Welcome back to James Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I'm excited to tell you the new archaeological

evidence has pointed to yet more evidence that the early Christians prayed to the saints.

And some of this is very new evidence, as in like December 2024, is when this was announced to the public.

And some of this builds on what we already knew. So a little bit of backstory here.

On an episode of Catholic Answers

live recently, Sykelet asked me about this, if I'd heard about this evidence out of Frankfurt,

Germany, and I had not, but I'm very happy to have done so, because the evidence is of what's

being called the first Christian north of the Alps. And they realized he was a Christian because he

was carrying the oldest Christian artifact ever found north of the Alps. And they realized he was a Christian because he was carrying the oldest Christian

artifact ever found north of the Alps. Now, of course, no one thinks he is literally the first

Christian north of the Alps, but he's the first one we know about. And this is in fact the oldest

Christian artifact we know about. We'll get into what that artifact is in a second. It's pretty

cool. But first, a little bit of kind of the context here.

There was a small Roman city called Nita that was pretty deep into what's now in Germany.

It's near the city of Frankfurt.

It'd be in the kind of Frankfurt suburbs today.

But at the time, it was obviously not part of the city of Frankfurt, which didn't exist yet.

It was part of the Roman province of Upper Germania, which is ironically further south, but it's further up the river.

So confusing if you're looking at a map, but Upper Germania is below, lower Germania on the map.

So Upper Germania,

this is the border province,

you know,

...