a dictionary and grammar textbook that remained with him during his studies at the university. He lied to King because he was afraid to get into an awkward situation with not very high level of Coptic.
But could anyone at least confirm the veracity of Fritz's words? An antique dealer in London, someone who knew that Laucamp collected papyri, or who saw Fritz and Laucamp at that lecture by von Daniken or at the Free University?
“Unfortunately not,” he said. - I'm sorry.
Karen King did not make contact. Even after learning about the many months of investigation and travel to Germany, she replied: “I'm not interested in this. I will read your article when it is published. But she was eagerly awaiting the results of the new ink tests being carried out in Colombia.
Fritz said he told King about our conversation. Before she stopped communicating, we managed to ask her why he never provided the originals of all the documents: Munro's 1982 letter, the 1999 sales contract, an unsigned note that allegedly related to the papyrus of Jesus' wife. “You’re talking to Walter Fritz,” she said. "So ask him yourself."
Okay, but why not publish the copies of Fritz's documents that were in her possession then? After all, many scientists have asked for this.
“I don’t think they are good quality,” she said. What's so useful about a scanned copy of a photograph that was essentially just a "reflection of a reflection".
Origin! What if this is where the clue lies. A manuscript is a physical object. To make a quality fake, you only need the right tools and materials. Origin, on the other hand, is historical fact: a sequence of dates, places, buyers and sellers. To convincingly falsify the origin would require rewriting the entire history, often not so distant.
The contract for the sale of papyri was dated November 12, 1999. Fritz explained that the transaction itself took place in the kitchen at Laucamp's house in Florida. However, the son and daughter-in-law of Helga Laukamp said that at this time Laucamp was at the bedside of his dying wife. He brought Helga back to Germany no later than October 1999 after a doctor in Florida diagnosed her with terminal lung cancer. Two months later, she died, and all this time Laucamp was with her, and, therefore, did not leave Europe.
Fritz later sent us a photograph of his copy of Peter Munro's 1982 letter. It's worth noting that one of Munro's colleagues confirmed that his signature and handwriting look "100% authentic."
However, then we noticed two errors in the address of Laukamp's Berlin apartment. The house number and zip code were not just spelled incorrectly, such an address simply did not exist. It looks like the letter deserved our close attention. We were soon able to get hold of scanned copies of other letters from Munro, written between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. They were sent by one of Munro's former students, an Egyptologist from Holland who kept the scientist's archives, one of the Free University professors and the same colleague who originally said that the letter looked like a real one (by the way, he immediately abandoned his opinion after looking at other letters of the deceased).
There were plenty of problems. For example, instead of the special German letter ß, which Munro used in his correspondence, Fritz's letter contained the usual S, which clearly indicates that the letter could be typed on a typewriter without a German font, or after the spelling reform carried out in Germany in 1996 year, or both.
In fact, according to all the available evidence, it was clear that the 1982 letter was not from the 80s at all. Among other things, the typeface used in it did not appear in any other Munro letter until the early 90s, the time when Fritz graduated from university. The same goes for the letterhead. Such appeared at the Institute of Egyptology only in April 1990.
As a student at Munro, Fritz may well have received correspondence from the professor, such as a letter of recommendation or confirmation of course completion. According to the medical examiner, there is nothing difficult in taking an original letter, placing a sheet of newly typed text on top of it in the center and taking a photograph. Perhaps this is why Munro's printed name at the bottom of the letter runs parallel to the decorative elements of the letterhead, while the rest of the text is slightly slanted. Surely, this explains the absence of the original letter - it simply does not exist in nature.
However, Fritz remained calm. He had his own explanation for all the arguments. As for the date of the contract, then, according to him, Laukamp flew to America at least twice after taking his terminally ill wife back to Germany. “She wasn’t dying then,” he said, explaining why a man who was completely devastated by the news of his wife’s illness could leave her on the verge of death. Fritz said he sometimes arranged the trips for Laukamp himself and could send us confirmation. By the way, we never got them.
When it came to Munro's 1982 letter, Fritz immediately interrupted the discussion: "I cannot comment on matters related to this letter." He said he hadn't changed it in any way. "I got a copy from another person, this is the end of the story."
After hearing information about the rest of the evidence, Fritz said that if Munro's letter was indeed a forgery, the fraudster must have “had no idea” what he was doing. He solemnly excluded himself from this category. “I always knew where he lived,” Fritz said of Laucamp, but did not notice any problems with the letters, including errors in Laucamp's address.
Finally, after several days of lengthy telephone interviews, Walter Fritz agreed to meet in person and take some photos for the magazine. A short-haired dark-haired man in a beige linen suit and sunglasses appeared before us.
At lunch, Fritz noted that he admired King's tenacity. She stood her ground despite the hostility and skepticism that reigned in the scientific world regarding papyrus, in many ways risking her own reputation. However, in his opinion, she made a number of strategic miscalculations that drew unnecessary additional attention to the authenticity and origin of the papyrus. For example, the sensational name she came up with for him; the decision to announce its opening to the Vatican; and the mention of Munro's 1982 letter in his article, because if the letter turns out to be "fake", the authenticity of the papyrus could be at risk.
