Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

A few weeks ago, researchers in Germany announced that they'd found the earliest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps.

During excavations of a Roman cemetery in Frankfurt, Germany, a tiny, tightly wound silver scroll dating to the

early 200s was found under the chin of a skeleton. The scroll was found in a philactory, a kind of amulet

worn on a cord around the neck. And this was an unusual thing to find in this part of the world.

Amulets like it were far more common in the eastern Mediterranean,

where they were used as protective charms against aches and pains, illness, infertility, or demons.

That kind of superstition was common during time periods without the kind of medical knowledge

we have today. Also, injuries and illness were quite common, judging from the evidence we find

in skeletons.

Over 1,800 years old, this amulet had folded, and it was creased, so it could not be unrolled without it being destroyed.

Instead, a high-resolution CT scan of the scroll was used to create a 3D model of the amulet, which was then digitally unrolled.

That's pretty cool.

And inside was a Latin inscription.

That was also unusual, since most were written in Greek. The text was clearly Christian, referring twice to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. There was also a quote from the epistle to the Philippians,

specifically when Paul said, every knee will bow those in heaven, those on earth, and those under

the earth, and every tongue confessed Jesus Christ.

And there were the words Holy Holy Holy from Isaiah 6 in Revelation 4.

Prior to this find, the earliest known post-New Testament Christian use of Holy Holy-holy Holy dated to the 4th century.

The dating of this amulet pushes the arrival of Christianity

north of the Alps nearly a century, and it places that at a time when being a Christian was quite

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