Archaeologists have discovered an almost 1,800-year-old silver amulet bearing a prayer to Jesus during excavations of an ancient Roman cemetery in Frankfurt, Germany. The inscription on the artifact may help provide a better understanding of the spread of Christianity and the religious beliefs of people in the 3rd century AD. Popular Mechanics reports, writes UNN.
Details
In 2018, archaeologists discovered a man’s skeleton and a silver amulet at the site of an ancient Roman cemetery in Frankfurt’s Praunheim district. Inside a small capsule around the man’s neck was a rolled-up silver sheet bearing a prayer asking “Jesus Christ, Son of God” for protection from attacks and illnesses.
In 2024, researchers used computed tomography to read the fragile silver scroll without unrolling it.
The Frankfurt Archaeological Museum dates the burial to AD 230–260. The age was determined based on a clay jug and a censer buried alongside the man.
What is known about the inscription
The text consists of 18 lines. It mentions Jesus, repeats the words “holy, holy, holy,” and also uses motifs from the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 2:10–11, which says that every knee will bow before Jesus.
Unlike many other ancient protective texts, the inscription contains no clearly defined appeals to pagan gods alongside the Christian words.
How the discovery may change perceptions of early Christianity
Santiago Guijarro, a researcher of early Christianity at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, believes that the amulet raises questions about how closely its owner was connected to the Christian community.
According to him, the man may have entrusted his protection to Jesus while simultaneously taking part in sacrifices to the Roman gods.
Around AD 250, Emperor Decius introduced a requirement for the empire’s inhabitants to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods. The researcher notes that a person who was only loosely connected to the Christian community might not have regarded compliance with this order as a betrayal of their beliefs.
Documents preserved in papyri discovered in Egypt confirm that some Christians offered sacrifices despite their beliefs. Others obtained the relevant documents without performing the ritual.
Guijarro emphasizes that the presence of a Christian inscription confirms the spread of Christian texts in a particular place, but does not prove that the object’s owner considered himself a Christian.
In the 3rd century, the boundaries of what we call Christianity were far more permeable than later church literature suggests
In 2025, Guijarro published a study of the amulet in the journal Isidorianum. He noted that no earlier object or manuscript has preserved these verses from the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians in Latin.
According to the researcher, the discovery is distinctive because the text was found not in a scriptorium or library, but inside a capsule worn around the neck of a man buried on the border of the Roman Empire.
Some details of the inscription remain unclear. In particular, the opening words are interpreted as a reference to Saint Titus, one of the Apostle Paul’s companions. Guijarro calls this interpretation puzzling, since known traditions of venerating Titus as a saint emerged much later.
The researcher believes that further archaeological discoveries of similar objects may help clarify how Christian prayers spread and who used such amulets.
Reconstructing this diversity does not weaken our understanding of early Christianity. It makes it more honest