- Part two -
Here it is - the key to unraveling one of the most confusing mysteries that have emerged in the world of science in recent decades. A thousand-year-old piece of papyrus with the phrase: "Jesus said to them:" My wife. " It was these words in the ancient Coptic language that shocked the entire world community when the famous historian from Harvard University, Karen L. King, presented her find at a conference in Rome in September 2012.
Why is Karen King's statement sensational?
For the first time in an ancient manuscript, there was a direct indication that Jesus may have had a wife. The phrases on the papyrus were incomplete, but it seems that at one time a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles was recorded on it on the topic of whether the “wife” of Christ (probably Mary Magdalene) was “worthy” to become one of them and join the teaching.
According to King, the main purpose of this manuscript was to convey to all of us that "women - wives and mothers - can also become disciples of Jesus." She is sure that he was part of the ancient debate about what constitutes the “ideal model of the Christian life - marriage or celibacy” - and whether a person can be simultaneously holy and sexual.
King called this piece of papyrus the size of a business card "The Gospel of the Wife of Jesus." Nothing to say, the name is provocative. But, with or without it, the whole world of Christian, biblical science was in confusion. The age-old Christian tradition now depends only on whether this piece of paper turns out to be the original or, as the growing part of the world scientific community claims, a fake.
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Still would! After all, it is the unmarried status of Jesus that underlies the ban on marriage for Catholic priests, and the fact that there was not a single woman among the apostles makes it possible to restrict the fairer sex when taking leadership positions in church institutions. In particular, in the Roman Catholic Church, the New Testament is considered a divine revelation that has come down to us thanks to a long chain consisting exclusively of men: Jesus, the 12 apostles, the founding fathers of the church, popes and, finally, priests who bring the word of God to their parishioners …
A few weeks before her speech, King showed the papyrus to a small group of media representatives, promising them that they would remain silent until she spoke in Rome. When King presented the find to her colleagues, they reacted in two ways - some were breathless with delight, while others looked at her with disbelief.
Gradually, doubts grew. The Vatican newspaper called the papyrus "blatant forgery." Scholars turned to their Internet blogs to point out obvious mistakes in Coptic grammar, as well as highlight a few phrases that were allegedly taken from the Gospel of Thomas. There were also those who drew attention to the fact that the find was released suspiciously at the time and corresponds to the modern spirit of religious egalitarianism (between a man and a woman), and also kindles an intrigue around the image of a married Jesus, which was first introduced to the general public in Dan Brown's novel " The Da Vinci Code".
However, a year and a half later, Harvard announced the results of radiocarbon dating, multispectral imaging, and other laboratory analyzes. It looks like the papyrus was indeed very ancient, and there was no modern ingredient in the ink. But this did not exclude deception. If desired, the fraudster could get hold of a clean piece of centuries-old papyrus (as an option, buy it on eBay, where such lots, by the way, are not uncommon), prepare ink according to ancient recipes and forge a suitable Coptic script, especially if he or she has the appropriate scientific education. As a result, the "Gospel of the Wife of Jesus" passed an order of magnitude more modern laboratory tests than other ancient papyri.
All this is understandable, but why hasn't anyone done a completely different kind of research? Why didn't anyone think of tracing the chain of owners of the papyrus?
King stubbornly insisted that the current owner of the papyrus wished to remain anonymous. However, in 2012, she provided fragments of her email correspondence with this person, having previously removed his name and any identification data. His account of how the papyrus fell into his hands contained a number of minor inconsistencies.
As soon as the investigation began, a web of lies and secrets opened before us, which stretched from the industrial districts of Berlin and the swinger parties of southeastern Florida to the halls of Harvard and the Vatican, and the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR.
The owner of the papyrus fragment about Jesus' wife (whoever he is) told King the story of where, when and how he got it. The main confirmation of the fact of the acquisition of the manuscript was the scanned copy of the signed purchase and sale agreement provided by him. The contract indicated that he acquired six papyri in Coptic in November 1999 from a man named Hans-Ulrich Laukamp. In addition, the document said that Laucamp himself bought the papyrus in 1963 in Potsdam (GDR).
