Images and icons in the early church

Pictures and images of Christ and the saints, and whether they are allowed in churches. Part of Worship.

Acts of John 26Anonymous · ca. 150–200 · Lycomedes has a painter secretly make a portrait of John.
Acts of John 27Anonymous · ca. 150–200 · John discovers that Lycomedes honours his portrait with garlands, lamps and altars.
Acts of John 28Anonymous · ca. 150–200 · John sees in a mirror that the portrait resembles his body, but not his true self.
Acts of John 29Anonymous · ca. 150–200 · John urges Lycomedes to paint his soul with the colours of the virtues instead of a portrait of the body.
Dialogue with Trypho 94.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · God forbade images, yet commanded the bronze serpent.
Exhortation to the Greeks 4.47Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · The most famous statues of the gods have known makers and materials; even the “heaven-fallen” Palladium was made from bones.
Exhortation to the Greeks 4.51Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Statues have less sense than the lowest animals; they are dead matter shaped by craftsmen, while the true God is known by the mind.
Exhortation to the Greeks 4.53Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Fire has destroyed famous temples, a foretaste of judgment; and the sculptors modeled their gods on their lovers and on courtesans.
Exhortation to the Greeks 4.57Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · The statues display the gods' disgraceful characters, and art has even led men to fall in love with stone; admire the art, but do not mistake it for truth.
Hortatory Address to the Greeks 34Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Even the human shape of Greek statues of gods comes from a misreading of "Let us make man in our image".
On Idolatry 4Tertullian · ca. 196–211 · The law forbids making idols as well as worshipping them, and Enoch, Isaiah, and David all condemn those who make idols together with those who worship them.
Octavius 32.1Minucius Felix · ca. 197–250 · Christians have no images or temples because man is God's image and the world cannot contain him.
Against Marcion 2.22Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The ban on images targets idolatry, so the bronze serpent and the cherubim on the ark do not break it; and when God rejects sacrifices he is rejecting worship offered without faith, not contradicting his own law.
Refutation of All Heresies 7.32.8Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Some souls finish all sins in one life; the sect brands its disciples' ears and keeps portraits of Christ said to be made by Pilate.
Against Celsus 3.34Origen · ca. 248 · Origen rejects Celsus's comparison of Christian worship with the hero cults of Zamolxis, Mopsus, and others: Christians build no temples or statues but, through Jesus as mediator and high priest, pray to the God over all.
Against Celsus 4.31Origen · ca. 248 · Against Celsus's claim that the Jews were insignificant runaways, Origen praises ancient Israel as a shadow of heavenly life: worshiping one God, banning images, prostitutes, and effeminacy, with just judges and Sabbaths devoted to hearing God's law.
Against Celsus 7.41Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus points Christians to unnamed inspired poets and philosophers; Origen asks how Orpheus, Homer, or the philosophers are better guides than Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, who teaches both the learned and the simple.
Against Celsus 7.62Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus says Christians' refusal of temples and images is shared by barbarian peoples and taught better by Heraclitus, and that Christians contradict themselves by saying man is God's image.
Against Celsus 7.66Origen · ca. 248 · Even pretending to worship images, as some philosophers do, misleads the crowd; Christians do not picture the invisible God, and man is “according to God's image” in the virtuous rational soul, not in bodily form.
Against Celsus 8.17Origen · ca. 248 · Christians do have altars, images, and temples: the righteous soul is the altar whose incense is prayer, and the virtues formed by the Word are images of God, far surpassing Phidias's Zeus, and best of all in Christ.
Against Celsus 8.18Origen · ca. 248 · The virtues formed in Christians are living images in which God's Spirit dwells, as God promised to dwell in the righteous; unlike statues, they last as long as the soul wills.
Against Celsus 8.20Origen · ca. 248 · The righteous are the precious stones of God's temple; Christians refuse pagan altars, images, and temples not as a secret sign but because Jesus has shown them the true way of piety.
Against Celsus 8.38Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus imagines Christians mocking statues, but God's law forbids reviling even the gods; the real harm to atheists who deny providence is not bodily but blindness to the Creator.
Against Celsus 8.41Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus taunts that the gods punish blasphemers while Jesus' executioners went unpunished and his Father abandoned him; Origen answers that Christians revile no one, not even statues or demons.
Canon 36Anonymous · ca. 306 (disputed, ca. 295–314) · No pictures are to be painted on church walls, so that what is worshiped is not depicted.
