Before reading this post - read THIS article that came out today that is about a three year old boy who found a golden locket in England.
The pendant is a huge find!
When I was in Bulgaria, my team and I could only dream of finding something of that caliber within the grounds of the monastic complex. There was a story circulating about that had to do with a fellow who discovered a dolium, in Britain, that contained a massive amount of Roman coins at the bottom of it. Click the link here for the actual story. Though we did have some incredible finds (including a coin, the dog skeleton, and some other items), we never "happened" upon anything worth millions of pounds. But the part that makes my brows descend is the other archaeological team in Bulgaria that found an untouched crypt on an island just off the coast (St. Ivan Island), which purportedly contained actual bits of bone from St. John. Though, that's not monetarily worth as much as pieces of the True Cross and Crown of Thorns, it means a whole helluva lot to the tourist industry of Bulgaria... and I wasn't apart of it. :-(
At least as of yet.
However, let's think about the fact that these huge finds seems to happen in Britain more than any other place… First off, the island of Britain has seen considerably less war and even less war-torn landscape than other places that were more active areas of the Roman Empire. So, naturally, there is a greater opportunity to unintentionally run into giant finds like this gold pendant. Though the Anglo's, Roman’s, Pict’s, and Briton's themselves did traverse the land, the frequency/scale of the marauding was not as traumatic as the marauding on the Danubian frontier.
Secondly, the pendant dates back to only the early 16th century. Yeah, right. Suurrreeee it once contained bits of the True Cross and Crown of Thorns. I feel that they give this pendant more credit than it deserves. There is no way that a treasure of this magnitude would go unnoticed, or "lost", or moreover... end up in Britain. The actuality of these items should to be accurately valued with a grain of salt. The Shroud of Turin, after all, would have been better off to the spiritual community had it not been carbon dated to the middle of the 1350's (+/- 100 yrs). In fact, the other team of Bulgarian archaeologists that discovered the St. John site are purposely not dating the items in question because, on the realistic side, they are afraid to discover that the items are really from some commoner that died during Justinian's Plague in the 540's. Nonetheless, I don't mean to harp on the kid's discovery. The fact that the kid found an item from the early 1500s is historically huge in its own right. The article is just catering towards the wrong historical topic. The pendant speaks of a time when the greater world Christianity also included Britain (pre Church of England). Notice how Catholic the item looks (emphasis on the cross, symbolizing suffering -the floral design, etc.). And most archaeologists never find anything that amazing on their sites anyway because they are digging in place where people have filtered through for hundreds of years - i.e. everything of great worth has already been taken.
One last thing, that's not Jesus depicted on the pendant holding the cross. Take a closer look. It's a saint of some sort, sure, I'll bite, but I’ll bet that it is not Jesus. Think about it. When in history have you ever seen Jesus without a beard? I can tell you, because I actually have encountered this question before, that there is only one case in which an adult Jesus does not possess a beard, and it is in the case of the Arian sect of Christianity. Like the Monophysites centuries later, the Arian's were ousted as a heretical sect of Christianity that was deemed unorthodox by the Ecumenical Council of Nicea in the year 325AD. However, as it so happens in history, the Roman's did sometimes attempt to get their enemies to convert to their religion in order to build a diplomatic relationship of some sort. And the objection of Arian doctrine within the Orthodox Church happened after the Romans converted the Goths from paganism and adopted this particular form of Christianity - which was fashionable at one time. So, incidentally, when the Goths (Visigoths and Ostrogoths) moved westward into Western Europe, they brought with them this Arian form of Christianity. Eventually, the sect was phased out. But to this day, when you go to places like Ravenna, in Italy, you'll always know when you're in a Arian church when you see mosaics of Jesus clean shaven (because they emphasized Christ's physical humanity).
So, the pendant could either be a certain saint who is carrying their own cross (many saints experienced this Roman form of torture).. or it could be an Arian depiction of Jesus which would ultimately say a lot for the interconnectedness of the antique world - and should be looked into further!!!! Either way, I guarantee that the kid will now be an archaeologist when he grows up.
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