The former owner also gave King a scanned copy of another scanned copy (yes, you heard right, a copy of the copy) of a letter Laukamp received from the Free University of Berlin Egyptologist, Peter Munroe, in 1982. Munro wrote that one of his colleagues had studied the papyri and believed that one of them contained the text of the Gospel of John.
The only written mention of a papyrus fragment associated with Jesus' wife was on another scanned copy - a copy of a handwritten letter without a signature and without a date. It said that, according to Munro's colleague, "a small fragment … is the only example of a text in which Jesus directly confirms his wife," which, in turn, "may be evidence of his possible marriage."
Luck or not, all the participants in this story were already dead. Peter Munroe died in 2009, the colleague he most likely consulted about the papyrus in 2006, and Hans-Ulrich Laukamp in 2002. Thus, King declared that the history of the papyrus could not be restored. “Unfortunately, we have no information about the origin of the find,” she wrote in 2014 in her article on papyrus in the Harvard Theological Review, “and it would be very useful to us.”
But is it a lack of information? Or maybe in the absence of an investigation? As King said in 2012, the owner of the papyrus was still alive and knew Laucamp personally. In one of his letters to King, the owner said that Laucamp "brought papyri with him when he immigrated to the United States." It turns out that Laucamp sold them when he was already living in America.
According to the documents, Hans-Ulrich Laukamp lived in only one American city. In 1997, a German couple, Hans-Ulrich and Helga Laukamp, built a one-story house with a swimming pool in a small town, Venice, Florida, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
Friends of the Laukamp family said that they were heavy smokers and spoke almost no English. A kind of outcast in the enclave of "active retirees" on bicycles with an average income. Helga worked in a laundry, and Hans-Ulrich, who did not even have a school education, made tools (what a collector of manuscripts there is!).
The Laukamp couple could have lived their whole lives in their small Berlin apartment, if not for the vicissitudes of fate. In 1995 Laukamp and his artisan friend, Axel Hertzsprung, started the company together. ACMB Metallbearbeitung GmbH, or ACMB Metalworking, managed to secure a lucrative contract to manufacture parts for BMW brakes, and soon the friends were making a profit of about $ 250,000 a year.
At that time, already 50-year-old Laukamp bought a Pontiac Firebird and persuaded Herzsprung and his wife to build a villa near their home in Florida, where the couple planned to spend their old age. But the dreams were not destined to come true. Immediately upon arrival in Florida, Helga was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Hans-Ulrich took her back to Germany, where she died in December 1999 at the age of 56. In August 2002, the company went bankrupt, and Hans-Ulrich himself died four months later after lung metastases reached his brain. Laukamp was 59 years old.
The company's financial statements were also unusual. For example, four days after Laukamp's wife died in a Berlin hospital, his auto parts company opened an American subsidiary at an office building in Venice, Florida. However, Laukamp and Herzsprung were not the only leaders in the American company. There was also a third man named Walter Fritz, who had arrived in Florida from Germany at least four years earlier than them and who soon managed to exclude both friends from the company's documents, remaining the sole director of the American branch.
Walter Fritz still lived in Florida and according to documents was an unremarkable local old-timer: 50 years old, married, has a one-story house in North Port, which is 30 minutes from Venice. The only thing that set Fritz apart from the crowd was his fervent sense of civic duty.
He wrote eloquent letters to the editor of a local newspaper, organized successful protests from neighbors against the installation of overhead power lines nearby. And when city officials gathered to discuss North Port's annual budget, Fritz - a tall, lean man with angular features and dark hair - engaged in a lengthy debate, eagerly lecturing city elders and opposing the proposed anti-crisis tax hike.
As it turns out, the auto parts company was not Fritz's only business. In 1995, he founded a company called Nefer Art. Translated from Egyptian "nefer" means "beauty". If someone in Laukamp's close circle had a love for Egyptian art, then it was definitely worth talking to this person, because Coptic was the Egyptian language, and almost all ancient papyri have come down to us from Egypt.
