Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines striking new evidence that the early Christians did in fact pray to the saints.
Transcription:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I’m excited to tell you the new archeological 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 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. Cy had 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. 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 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, a budding all these different Roman pagan tribes. And in 2018 archeologists discover an ancient Roman cemetery there. And it’s a great find already because a lot of the Roman stuff we have, it comes from further south places like Rome and Nita also is pretty old.
It seems to have gone out of existence in the later two hundreds, maybe two seventies as northern tribes like the Amania encroached and pushed them out. So it’s an ancient Roman cemetery in a place we don’t usually find cool ancient Roman stuff. And then they go digging and they realize that one of the skeletons in the cemetery has a little metal box around his neck with a Christian prayer inside. Now the press descriptions have called this an amulet in many of those involved in the fines seem to think of it as something almost like pagan or almost magical. They don’t say pagan, and there’s reason they don’t say pagan, but they do use the kind of magical language around it. So for instance, Gerta University in the press release described it as a small silver amulet, a so-called fractory, which he probably once worn a ribbon around his neck.
Such a fractory is a container worn on the body that holds magical contents or in later times relics and is intended to protect the wearer. But if you’re familiar with that term, fractory, you probably also realize phylacteries didn’t just have magical contents or relics, and they’re not something coming from paganism or not only from paganism. There’s lots of groups that would wear things around their necks, but the term Flac signals the fact this is something coming from Judaism. Jesus in Matthew 23 for instance, criticizes scribes in the Pharisees, not for wearing Phil factories, but for widening their laces. It’s in this kind of ostentatious way so that people can see how holy they are. And this Jewish practice of wearing laces around, well, the forearms and the forehead in their cases comes again not from paganism, but from the Bible. In Deuteronomy 11, God instructs the Israeli Israelites to bind his words as a sign upon their hands and assless between their eyes.
And so this was their attempt to take that as faithfully and literally as they could. Now, there’s a long complicated history of F factories within Christianity and a bunch of other cultures, but we know that there’s plenty of evidence for Christians following this practice of having some passage of scripture, for instance, or some prayer wound up like a scroll and then placed in a little box around their neck where they could then unroll it and then be reminded to pray and using it for devotional purposes. Now, it’s also true, particularly among the illiterate, we also find them carrying things like relics of the saints. And later on you even have controversial cases like King Robert II of the Franks, so-called Robert the Pius, despite being threatened with excommunication by the Pope, that’s a whole other issue. But you’ll find cases like that of someone carrying the host in a pics around his neck as a way of being closer to Jesus in the Eucharist.
Now, make of that what you will, you can love it, you can hate it, you can be confused by the practice. I’m reminded of two things. Number one, I’m reminded of the modern practice of wearing scapulars. This is something Catholics do, meaning non-Catholics find kind of weird. But at its best, scapulars are a spiritual aid and a physical reminder of the faith and what we’re about. Having something that is right there that presses against your body can remind you, and many people wear across or a crucifix for a similar kind of purpose. Nevertheless, we could also acknowledge they can be used in a sort of superstitious way that, oh, I don’t need to be devout because I’ve got the scapular or the cross or whatever on. Or if you want maybe an example Protestants might be more likely to relate to. You’ve got these kind of battlefield examples where there are plenty of real life cases where a musket or a bullet was stopped because a soldier had a Bible in his pocket and the Bible protected him.
Now, I think it’s totally fair to say that may not have been a coincidence. God may have actually been protecting him in this pretty obvious sort of miraculous way, and you can believe that and that’s well and good. Now, if you took that in the wrong way, that could become superstitious. You could imagine, for instance, a nonbeliever having no interest in what the Bible says. Nevertheless, carry in just to protect him in battle. That’s not really what it’s about. So with all of this stuff, with phylacteries, with scapulars, with bibles in your pocket, all of that stuff, you can use it in a good way or a bad way or a sort of neutral way. I wouldn’t jump to, oh yeah, this is like a superstitious, pagan magical sort of thing. I’m trying to give it a little bit of context as we make sense of what the whole practice of wearing a fractory even was about.
But in any case, what was this German? Well, the scroll itself was actually too fragile, too physically unrolled without risk of damaging it. But they use some pretty cool technology. That’s a whole other story to digitally reconstruct it. And so here’s what we find, but bear in mind some of the words are impossible to make out, and this is sort of a best attempt at reconstruction. But in any case, it has an indication to St. Titus followed by praise of Jesus Christ as holy, holy, holy. This is one of the earliest known uses of the thrice holy, which we find liturgically from around this same time period. And then there’s a prayer for protection or perhaps a declaration that the faithful wear is protected. The writing here is actually a little hard to decipher unfortunately. And then it closes with a clear reference to Philippians two, verses 10 to 11 about how every niche shall bend in heaven on earth under the earth at the name of Jesus, and every tongue shall confess his name.