“If you deliberately go into confrontation, you shouldn't supply arms to the other side,” Fritz explained this mystery. Although King's approach was "very honest, you can hardly call him smart."
Where does such a contrast between smart and honest come from? And smart for whom? Or what for?
On the subject of porn, Fritz revealed that at one point he and his wife received a third of their income from monthly subscriptions to their sites. However, a couple of years ago, they decided to shut down some of their sites because the business was bad for their sex life. According to Fritz, he saw the film adaptation of the book "The Da Vinci Code", but his joys with his wife and the papyrus are in no way connected. “There are no coincidences,” he said.
At some point, Fritz decided to share something. He grew up with his mother in a small town in southern Germany. When the boy was 9 years old, a Catholic priest gave him wine for the sacrament and raped him in a room next to the church altar. In April 2010, he wrote about this to Pope Benedict XVI, who, it seemed to Fritz, pays too little attention to the problem of sexual abuse among church officials. Fritz even sent digital copies of the letters of comfort he received from church officials, but he was not satisfied with this response.
According to Fritz, violence was reflected, rather, not on the spiritual, but on the psychological perception of reality: hence his angry outbursts, aggressiveness, contempt for others, who seemed to him stupider and worse than himself. He was afraid that if he didn’t tell about that letter himself, someone from the Vatican would certainly disclose this detail from his life, as another motive for fraud. In addition, he insisted that the fact of the violence and the date of the letter to Benedict (a few months before contact with King) had nothing to do with the papyrus.
As it turned out, Fritz hadn't lied. He did report that incident long before we met. A Vatican spokesman confirmed that a senior prelate wrote to Fritz "in the name of the Holy Father" in response to his "sad story." Clergymen in southern Germany said they also have records of Fritz's accusation, but besides him, no one has ever complained about the priest, and the priest himself died in 1980.
True, one thing became clear in the course of our communication. When we first started talking, Fritz argued that he didn't care about the message contained in the papyrus. But, as it turned out, everything is exactly the opposite. As a teenager, he wanted to become a priest, but then realized that most of the Catholic teaching was "delusion". He found it especially deceitful that the church believed the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were more truthful descriptions of the life of Jesus than the Gnostic Gospels.
He drew attention to the fact that scientists have not examined almost any papyrus of the canonical gospels using the method of carbon dating, because such tests would cause physical damage to the manuscripts of the New Testament - damage that institutions such as, say, the Vatican Library will never suffer. But thanks to new methods of researching ink in Colombia (which King talked about), scientists can determine the age of papyrus without compromising the material. According to Fritz, these tests may well show that many of the Gnostic Gospels were written before the canonical ones, and, therefore, are a more reliable description of the life story of Christ. However, serious scientists do not share this view.
“All this speculation that the canonical gospels came before anything else is complete nonsense,” Fritz said. "The Gnostic tests, in which a woman is allowed to become a disciple of Jesus and which describes him, rather, as a spiritually developed person, and not as a demigod, these texts are the most correct."
When the waitress took our plates away, Fritz asked to turn off the recorder. He wanted the next part of the conversation to remain exclusively between us, and continued.
He had a proposal. As he said, he was not a master of storytelling and writing, but his erudition would be enough to create hundreds of pages of basic material for a thriller book. "I will do all the work for you and will not ask for anything in return." That is, instead of conducting our own long-term research, we would have to rely on his information.
Fritz said that the theme of the book would be “the story of Mary Magdalene,” “the suppression of the female essence” in the church, and the primacy of the Gnostic gospels. Another "Da Vinci Code" in action.
"People don't want to read Karen King's book" about Gnosticism or the work of other scholars, he said, because they are so boring. “People want to read something they can sleep with. Naked facts won't go here. The main thing is to create an atmosphere."
He was confident the book would become a bestseller: "In the first month, we will sell a million copies." He said that our cooperation “can change everything,” but insisted on the need to fabricate facts: “You have to come up with a lot of things. You can't just present the facts as they are."
“The truth is not absolute,” he explained. "The truth depends on the prospects, on the environment."
Amazing. We could say that we accused this man of fraud, and he sat and asked us to "come up with a lot of things" for his new project, in which we could become excellent partners. Either he didn't really understand the gravity of the papyrus situation, or there was something else here.
We are journalists, we write facts, not invent. Nevertheless, curiosity prevailed. What role did Walter Fritz play in this hypothetical book for himself - the person who invented all this? He looked puzzled. “I won't be in it,” he said.
He wanted his presence to remain invisible.
As I walked back to the car, I realized with a shudder that Fritz was trying to lure me into a trap in which my reputation would end. I knew enough about his relationship with King and Laukamp to see all the signs of cleverly placed networks: asking for confidentiality, strategic self-deprecation, using other people to achieve their mysterious goals.
He promised that glory would fall on me. All I need is to forget about the instinct of self-preservation and just take his word for it.
Translated by Irina Zayonchkovskaya
- Part one -