When typing the words "Walter Fritz" and "Egypt", the search engines returned one remarkable result. In 1991, someone named Walter Fritz published an article in a prestigious German journal entitled Studies of Ancient Egyptian Culture. He used infrared photography to decipher the smallest text characters on an Egyptian tablet that was about 3,400 years old. In addition, the journal mentioned his affiliation with the Institute of Egyptology of the Free University of Berlin - the same place where Peter Munro and his colleague, who supposedly studied the Hans-Ulrich papyri in 1982, worked.
Are the author of the article and the director of the Florida company the same person? According to several Egyptologists, the article devoted to the dispute over whether Akhenaten and his father were separate pharaohs or occupied the throne together, still carries weight in the scientific world. But none of them, not even the former editors of the magazine, could remember who Walter Fritz was and where he is now.
To learn more about Laukamp, I had to fly to Florida, but Fritz was no less interesting. When he heard that we were planning to write an article about his companion and the papyrus of Jesus' wife, he refused to meet, clearly got nervous and quickly hung up the trumpet. According to him, he never studied Egyptology at the Free University and did not write articles for a German magazine. Although the website of the Laukamp and Hertzsprung company indicated that Fritz is the president of the American branch, he replied that he was simply a consultant and helped to register the company. He didn't even remember how he met Laukamp.
But when we asked him if Laucamp was interested in antiques, Fritz jumped up and muttered: “He was interested in a lot of things. For example, he had a collection of beer mugs."
Then he somehow mysteriously returned to the question of the origin of the papyrus: “There will always be those who say“yes”and those who say“no”. Everyone always has their own opinion. But he flatly refused to share his own.
To the question “Are you the owner of the papyrus,” he replied: “No. Why do you think so? . Fritz said nothing more.
Karen King is the first woman to become a Hollis professor of theology, and thereby rose to unprecedented heights in her profession. The daughter of a pharmacist and school teacher, King entered Montana State University, where she became seriously interested in ancient Christian texts. “Even then, it seemed to me that I was not like everyone else,” Karen said in 2012. - At school they constantly made fun of me. It seemed to me that if I could make out these texts, I would understand what was wrong with me."
In 1984, she became a Doctor of Theology, and by 1991 she headed the Departments of Religious and Feminology at Occidental College. She was invited by Harvard Divinity School in 1997.
A fragment of a papyrus with words about the wife of Jesus can be called the result of the work of her entire life - the resurrection of Christian polyphony, lost over the years of its development and formation. The early Christians lacked a uniformity of thought; they often had conflicting views on the meaning of the life and teachings of Christ. But after Constantine converted his subjects to the Christian faith in the 4th century, and church leaders began to canonize a small part of the texts that make up the New Testament, Christians with different views were called heretics.
In particular, King was interested in non-canonical, or Gnostic, texts in which Mary Magdalene is ascribed an important role in the life of Jesus, the role of his attorney and disciple. Evidence that early Christians also considered Mary Magdalene to be the wife of Jesus would have been a slap in the face for the church patriarchs, who long ago dismissed and disgraced her, along with two other women mentioned in the Gospels: the nameless traitor from the Gospel of John and the nameless prostitute from Luke's Gospel.
From the very beginning, King was interested in the mysteries associated with the so-called wife of Jesus. The obverse and reverse sides of the papyrus had 14 lines, which were unfinished phrases, most likely from a larger manuscript. “Jesus told them, 'My wife' is probably the brightest part of the manuscript, but there were other notable sayings, such as, 'She may be my disciple,' or 'I live with her.'
In a summer 2012 interview, King said she expected heated debate over the meaning of the phrases on the papyrus fragment. In her opinion, these words should by no means be interpreted as a biography. They were written several centuries after the death of Christ. They simply testify that one of the groups of ancient Christians believed that Jesus was married.
