A Popular Mechanics online article today reports that a Christian amulet recently was discovered in 2018 in an archaeological dig of an ancient gravesite in Germany that may change some history about Christianity. This amulet is a silver cross about 1.4 inches tall with 18 lines of inscription in Latin. It dates back to between 240 and 270 AD. It was found in a gravesite on a human, male skeleton just below the bony remains of his chin. Thus, the man likely wore it on a chain, or the like, around his neck.
The gravesite is in the remains of ancient Nida, a city that used to be a cultural and administrative center of Roman Germania. It is near Frankfurt, Germany, thus north of the Alps. Historians had previously thought Christianity only existed south of the Alps in this period. Thus, this discovery has the potential to change the history of Christianity in that region of Europe. That is, it likely indicates Christianity existed farther north in the Roman Empire during this time than was previously thought.
The inscription -- which was not easy to decipher -- is theologically revealing. It affirms repeatedly that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and it says nothing about him being God as was determined officially by the Catholic Church at the Nicene Council held in the year 325 AD in Nicaea near present-day Istanbul, Turkey. This theological affirmation, and lack of identifying Jesus as God, further suggests the Nicene Creed, which identifies Jesus as "very God of very God," meaning just as much God as God the Father is God, is a departure from original Christian belief of the 1st century. A few of the words on this cross are uncertain. This inscription is now being identified as The Frankfurt Silver Inscription. Its words are as follows, in the form of the lines, although the Popular Mechanics article has 17 lines, not 18 as its reports:
Who was Saint Titus? He was an apostolic associate of the apostle Paul, whose New Testament corpus of 13 letters contains The Letter of Paul to Titus. The second half of the inscription on this silver cross obviously alludes to vv. 10-11 in what Paul wrote in Philippians 2.9-11: "Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (NRSV).