“God Jesus Christ”: Words That Survived 1,800 Years

Some discoveries are impressive because of their size. Others are powerful because of a few words.

Somewhere around the year 230, a small group of Christians met in a room beside a Roman army base in northern Israel. There were no cathedrals. No stained glass. No crosses rising above the city. Christianity was not the religion of the empire, and would not be for another hundred years. These were people meeting in an ordinary building to worship, to pray, and to remember Jesus.

And in the floor beneath their feet they left words that outlived every one of them.

Hidden beneath a prison

In 2005, an archaeologist named Yotam Tepper was working beneath the grounds of Megiddo Prison in the Jezreel Valley. Under the modern buildings he found the remains of an ancient hall, and its floor was covered with a mosaic that had survived almost perfectly.

At first it might have looked like more ancient decoration. Then came the inscriptions, and the inscriptions named people.

A Roman centurion, Gaianus, who also went by Porphyrius, had paid for the mosaic out of his own pocket. A craftsman named Brutius had laid it. And a woman called Akeptous had given the community its table. The Greek reads, in translation, that Akeptous, the God-loving, offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.

Those four words are the reason people travel to see this floor. To God Jesus Christ.

Before the cathedrals

That is what makes the discovery so moving. The hall was built before Christianity was legal in the Roman Empire. Before the great churches. Before centuries of Christian art. Before any of this became something people associated with power.

Here instead was a small gathering. A serving officer of the Sixth Legion, who is called simply “our brother” on the floor he paid for. An artisan. A woman with enough standing and enough means to buy the table the community gathered around. People whose names would otherwise have vanished completely.

And at the centre of it, Jesus. Not only as a teacher. Not only as a figure from the past. Their own inscription calls Him God.

It is worth being careful about the date, because the scholars are. The excavators put the hall at about 230 based on the coins, the pottery and the style of the Greek lettering, which is why people describe the mosaic as roughly eighteen hundred years old. Some researchers argue for later in the third century or the beginning of the fourth. Either way it is remarkably early, and either way it comes from a time when saying this about Jesus cost something.

For anyone who believes today, there is something humbling in that. Our faith did not begin with us. Long before we were born, in a world that would be unrecognisable to us, people were already putting their trust in the same Jesus.

Faith leaves traces

The people who made that mosaic could never have imagined us. Not cameras, not museums, not screens, not someone on the other side of the world reading about their small worship room. They almost certainly did not think that anyone eighteen centuries later would know their names.

But they left something behind. Akeptous gave a table. Gaianus paid for a mosaic. Brutius set the small stones into the floor one by one. Ordinary acts, and they became part of history.

It makes you think about how easily we underestimate small acts of faith. A prayer whispered before bed. A child taught one verse. A meal shared with somebody who is struggling. A person quietly choosing to forgive. A believer who keeps trusting God when nobody is watching.

We tend to assume faith matters most when it is visible. Perhaps some of its deepest work happens quietly.

“My Lord and my God”

Long before that mosaic was laid, the Gospel of John records Thomas standing in front of the risen Jesus and saying:

“My Lord and my God!”

John 20:28

The Megiddo mosaic does not prove the resurrection. It does not prove Christianity. Archaeology cannot make faith compulsory, and it should not be asked to.

What it does show is something historically striking. Very early Christians, in a room next to a Roman garrison, were already saying openly that Jesus is God. Sometimes people talk as though belief in the divinity of Jesus was a later invention, something that arrived with emperors and councils. Yet here is a physical object, made long before Christianity had any power at all, carrying that belief in stone.

That is worth stopping to notice.

God was there before us

There is something else this discovery makes me think about.

Sometimes we live as though faith depends entirely on our own strength. When we get tired, we worry that faith itself is fading. When we struggle, we wonder whether the whole thing is slipping away.

Then you look at a floor that lasted eighteen hundred years. The people are gone. The empire that ruled them is gone. The building came down. The room was buried. And the words remained.

That does not mean objects preserve faith. People do. God does. Generation after generation. And perhaps that is the larger reminder, that we are part of a story which began long before us and will continue long after us.

The names on the floor

One of my favourite details is that the mosaic does not only speak about theology. It remembers people.

Another panel simply asks the reader to remember Primilla, and Cyriaca, and Dorothea, and also Chreste. Four women. We know almost nothing else about them. Their community wanted them remembered, and somehow, eighteen centuries later, we are doing exactly that.

Their lives may have looked ordinary. Their names survived anyway.

Perhaps there is something in that too. You do not have to become famous for your life to matter. You do not need thousands of people to know your name. God sees the lives that history overlooks. He sees faithfulness that never becomes a headline. He sees the person who keeps showing up, the person who serves, the person who believes quietly, the person whose small acts of love turn out to be part of something much larger than they understood.

Faith beneath our feet

The mosaic was lifted, stone by stone, and it is on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington until the end of this year. A faith that once existed in a small room under the Roman Empire is visible again, and anyone can go and stand in front of it.

The most beautiful thing about it may be how simple it is. They gathered. They worshipped. They gave what they had. They remembered Jesus. And their faith left a mark.

Maybe ours will too. Not necessarily in stone. Perhaps in a child. In a family. In a person we encouraged. In someone who found hope because we refused to give up on them. In a prayer whose answer we may never live long enough to see.

We never really know how far one faithful act can travel. That ancient floor gives us a reason to wonder.

If you have children at home, Daniel and the Lions’ Den tells them the same thing in words they can hold: God is with you, even in the places where being faithful costs something.

A prayer

God,

Thank You for the people who believed before us. For those whose names we know, and for the many whose names history has forgotten but You have not.

Help us to live our faith sincerely. Not for recognition. Not to be remembered. But because You are worthy of our trust.

And when our own lives feel small, remind us that faithfulness can leave traces we will never see.

Help us to pass hope, truth and love to the generation that comes after us.

Amen.