Before publishing information about her find, King decided to consult with the world's leading experts in the field of papyrology and the Coptic language: Roger Bagnell, a renowned papyrologist who runs the Institute for Ancient World Research at New York University; Anna-Maria Laendijk, a recognized Coptic writer from Princeton, who received her Ph. D. from Harvard under King herself; and Ariel Shisha-Halevi, a linguist specializing in Coptic from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. All three concluded that the papyrus looked real.
But not everyone was convinced. In the summer of 2012, the Harvard Theological Review sent King's draft of the work for evaluation. One review was positive, while another contained criticism based on grammatical inconsistencies in the papyrus text and the type of writing itself. King decided that if her own expert panel agreed with the skeptical reviewer, she would not report her discovery in Rome. She knew the stakes were high now, both for history and her reputation. The most prestigious institutions in the world - the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre - became the victims of the scammers, and she did not want Harvard to be added to this list. “If it’s fake,” she told reporters, “my career is over.” However, Roger Bagnell supported King in her endeavor, and she decided to move on.
The hunt for fake, which was initially limited to science blogs, took a more formal turn last summer. Then in the scientific journal New Testament Studies, published by the University of Cambridge, they published an entire article dedicated to the opponents of the fragment. So the adherent of the classical theory, Christopher Jones, from Harvard University, notes that the fraudster could have chosen King because of her feminist scientific activities.
King never ruled out the possibility of forgery, but nevertheless asked colleagues not to jump to conclusions. Additional scientific tests were carried out, and the coincidences with the Gospel of Thomas became less and less. Ancient chroniclers often borrowed fragments from other texts: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke with their intertwining, but, nevertheless, "theologically distinguishable" narrative were a vivid example of such borrowing.
On the other hand, King could not understand how such a skillful fraudster, who managed to create a scientifically perfect forgery, so irresponsibly approached Coptic writing and grammar. "In my opinion," she wrote, "such a combination of sloppiness and sophistication looks very unlikely." Errors in writing, she mused, could be caused by the fact that the ancient chronicler was simply a novice in his field.
However, the phrase "a combination of sloppiness and sophistication" could become an epitaph for many notorious forgeries, whose graceful accuracy literally derailed due to a few minor miscalculations.
In the mid-1980s, a Utah swindler named Mark Hofmann was able to foist manuscripts on experts that he said could disprove the official history of the Mormon church. He used antique paper, prepared ink according to old recipes, and artificially aged the manuscripts with gelatin, chemical solutions and a vacuum cleaner. Hoffmann was exposed after a homemade bomb detonated in his own car, which police believe was intended for a man who could uncover the criminal's machinations.
Prior to his arrest, Hofmann earned $ 2 million selling his fake manuscripts. Young, shy and humble (The New York Times dubbed him "the villainous scientist"), he chose clients who, because of their professional interest or ideological position, would believe that his documents were real. He often expressed doubts about his findings, thus leading experts to believe that they see in the manuscripts signs of authenticity that Hofmann himself, unfortunately, missed. “Usually he would just quietly lean back and allow his enthusiastic victim to validate the object herself and then say, 'Do you really think the manuscript is real?' - wrote in 1996 in his book the country's leading specialist in the determination of counterfeits, Charles Hamilton, whom Hofmann, by the way,also managed to hold.
Reading Hofmann's story, one involuntarily recalls the curious emails that Karen King wrote, the owner of the papyrus with a fragment about the wife of Jesus. In some reports, the owner appears as a simple inhabitant, refers to King as "Mrs." and not "doctor" or "professor" and declares that he does not know the Coptic language and has absolutely no idea what kind of object is in his possession. However, in other posts, he looks much more knowledgeable. He sends King a translation from the Coptic language that he thinks "makes sense." He even names the dialect (Said) and the approximate age of the papyrus (3rd-5th centuries AD), and also asks that radiocarbon dating should use “only a few fibers” and not damage the papyrus. It is also strange that he tells King that he acquired the fragment about the wife of Jesus in 1997,and provides her with a contract with a date two years later.
