Before the Rosetta Stone came to light, no one in modern times could read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Napoleon’s French soldiers discovered the stone in El-Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt, in 1799. It is a large fragment of a stela, a sort of tombstone-shaped slab, which was once placed in a temple of Ptolemy. It bears a lengthy inscription written in three versions: in hieroglyphic, in demotic (another Egyptian script), and in Greek. It was the parallel Greek version of the inscription which allowed scholars, most  notably Jean François Champollion (1790-1832) shown at left, to correlate a known language with the Egyptian text, and thereby crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The French ceded the Rosetta Stone to the British by the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria, in 1801. Consequently, this important artifact rests today in The British Museum, London.
       Once the Rosetta Stone had enabled scholars to decipher hieroglyphs, it unlocked the vast history of ancient Egypt for modern scholars. Thus, the Rosetta Stone has become a metaphor for a “key that breaks a code or solves a mystery.”
        It is our contention that Jesus of Nazareth is The Rosetta Stone of Life. Apart from Jesus Christ, life is only an illusion for the eastern mystic, and for the western skeptic life is a brief hurrah at best and a cruel joke at worst: life just does not make sense. However once the person and work of Jesus are understood and embraced, the believer finds the purpose and meaning we all seek and can begin to unlock the big questions of life. This contention is not simply another modern interpretation of Jesus’ life, nor only a subjective testimony from one of the many who have found real answers through Jesus, but a clear inference from Christ’s own words. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” Let Jesus unlock life’s mysteries for you.