BELGRADE, THURSDAY –

HOW MUCH will thirty pieces of silver invested at an average compounded rate of five per cent over two thousand years be worth today?

Quite a lot actually.

“We’re talking a figure way beyond trillions,” says archaeologist Dr Tony Cave. “The net asset value of an advanced industrialized democracy, probably. Probably more than that. We just don’t know for sure.”

And therein lies the bone of contention.

Because Dr Cave and a group of fellow archaeologists claim they have traced the history of the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus, invested over centuries, and it’s enormous.

“We know it’s out there but the Swiss institution, which controls at least a portion of it, will not reveal the amount nor even confirm its existence.”

So the archaeologists are going to court in an effort to open the so-called Judas Fund to the world.

Professor Montana Smith, a freelance treasure hunter, and one of those who has filed the legal suit to expose the fund, explains:

“We all know from our Gospels, that the Apostle Judas received thirty pieces of silver from the Jerusalem Temple for betraying Jesus. Judas is said to have returned the silver when he saw what happened to his friend. But the Jewish Temple officials would not accept the money as they deemed it defiled. So Judas went and bought a field – the legendary Potter’s Field – where he hanged himself.”

“Now this is where the story gets interesting,” adds Dr Marion Hoarde, who did most of the academic research in tracking the eventual fate of the silver given to Judas. “The field was sold for a profit and that money was allegedly given not to the Temple authorities but to a Temple money changer on the orders of the resurrected Jesus. It is said, the Savior insisted that the money belonged in the Temple, from where it had come, and that if given to a money changer it would pay for the damage He had caused when he threw over the tables there before his crucifixion. So a money changer named Blind Issac was chosen, and Matthew the Tax Collector discreetly passed the money to him. By this time it wasn’t Temple silver any more but Roman coin.”

“This is where it gets strange,” says Professor Brun Daniels, a Biblical scholar once attached to, but now estranged from, the Vatican. “Blind Issac converted to Christianity. It’s not certain why, or if he discovered the provenance of the money he had been given. Anyway, he eventually followed St Paul to Rome where, among other things, he wound up helping to finance the Emperor Claudius’ invasion of Britain in AD 43. Much like Christianity, the Judas money prospered and grew in Rome. When Issac passed – some say he was martyred, others that he fell into the Tiber – the money fell under the control of the Christian underground, and despite setbacks like Nero and Commodus, and much of the third century, hundreds of years of loans to Roman emperors and the Senate, saw what had now become known as the Judas Inheritance grow and grow. Then when the Emperor Constantine became a Christian in the fourth century, the inheritance was renamed the Judas Fund, and was given official status and moved to the Roman state treasury. Until it was shipped east to Constantinople just before the fall of the Western Empire.”

“Several hundred years passed and the fund disappeared into the murky history of Byzantium,” Montana Smith continues. “Until the First Crusade. In the late eleventh century, the Fund was rediscovered back in Jerusalem under the control of a family of Armenians. How it had got there was unclear. Anyway, it came back to Constantinople where it remained until the city’s capture by the Turks in 1453. As the walls were breached, it was smuggled to Italy on five Genoese ships, and became the seed capital for one of the great Italian Renaissance banks. The Medici perhaps.

“It survived in Italy up to the early modern period, financing, it is said, among other things, the voyage of Christopher Columbus to what became the Americas, which boosted the fortune, and the painting of the Sistine Chapel which cost it more than anticipated but brought the Vatican into part ownership.

“Then it went to ground again, slowly growing, dancing around debtors from hell like Phillip II and Louis XIV. The fund made money in Tulip Bubble of the 1630s, and lost it in the Mississippi Bubble of the 1720s. Rumour has it that it made a hundred fortunes in slaves and sugar; and that it backed the colonists in the American Revolution. Whatever, it re-emerged in 1803 when the Emperor Napoleon had much of its paperwork – it was impossible to physically gather it together by then – shipped to Paris. After his disaster in Russia in 1812, it is said that Czar Alexander 1 took it for the Russian Orthodox Church, which he claimed had a right of inheritance to the wealth. He allegedly hid the fund in multiple European banks with the help of the Rothschilds. And when the Russian royal family met its end in 1918, a small priest escaped to Japan carrying all the information there was about the Judas Fund. He vanished and there is a gap in our knowledge.

“Some say that the real cause of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, was the Fund. By this time it’s interests stretched around the world. The Vatican’s Concordat with Hitler had something to do with it. Stalin was chasing it at that time, claiming it for the Soviet Union as the successor to Czarist Russia.

“Whatever, by 1945, the fund was at least part-controlled by Deutschebankfrom Berlin. Stalin knew about this and was pushing his generals to capture the German capital, not, as if believed, to get hold of Hitler, but to get control of the Judas Fund. This is where the Vatican Bank, which had had a controlling interest since the days of the Pope’s deal with Napoleon, stepped in and moved the whole business to Zurich. How they did it, is not clear, but when the Russians arrived in Berlin, all they found was a crucifix and a prayer.

“Since then, a private and very secret cabal has controlled the Fund, and it is now the greatest fortune the world has ever known; and it is still growing. Word is, it shorted housing in America in 2008, and has been successfully long in the tech sector for decades. Some details of the controlling companies were revealed when law firm Mossack Fonseca’s files were compromised and released several years ago. But they were quickly covered up. If you have enough money you can achieve anything. Maybe that was Jesus’ plan all along. The rich man and the eye of the needle thing. Who knows?”

“The crucial issue now is who really is the beneficial owner of this wealth?” says Dr Cave. “It is so constructed that not even those who control it, or even parts of it, know who owns all of it. It appears to have a life of its own. It just continues to grow and grow. The CIA tried to penetrate its secrecy decades ago, to no avail; it turns out the Fund has more resources than the USA. Only the Vatican has some inclination as to its spread. It is said that each Pope receives a briefing from an unknown Swiss banking official upon that Pope’s accession to the throne of St Peter. But even the Papacy does not understand the full extent of the money controlled by the Fund. It’s everywhere and nowhere. It owns land and shares and jewellery and paintings, mines and ships and planes and – if one source is to be believed – whole countries. And we need to find out what its extent is. Hence this court case. It’s a start.”