According to the world famous microscopist, Joe Bayreb, who assisted in the disclosure of several major scams, many fraudsters prefer to "sell" their tricks to unknowing people. As a rule, scientists are the last ones to whom they will offer their fake. So who, then, must be a crook to try to sell his papyrus to one of the world's leading scholars of early Christianity?
“Insolent,” Bayreb replied. - Of those who think: "Can I get away with it?"
After Walter Fritz refused to meet in Florida, we found a photograph of him.
At the Free University of Berlin, there was one old employee - an Egyptologist, Karl Jansen-Winkeln. When he was shown a picture of Walter Fritz, he said that he knew the person depicted on it. Fritz was a student at Jansen-Winkeln in 1988, around the time the article was published. “He left the university without passing the final exams,” explained Jansen-Winkeln. "After 1993, I never saw him again."
Here it is - the first sign that Fritz has deceived us during the telephone conversation. But why did a promising student, a young man who wrote an article for a leading science journal at such a young age, suddenly drop out halfway through? Fritz's acquaintances at the Free University did not know the answer to this question. “One day he just disappeared,” one of the women wrote. "Is he still alive?"
According to records in state archives, Fritz arrived in Florida no later than 1993. In 1995 he founded Nefer Art. The company's website offered a wide variety of services: wedding photography, "erotic portrait" and "documenting, photographing, publishing and selling valuable art collections."
One of the pages featured unsigned photographs titled "Art Gallery", including a relief image of Pharaoh Akhenaten and a drink (depiction of the crying Virgin Mary), a sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding crucified Jesus Christ in her arms. In addition, fragments of two seemingly ancient manuscripts were presented here: one in Arabic and the other in Greek.
Looking at these manuscripts, the scholars only laughed. On the Greek papyrus, there was an image of a naked woman and texts allegedly belonging to the Greco-Roman period of the Egyptian civilization, known as "magic papyri". However, according to scholars, the words in Greek were complete nonsense, and more or less modern paint was used when writing the texts. "Certainly not Times New Roman," said University of Chicago papyrologist Sophia Torelles Tovar dryly, "but it's definitely made in modern typography." Meanwhile, the painted image of a female figure "in style did not meet the standards of antiquity art in any way, but this can easily be found in the notebooks of today's schoolchildren."
Two experts on ancient Arabic manuscripts noted that the text on another fragment was written in the opposite direction, as if it were a mirror photograph.
Then it was quite simple. We entered Fritz's name and email address into a Google search engine and immediately saw a link to a site that tracks domain name registration history. On August 26, 2012 - three weeks before the public announcement of King's discovery, when only a narrow circle of her acquaintances knew about the existence of the papyrus and the name that she had invented for it - Walter Fritz registered the domain name www.gospelofjesuswife.com (Gospel wife of Jesus).
This was the first strong evidence linking Fritz to papyrus.
Then we were to go to Germany to visit Rene Ernest, the adopted son of Hans-Ulrich Laukamp and the closest of his living relatives. Ernest and his wife, Gabrielle, were intrigued that Laucamp, it turns out, was the owner of such a mysterious papyrus.
Laukamp spent his childhood in Potsdam, East Germany. Growing up, he fled to West Germany, crossing the Gibnitzsee lake, which was on the border of the two countries. The Ernest couple did not know the exact date of the swim, but according to Laukamp's immigration documents, it happened in October 1961, two months after the construction of the Berlin Wall, when he was only 18 years old. According to a friend of Laukamp, he ended up in West Berlin in one bathing suit.
Thus, the story that in 1963 Laucamp acquired 6 Coptic papyri in Potsdam looked, to put it mildly, improbable. It turns out, shortly after his illegal escape, he made his way back to East Germany, got hold of papyri and, risking his freedom, and, possibly, his life, he criminally fled to the West for the second time.
Another problem was that, prior to founding an auto parts company with Axel Herzsprung in the mid-1990s, Laukamp was an ordinary artisan and did not collect anything, not even beer mugs. “If he ever bought or received this papyrus, then after the third glass of beer in the bar the whole area would know about it,” said Gabrielle Ernest. "I know my father-in-law, he would have sold him at a high price right away."
