Ancient 1800-Year-Old Amulet About Jesus Discovered in German Cemetery
A nearly 1800-year-old silver amulet describing Jesus as the ‘son of God’ and using Christian phrases previously unknown at this time period was discovered in Germany, speaking to the spread of Christianity in the early Roman Empire.
The amulet was initially discovered in 2018 around the neck of a skeleton buried in a Roman-era Frankfurt century between A.D. 230 and 270. Measuring just 1.4 inches long and consisting of a wafer-thin scroll, researchers took six years to “digitally unroll” the scroll using a CT scan. According to a statement released by the Leibniz Center for Archaeology:
The wafer-thin silver foil itself is too brittle and fragile to simply roll up due to the long time it has spent in the ground. It would fall apart if attempts were made to unroll it. It was only the X-ray examination with a state-of-the-art computer tomograph at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Mainz (LEIZA) in May 2024 that finally brought the breakthrough. “The challenge in the analysis was that the silver sheet was rolled, but after around 1800 years it was of course also bent and pressed. Using the CT, we were able to scan it in very high resolution and create a 3D model,” reports Dr. Ivan Calandra, head of the imaging laboratory at LEIZA. LEIZA also used a special analysis method for this object and then virtually placed individual segments of the scan together piece by piece so that all the words were visible. Only through this digital unrolling could the entire text be deciphered.”
The sheet reads:
(In the name?) of Saint Titus. Holy, holy, holy! In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God! The Lord of the world resists with [strengths?] all attacks(?)/setbacks(?). The God(?) grants entry to well-being. May this means of salvation(?) protect the man who surrenders himself to the will of the Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, since before Jesus Christ every knee bows: those in heaven, those on earth and those under the earth, and every tongue confesses (Jesus Christ).
Noting that the scroll contains the earliest example of the phrase “holy holy holy,” which is a quote from the book of Philippians and was previously not known in Christianity until the fourth century, the researchers posit:
What is unusual is that the inscription makes no reference to any other faith besides Christianity. Normally, up until the 5th century, precious metal amulets of this type always contain a mixture of different faiths. Often elements from Judaism or pagan influences can be found. But in this amulet, neither Yahweh, the almighty God of Judaism, nor the archangels Raphael, Gabriel, Michael or Suriel are mentioned, nor are any of Israel’s forefathers such as Isaac or Jacob. And also no pagan elements such as demons. The amulet is purely Christian.