So several things stand out. Remember this guy died somewhere between two 30 and two 70 because this is his grave. This is not when he lived. This is when he died and was buried. The man himself appears to be between 35 and 45 years of age like me ominously. And so he was probably born, we can just doing the math there. He must’ve been born seemingly between the years one eighty five and 2 25 at the latest. So this is quite early. And what’s more prior to finding this guy, the earliest evidence that we had was of a bishop of cologne in like three 13 going to the Senate of Rome. So we knew there must have been some Christians in this kind of German area because he wouldn’t have a bishop in a place. There weren’t any Christians, but we didn’t know much of anything about who they were when they showed up or anything.
So this guy has now moved that date earlier. Some future discovery may move it earlier yet, but the timing is also significant for another reason, as Gsu University points out, this is a time when Christianity is still illegal. This man was literally risking his life by wearing this around his neck at a time when being discovered with Christian items could mean being tortured and killed. So I want to take what we’ve just kind of found out with this and apply it to what we’ve already known. So I want to move now further south to the persecuted Christians in the very heart of the Roman Empire in the city of Rome who are down there in the catacombs, privately worshiping God in the celebration of the mass at a time when Christianity has been outlawed. The University of Oxford, working with the University of Warsaw and the University of Reading, which is a city, not just a university that teaches people to read.
They created a large online database called The Cult of Saints in late antiquity that it just games to gather together all of the early documentation, archeological evidence for what early Christian devotion to the saints was like from the beginning of Christianity up to about the year 700. And so in that database we find evidence of, well, there are hundreds of different inscriptions in graffiti. There’s a reason graffiti is an Italian word. It’s a long standing custom of writing on every available wall in Rome. And there are hundreds, there’s like 538 different known instances of graffiti in the catacombs. Not all of them are obviously saying the same thing, but among those 538, we find some pretty interesting things. But the catacomb in question here is beneath the basilica of St. Sebastian’s outside the walls. And this is actually really great because there was an ancient catacombs and then once Christianity was legalized, built a church right on top of where they’d already been going and worshiping.
And so that gives us a very clear strata when you go underneath the church and do the ancient catacombs as it we’re going back in time from before. The church is built in the mid three hundreds. And so that gives us a pretty accurate date range that when we’re looking at this graffiti, we’re looking at any things that seemingly couldn’t have been earlier than 2 44 based on some surrounding stuff. And they couldn’t have been physically later than 3 56 because there was a church there where they wouldn’t have been able to get in and write on the walls. We have a nice little range there, a little more than a hundred years. But the earlier part of that range is probably more relevant to our purposes because in the year 2 58, the Roman Emperor Valerian begins persecuting Christians. And in the midst of that, there’s some evidence from the chronograph of 3 54, which is also interestingly where we get evidence of December 25th for Christmas.
Leave it aside. The chronograph of 3 54 comes up a lot. And so in any case, it has this reference. It’s kind of cryptic about the Christians moving St. Peter’s body to the Church of San Sebastiano. And so that according to the chronograph happens in the year 2 58. So we are seemingly looking at mid two hundreds here, and it couldn’t be later than early to mid three hundreds. And what do we find on these Christian catacombs also, sorry, I should add one more thing. Another reason why we wouldn’t expect it to be later than the early three hundreds is Christianity is legalized. Once you’re legalized, you’re probably not going to continue to just celebrate in the catacombs on purpose. This was done for a particular reason because Roman pagans weren’t about to find you out in the cemeteries, in the graveyards, in the catacombs. So what do we find in the catacombs again, from maybe the 2 58 period or thereabouts?
We find a lot of prayers, particularly to St. Peter and Paul. Now that’s why I’m stressing that Peter’s body seems to have been moved there in 2 58 because it makes sense why you get so many references to Peter and Paul who are often invoked as a prayer. So you find these prayers like O Peter and Paul, keep in your mind, keep in your prayers and all. And Peter intercede for us all and save O Peter and Paul and Marus and save in the Lord and O Paul and Peter intercede for Victor O Paul helped my father o’ Paul and Peter, keep in mind, Oios, my son, those kind of things. A lot of these invocations to saints. The point I’m making here is that our German friend isn’t the only one with a devotion to a saint. This rather appears to be quite widespread among the early persecuted underground Christians.
Now, what are the implications of that? I think this upends the way many Protestants imagine devotion to the saints arrives in the church, by which I mean I think many Protestants imagine this happens much later, and I think they imagine this is coming from paganism that as Constantine legalizes Christianity or later when it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, they get all these pagans that become sort of half Christians and they keep worshiping their pagan gods, but they slap the name saint on there so that the Roman emperor doesn’t know about it. But that’s totally wrong because the Roman emperor wants you to worship pagan gods, and these are the people who are in catacombs because they won’t. So I think a pretty representative view is Dr. Gavin Orland’s. He over on Twitter or X claims that there was this slow process of accretion by which the surrounding pagan practice began infiltrating the church.