When the Ernest couple learned that Laucamp had allegedly consulted the famous Egyptologist, Peter Munro, about the papyrus, they burst out laughing. According to them, Laukamp studied at school for only 8 years - the minimum provided for by German law. His favorite resting place was the bar on the street corner, not the walls of a library or research institute.
By the way, the ex-wife of Peter Munroe also considered this story to be fiction. If her ex-husband had come across an interesting Coptic papyrus, he would have "definitely told her about it."
Regarding the origin of Laucamp's signature on the papyri sale contract, the Ernest couple replied: “He was a very gullible person. Good-natured. He could easily share breakfast with a homeless person in the park while walking the dog. But he was simple and weak, so easy to deceive."
Hearing the name of Walter Fritz, Gabrielle Ernest chuckled in the affirmative: “I can easily imagine Walter Fritz saying:“Put your signature here. This is a company document. " Laucamp would have signed it without even reading it."
So gradually the psychological portrait of Walter Fritz began to appear before us. For example, the owner of a metalworking shop on the outskirts of Berlin, Peter Biberger, who did business with Laukamp, described Fritz as follows: “Slippery like an eel. You can't hold him. And he tries to slip between his fingers."
When Fritz appeared at the Free University in 1988, he looked like someone who had already achieved a lot in life. Living on campus, where most of the students wear frayed jeans and T-shirts, he preferred smart shirts and jackets. He had two Mercedes cars.
Fritz’s thrust toward Egyptology was also suspicious. He got a job as a tour guide in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; traveled extensively in Egypt; and even took lessons from Munro, a recognized expert on Egyptian art.
However, teachers noted that his enthusiasm was not always supported by hard work and diligence. “Fritz was very interested in Egyptology, but he was not the type to learn,” said Karl Jansen-Winkeln, a professor who recognized Fritz in the North Port Sun photograph. He recalls that Walter Fritz’s Coptic was far from up to par: “He seemed to me like a person who wanted to sell something, not someone who was really interested in research.”
“He paid a lot of attention to what others thought of him,” recalls Egyptologist Christian E. Loeben, who worked with Munro and considered Fritz a friend. "He always tried to guess what a partner or interlocutor expects from him, and immediately acted to please his desires."
The arrival of the new head of the department in 1989 put an end to Fritz's fate. Jurgen Osing was a respected scholar who specialized in Egyptian languages, but a tough and demanding teacher. As far as is known, during Osing's entire career, only three students managed to defend their doctorates with him.
An article written by Fritz in 1991 could be his ticket to a promising future in the world of Egyptology. But, as Jansen-Winkeln said, “There was a problem: the article angered Osing. Fritz went to the museum to make a copy of Amarna's letter - a clay tablet used to correspond with the pharaohs of Egypt and the rulers of the Middle East - and photograph it, but many of the conclusions he arrived at in his work were drawn from Ozinga's lecture on Egyptian history..
Fritz expressed his gratitude to Osing in the first footnote to the article and referred to him twice in the text. But, according to Jansen-Winkeln, the key ideas of the work "did not belong to Fritz."
Osing had no recollection of Fritz or his article at all. However, the only thing that everyone agreed on was one thing: soon after the article was published, Fritz disappeared. Nobody heard of him again.
On this, our investigation could have reached a dead end, if not for the vague memories of two of Fritz's acquaintances. In the early 1990s, they said, he materialized for a time as director of the new East German History Museum. Then the news struck everyone, because Fritz absolutely did not understand the subject. One of the fellow students said that the rumor about Fritz's appointment began after the publication of the note in the large German magazine Stern.
This is the issue dated February 27, 1992. On one of the pages of the magazine, somewhere between the pictures of stars such as Glenn Close and La Toya Jackson, there was a photo of Fritz, in a tie and a jacket buttoned with three buttons. He stood next to a painting by Erich Milke, the terrible and ruthless Minister of State Security of the GDR. Indeed, Fritz was appointed director of the museum, located in the former headquarters of the East German "secret police".
