not by decades of painstaking scholarly work, certainly not (despite at least one press claim, in the British Daily Mail) by any attempt on the part of the church to hush it up, but by the comi-tragic vagaries of the antiquities market. Herbert Krosney tells the story of how the codex, originally discovered by illiterate peasants near the banks of the Nile in central Egypt, made its way to Cairo, and thence by an extremely circuitous route to a bank vault in New York, to Yale University, to an American