Until you see in the medieval prayers, excuse me, in the medieval era, you would have prayers that would’ve scandalized the church fathers. So again, I think that’s pretty fair as a representation of what many Protestants imagine. It’s not particularly precise. There aren’t a lot of names or dates or facts you could check. It’s just this kind of loose idea that slowly Christianity went bad and when, I don’t know, maybe the middle ages, maybe the dark ages, maybe if you’re a different type of person, Constantine or when Christianity becomes the official religion in three 80, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s just a slow process, that sort of thing. And then second, you’ve got that claim that you may have noticed Gavin just sort of throws out, which I’ve pressed him on, and I’ve never any clear evidence to support his claim. This idea that all of this somehow came from paganism.
Well, none of this as far as I can tell is true. We keep finding earlier and earlier evidence of Christians who have a devotion to the saints, which makes a slow accretion theory have a shorter and shorter time period. If you’re going to say, this happened slowly, well, it doesn’t give you a lot of runway when we find the oldest known Christian north of the Alps with a clear devotion to St. Titus and you find the Christians in the catacombs with devotions to Peter and Paul, and you can continue to multiply those kind of examples. I am reminded, for instance, there were skeptics of Christianity who would claim the New Testament texts couldn’t have been written by the apostles say, because oh, they were actually written in the second century, and then they were answered ultimately because we kept finding older and older manuscripts that showed that their theory just didn’t really work.
And so even though we have never found the oldest, we haven’t found the original autographs, maybe we don’t have them anymore. And similarly, we’re not going to find the first Christian to ever invoke a saint in their prayers. We see directionally this is getting earlier and earlier and earlier. And so the slow accretion theories become less and less and less plausible. Whether we’re talking about the slow accretion to get the Bible or the slow accretion to devotion in the saints, it just doesn’t work as you get less and less runway to imagine Christianity going bad. But then the second part, as I say, is this alleged coming from paganism. That makes sense. If you buy a slow accretion theory once it becomes a popular religion and you’ve got all these pagans who are just doing it to be cool and they’re lukewarm and all that totally makes sense.
That’s not what’s going on here though. These are the Christians in the catacombs. These are the Christians where it’s the lone Christian. We’re finding in Nita, he’s the one guy. The idea that he’s just lukewarmly accepting Christianity doesn’t really make sense. And so the idea this is coming from paganism becomes less plausible. It also becomes less plausible. By the way, if you know anything about the history of pagans and their interaction with prayer to the saints, the most famous example is from Julian the apostate. If you don’t know, he was a Roman emperor who despite being raised as a Christian, rejected Christianity and reverted to the ancestral paganism of the earlier Roman emperors, tried to bring the empire back to Paganism unsuccessfully. And he writes these nasty arguments against Christianity in a work called against the Galileans. And in there he actually mocks prayers to the saints on ironically much the same ground that many Protestants do.
His argument is that even the most virtuous men are inferior to the gods or a Protestant would say to God. And so therefore it’s a waste of time to pray to them. Why would you pray to these incomplete, impartial powers? That’s his argument. So it’s striking that this is not a concession paganism. The pagans didn’t look at the prayer to the saints and say, oh yeah, that’s just like what we’re doing with the gods. No, they rejected it because, and we understood human saints and Roman gods are not the same thing. There’s not a one-to-one equation there. This is not some kind of religious methadone where my devotion to the gods, I can just slap Saint in front of it and then keep calling. Now, I’m not going to call in Mercury, I’m going to call in Saint Mercury. No, it doesn’t work like that.
It doesn’t work like that historically. And we find clear evidence that the pagans were not cool with the Christian practice of Ukraine to the saints. This is as far as we can tell a distinctly Christian practice and a practice much older than you might’ve believed. So three final thoughts. Number one, devotion to the saints is not coming in any obvious way from paganism. Number two, it’s not some late or gradual arrival as far as we can see, but is present in Christianity long before say the ninth scene Crete. And number three, we’re just getting started. In other words, there’s no reason to believe this is going to be the earliest archeological find we ever have of somebody with an invocation to the saints. And so if you’re banking your objection to Catholic devotion as a saints on a slow accretion from paganism kind of theory, that’s going to get less plausible I think as we move forward because it’s gotten less plausible over the years as we’ve found more and more evidence that it just simply is not true.
So I’m excited by this. I hope you are too. And if you’re someone who’s maybe uncomfortable the saint, I hope you’re challenged by this and maybe a little more comfortable knowing the earliest Christians, the ones that you hopefully respect because of the authenticity and fervor of their faith, the people who are willing to die for their faith we’re totally cool asking the Saints for help. And they did it a lot. And we have the evidence to show that. And it seems much more plausible to say, we can trust those guys. They were holy and died for the faith rather than, oh yeah, that’s already pagan Christianity from long before the nice creed. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.