As it turned out, the current director of the museum, Jörg Driselmann, remembered Fritz very well. In 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German activists took over the premises of the Ministry of State Security to prevent officers from destroying classified documents. The activists wanted the building to be preserved as a research center, museum and memorial.
Fritz proposed himself as director of the museum. “Nobody in the group knew him,” said Drizelmann, who was one of the activist leaders at the time. "But Fritz had the advantage - he came from the Egyptian Museum in West Berlin and had experience in museum work." As it turned out, the activists did not check the information about Fritz and did not know that he was only working as a tour guide in the museum. The mere fact that he was from West Germany amazed the East Germans, who hired him as director in October 1991.
Fritz excelled at self-promotion, Drizelmann said, but not as an administrator. In March 1992, five months after the museum opened, the museum council asked him to improve his performance indicators. In addition, everyone was worried that during the time Fritz served as director of the museum, valuable exhibits disappeared from the vaults: paintings, military medals of the Nazi era, relics of the Ministry of State Security. In the spring of 1992, Drizelmann put the matter bluntly, and soon after, Fritz disappeared, leaving a letter of resignation on his desk.
“I don’t want to blame anyone, but it’s quite possible that the West German was much better than us East Germans at understanding that these items could be sold and that they were expensive,” said Drizelmann, who became director of the museum in 1992. after Fritz left and remains so to this day. No one investigated the fact that antiquities were missing from the museum, so his assumptions about Fritz's guilt remained unconfirmed.
Fritz's career throws from a student of the Faculty of Egyptology to the Director of the Museum of the Ministry of State Security looked, to put it mildly, strange. But his appearance as the head of a branch of a company selling auto parts a few years later was completely out of the picture.
Fritz did not remember exactly how and where he met Laukamp. Fortunately, Hertzsprung fared better with memory. “They met in a sauna,” he said. According to him, in 1992-1995, Fritz himself struck up a conversation with Laukamp, who, by the way, was 22 years older, in the steam room of a Berlin fitness center.
Ask how the stranger from the sauna was able to become the director of their car company? “It leaked out,” Herzsprung said bitterly in his voice. - He was very eloquent. And Laucamp always succumbed to pressure. He was not very smart, and Fritz quickly crushed him."
Herzsprung did not even try to hide his hatred for Fritz. Unlike Fritz, who accused Herzsprung of fraud that ultimately led to the bankruptcy of the company, the latter argued that Fritz was to blame for everything, who initially planned to take over the business, playing on the conflict between Herzsprung and Laukamp. When the company fell apart, Fritz, who was literally torn between Florida and Germany, convinced BMW to sign a contract with another Berlin-based company, APG Automotive Parts.
According to the owner of APG Automotive Parts, the business flourished for several years, generating $ 250,000 a year, thanks in large part to Fritz's talent as a salesman and a lucrative contract with BMW. However, in February 2008, the company filed for bankruptcy after a former employee broke into its warehouse and trashed a main machine that was making parts for brake systems.
Two months earlier, Fritz had tried to sell his home in North Port, but to no avail. In February 2010, he put it up for sale again, lowering the price by more than a third, from $ 349,000 to $ 229,000. On July 8, 2010, the house was still not sold. It was on that very day that Fritz's letter was published in the North Port Sun newspaper demanding cuts and a 35% cut in wages for high-paid administrative workers amid the global economic crisis and rising unemployment.
The next day, Karen King received the first letter from a man claiming to have an interesting set of Coptic papyri fragments.
All indications are that Fritz possessed the necessary skills and knowledge to forge the papyrus about the wife of Jesus. It was he who was the link between all the participants in the history of "origin". He was quite capable of deciphering the mysterious Egyptian text. He had an excellent tongue hanging, and he knew how to sell. And most importantly, he studied Coptic, albeit not very successfully, which could just explain the "combination of sloppiness and sophistication", which, according to King, is "not so typical" of forgery.
- Part two -