The codex is thought to have been found in the 1970s near Maghagha in Middle Egypt and sold in Cairo in 1978. It was stolen and taken to Geneva in 1980 and recovered two years later. Stephen Emmel examined it on the market in Geneva in 1983 and recognised its importance, but the asking price was refused and no institution bought it. For the next seventeen years it was moved between Europe and the United States in a cardboard box and kept for long periods in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York, in unstable humidity. In that time its thirty-one leaves deteriorated to a fraction of their original condition, with the papyrus breaking into fragments.
In April 2000 it was bought by the dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, from whom the codex takes its name, and briefly deposited at Yale. Later that year it passed to the Ohio dealer Bruce Ferrini, who put it in a freezer. Freezing separated ink and sap from the papyrus fibres and did more damage in a short period than the preceding decades. In 2001 it went to the Maecenas Foundation in Basel, and restoration began: some fragments had to be placed by matching fibre patterns, and the reconstruction is incomplete, with gaps at critical points in the text.
Radiocarbon analysis at the University of Arizona in 2005 dated the papyrus and binding leather to roughly 220 to 340, and ink analysis in 2006 was consistent with third-century Egyptian production. The Coptic is a translation from Greek, and composition is generally placed in the second century, before about 180. The condition of the manuscript is not a detail of provenance but a fact about the evidence: several of the disputed readings turn on letters that sit at the edge of a break.