Scientists baffled by mysterious coin linking Vikings to Jesus

A shocking discovery has unearthed an apparent link between Vikings and the teachings of Jesus, rewriting what historians assumed about the spread of Christianity 1,200 years ago.

A person searching for possible treasure with a metal detector in the UK’s county of Norfolk recently found a small, incomplete gold coin which had been turned into a pendant.

An analysis revealed that the coin was from the late ninth century, likely between the 860s and 870s AD, a time when Vikings had just conquered the kingdom of East Anglia in eastern England and were establishing control over the region.

Strangely, this coin displayed the face of a bearded man with the Latin word ‘IOAN,’ which is short for John.

The other side had a partial Latin inscription that appeared to read ‘Baptist and Evangelist’ after being translated to English by experts.

Although Vikings of this time were thought to be mostly pagan during this era, worshipping the Norse Gods such as Odin and Thor, the strange coin has opened up a mystery, suggesting that Vikings actually turned to Christianity decades before historians currently believe.

Moreover, the image of John the Baptist, Jesus’s cousin who often prepared the masses for his arrival in the Bible, was considered a shocking find.

Coins from this century in Western Europe typically displayed the portrait of kings or emperors, not religious figures.

The discovery is believed to be the first coin or piece of jewelry unearthed in Western Europe from this period to feature Saint John the Baptist.

John has been a major figure in Christianity since the time of Jesus. He was not only Jesus’s cousin, but was said to be the person who baptized Jesus in the River Jordan.

Early Christians considered John the Baptist as a bridge between the old Jewish prophets and the new Christian faith. By the ninth century, he was already a well-known saint across Christian Europe.

Despite his widespread notoriety, pictures of saints or Jesus were a more common sight of the Byzantine Empire, in present-day Turkey and parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

However, the mysterious coin’s origins have created an even greater puzzle, as coin historian Dr Simon Coupland suggested the maker of the pendant may have been a Viking who already converted to Christianity.

Coupland told the BBC: ‘These imitations of gold solidus tend to be made by Scandinavians, who are not Christian at this point – so what are they doing depicting John the Baptist?’

‘A figure of John the Baptist on a coin is so unusual and remarkable – I don’t know of another John the Baptist from the Carolingian period; it’s bizarre – it’s not like anything else I know.’

Until now, it was believed that the Vikings arrived in the present-day UK as pagans in the late eighth and ninth centuries – matching the age of the coin. After the tenth century, historians have claimed many settled, married locals and converted to Christianity.

The gold imitation coin has now marked one of the earliest and strangest pieces of evidence that the two worlds may have overlapped and influenced each other far earlier than records have shown.

However, the pendant does not provide definitive proof any or even some Vikings had switched from worshipping the Norse Gods to following the teachings of Jesus in the late 800s.

As Vikings both raided and traded with communities across Europe, the pendant may simply reflect a piece of cultural contact, trade, plunder or a Viking’s personal curiosity rather than a full religious conversion.

The unusual coin is not the first piece of jewelry to change what present-day researchers know about the history of Christianity.

In 2024, scientists announced the discovery of a tiny 1,800-year-old silver amulet found in a Roman grave near Frankfurt, Germany.

The amulet, dating from around 230 to 270 AD, contained an 18-line Latin inscription that repeatedly referred to Jesus as the son of God and included a direct quote from the Bible.

It was the oldest known purely Christian artifact ever found north of the Alps, pushing back the confirmed history of Christianity in that part of Europe by 50 to 100 years.