Nearly 1,800 years ago in Nida, a Roman town in what’s now Frankfurt, Germany, a man was buried with a small silver capsule around his neck. Inside it was a rolled silver sheet containing a text that asked “Jesus Christ, Son of God” to protect him from attacks and illness.
In 2018, that man’s skeleton and amulet were discovered by archaeologists in an ancient Roman cemetery in Frankfurt’s Praunheim district. Six years later, in 2024, CT scans allowed researchers to read the brittle silver scroll without unrolling it. The inscription provided rare proof that the Christian faith had reached this part of Roman Germany by the third century C.E., decades before the other surviving evidence of Christianity’s arrival in the region.
But Santiago Guijarro, an early Christianity scholar at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, thinks the man’s relationship with those words deserves more attention. What if he trusted Jesus to protect him while also taking part in the sacrifices Rome demanded?
The question matters because the amulet points to a kind of believer the written record was never designed to capture: someone who used Christian prayers while living in ways church leaders condemned. Our picture of the early church comes largely from bishops, who counted believers only when they conformed. How many people vanished from a history that recognized Christians only when they followed the rules?
Around 250 C.E., Emperor Decius imposed an empire-wide requirement to sacrifice to the Roman gods. For someone loosely connected to a Christian community, Guijarro says, “It is not obvious that such a person would have understood compliance with the imperial order as a betrayal of anything.”
Frankfurt’s Archaeological Museum dates the grave to 230–260 C.E. based on the age of a clay jug and incense burner buried with the man. He could have died before Decius issued his order, or lived through the persecution that followed. There’s no way to tell whether he was ever asked to sacrifice—but other Christians demonstrably faced that choice during the same period, which is why Guijarro considers the scenario plausible.
The proof is documentary. Papyri found in Egypt preserve statements signed by officials confirming that they’d witnessed sacrifices. Some Christians went through with the ritual despite their beliefs, while others found ways to obtain the paperwork without sacrificing at all.
Sacrifice was part of religious life in the man’s own town, too. Goethe University’s January 2026 announcement of funding to study Nida’s large sanctuary describes animal and plant remains interpreted as offerings and ritual meals, along with a dedication to a god dated 246 C.E. The complex served worshippers of several deities, including Jupiter and Apollo.
What happened afterward shows how unsettled the question was. Some Christians who sacrificed later wanted to return to their congregations, and bishops were forced to decide if and how to take them back. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, argued that these lapsi, or “lapsed” Christians, shouldn’t all be treated alike. In his letters, he asked whether a person had sacrificed willingly or given in under pressure, and he distinguished between performing the sacrifice and obtaining a certificate without really doing it. Guijarro points to those disputes as evidence that Christian belief and public compliance could coexist.
The amulet extends that possibility past the edges of any congregation. Someone only loosely attached to a community might have worn Christ’s name while making the required sacrifice, never sharing a bishop’s understanding of what that act meant.
“In the third century, the boundaries of what we call Christianity were considerably more porous than later ecclesiastical literature suggests,” Guijarro says.
The inscription itself seems, at first, to argue against that reading. Its 18 lines name Jesus, repeat “holy, holy, holy,” and draw on Philippians 2:10–11, where every knee bows before Jesus. And unlike many ancient protective texts, it contains no identifiable appeal to pagan gods alongside the Christian language.
But the person who wrote that prayer may have believed things its wearer didn’t, Guijarro contends. “The content tells us about the person who composed or wrote the text; it tells us rather less about the person who wore it,” he says. The man might have belonged to a Christian community, or he might have received the object as a gift from a Christian without being one himself.
That distinction could change how archaeologists read future discoveries. A Christian inscription establishes that Christian words reached a place; it takes separate evidence to establish that the person holding them thought of himself as Christian. Guijarro’s argument is that the second question has too often been answered by assuming the first.
Guijarro wrote about the amulet in a 2025 paper in Isidorianum. He observes that no older object or manuscript preserved these verses from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians in Latin. The remarkable part, he says, is where the text turned up: “not in a scriptorium or a library but rolled inside a capsule worn around the neck of a man buried on the frontier of the empire.”
One detail still resists explanation. The opening words of the inscription have been read as a reference to Saint Titus, one of Paul’s collaborators—a reading Guijarro calls “frankly, puzzling,” because the known traditions honoring Titus as a saint come much later. He hasn’t found a better explanation, so he’s leaving the question open until the inscription gets a closer look.
Even the choice of metal carried meaning. In the ancient world, silver was used for protection, while curses were typically written on lead. Whoever made this object understood what it was for: people across the empire wore amulets hoping to be shielded from illness and danger.
Church authorities eventually tried to stop them. A late antique canon attributed to the Council of Laodicea prohibited clergy from making amulets and ordered the exclusion of anyone who wore one. That the ban targeted clergy rather than outsiders tells Guijarro the practice had already taken hold inside the church—though the canon comes more than a century after the Frankfurt man’s burial, which leaves the question of who supplied his amulet unanswered.
It also suggests where people like him learned their prayers. Some may have picked up Christian language from whoever made their amulets, perhaps even a priest. If they were sick, they may have wanted something to help them get better without asking what else the church expected of them.
That is the gap more discoveries could close. If other third-century examples emerge, their inscriptions could reveal which prayers people shared and how they altered them, and their burial contexts could suggest who received them—showing how Christian practices spread among people who left no written account of what they believed.
For the Frankfurt man, we have only the words he wore. His amulet asks Christ for protection, but he might never have thought that praying to Jesus ruled out sacrificing to Rome’s gods. Whether he ever had to choose is lost. Guijarro’s point is that someone who did both still deserves a place in that history.
“Recovering that plurality does not weaken our understanding of early Christianity,” he says. “It makes it more honest.”
Eric Spitznagel is a frequent contributor to magazines like Playboy, Esquire, and the New York Times, and was employed for over two decades by the Second City comedy theater, where Stephen Colbert was his Secret Santa _twice.