to sell it there without any success. >> the owner then deposits the codex in a bank vault.t stays there for nearly two decades until another buyer finally persuades him to sell. >> here i am, opening again that safe. all the pages were glued together. and fragments of the pages were floating around. >> still uncertain what the manuscript is, tchacos takes it to yale. >> i say, do you know what you have here? this is something that's only been hinted at in antiquity. for the first time ever we're laying eyes on the actual gospel of judas. >> but there's bad news. restoration will cost a fortune. tchacos needs someone with very wealthy contacts. enter manuscript dealer bruce ferrini. >> i was told that bruce ferrini was a very reputable manuscript dealer and that he had bill gates as a client. that sounded good. >> seeing the chance to make a quick profit, ferrini decides to buy the manuscript himself and sell it on. >> ferrini writes two checks totaling $2.5 million for the gospel of judas, and they bounce. >> tchacos needs to reclaim her property. >> ferrini has the documen

to sell it there without any success. >> the owner then deposits the codex in a bank vault.ere for nearly two decades until another buyer finally persuades him to sell. >> here i am, opening again that safe. all the pages were glued together. and fragments of the pages were floating around. >> still uncertain what the manuscript is, tchacos takes it to yale. >> i say, do you know what you have here? this is something that's only been hinted at in antiquity. for the first time ever we're laying eyes on the actual gospel of judas. >> but there's bad news. restoration will cost a fortune. tchacos needs someone with very wealthy contacts. enter manuscript dealer bruce ferrini. >> i was told that bruce ferrini was a very reputable manuscript dealer and that he had bill gates as a client. that sounded good. >> seeing the chance to make a quick profit, ferrini decides to buy the manuscript himself and sell it on. >> ferrini writes two checks totaling $2.5 million for the gospel of judas, and they bounce. >> tchacos needs to reclaim her property. >> ferrini has the documents. he's g

stuart: this is a color facsimile of the dresden codex -- actual size, real colors. it's made on, like the others, on bark paper sized with lime plaster, on which the images were painted with fine hair brushes and pigment in about oh, five or six different colors. keach: many of these books were discovered by the sixteenth century spanish. they were said to be filled with genealogies, prophesies and religious beliefs. but to the spanish conquerors, they were blasphemous. in 1562, bishop diego de landa ordered them destroyed. "we found a large number of books in these characters "and as they contained nothing "in which there were not to be seen "superstition and lies of the devil, "we burned them all, "which caused them much affliction." ironically, a book by bishop landa himself proved crucial to the understanding of maya writing. stuart: and in it is everything that he observed in yucatan about the maya about their ceremonial cycles, their ritual calendars. he even had pictures of the glyphs drawn to put in the manuscript. and without that we would know very little