Against the Nations 3.16Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If the pagans shape the gods in human form merely for honor, they insult them, as men would be insulted by statues of themselves with animal faces.
Against the Nations 6.1Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius turns to the charge that Christians have no temples, images, altars, or sacrifices, which true gods would not want.
Against the Nations 6.8Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If the pagans believe in the gods, they do not need images; if they doubt, images of doubtful beings are pointless.
Against the Nations 6.9Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Worshiping gods through images is like praying to one being while addressing another, a senseless substitution.
Against the Nations 6.10Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Images cannot be true likenesses of gods whom no one has seen, as the human-shaped sun, moon, and winds, and a lion-faced god, show.
Against the Nations 6.11Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The pagans mock ancient aniconic cult objects yet worship human-shaped statues, and defend by force what they privately know to be absurd.
Against the Nations 6.12Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The gods' statues are distinguished only by the attributes artists give them; exchange the attributes and no one could tell which god is which.
Against the Nations 6.13Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Statues of gods were modeled on real people, even prostitutes and a sculptor's boy-lover, which shows the images are human products.
Against the Nations 6.14Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Idols are made from base materials by human craftsmen, so it is madness to worship them as gods.
Against the Nations 6.15Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Raw materials are not worshiped, and shaping them into human forms adds no divinity to them.
Against the Nations 6.16Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Statues are hollow assemblies of metal and wood, decaying and fouled by vermin and birds, which shows they contain no divinity.
Against the Nations 6.17Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius asks whether the gods, supposed to dwell in statues by dedication, enter them willingly or by compulsion, and why they would prefer clay to heaven.
Against the Nations 6.18Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If gods dwell in statues, they are either imprisoned in them or come and go, and they must shrink, stretch, sit, or run to fit each statue.
Against the Nations 6.19Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · One god cannot be present whole in thousands of statues at once, nor divided among them.
Against the Nations 6.20Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If gods lived in their statues, they would not need locks, guards, dogs, and geese to protect them from thieves.
Against the Nations 6.21Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Temple robbers like Antiochus of Cyzicus and Dionysius of Syracuse stripped statues of Jupiter and Aesculapius unpunished, showing that no gods dwelt in them.
Against the Nations 6.22Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Even when statues of Venus were violated by lovers, the goddess did nothing, which shows she was not present in them.
Against the Nations 6.24Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The claim that images were made to frighten the crowd into virtue is refuted by the continuing prevalence of crime, even against temples themselves.
Against the Nations 6.25Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius lists the attributes of the statues of the gods, none of which could frighten anyone into virtue.
Against the Nations 6.26Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The attributes of the statues could frighten no one; it is laws and punishments, not images, that restrain crime and even protect the images themselves.
Church History 7.18.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · A bronze statue group showed a kneeling woman and a man reaching out to her; a healing herb grew at its base.
Church History 7.18.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · The statue was said to depict Jesus, and Eusebius saw it himself.
Church History 7.18.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Eusebius notes that painted portraits of Paul, Peter, and Christ existed, a custom from pagan practice.
Recognitions 5.23Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · The true image of God is man, honored by works of mercy and violated by murder, adultery, and every injury, not by images of stone or wood.
Divine Institutes 1.11.27Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · If Jupiter were the one God, only his image would stand in the temples.
Divine Institutes 1.11.28Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Images of goddesses and of Jupiter's lovers prove he was a man.
Divine Institutes 1.11.29Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The temple images, like Ganymede and the eagle beside Jupiter, confirm the poets' stories.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.3.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius asks whose likeness the idols actually represent.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.3.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The images plainly represent dead men, not elements.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.7.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Porphyry claims that statues express the invisible gods in visible forms, which the ignorant mistake for wood and stone.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.7.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius calls Porphyry's symbolism a modern sophistry and cites Plutarch on the earliest images.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.8.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plutarch says the earliest images were of wood, since stone, gold, and silver were thought unfit for gods.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.9.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · No image could adequately portray such a god.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.10.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · If the visible world could not be imaged, still less could the divine mind.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.10.15Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · A statue cannot resemble even the human mind, much less God's.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.10.17Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Since the human mind cannot be depicted, no man-shaped image can depict the most high God.
Preparation for the Gospel 3.10.18Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The statue of Zeus imitates only the lifeless body of a mortal man.
Preparation for the Gospel 8.8.25Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · No image of God may be made.
Preparation for the Gospel 9.6.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Clement: Numa, taught by Moses' writings, forbade images of God.
Preparation for the Gospel 9.6.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · For 170 years Rome had no images of the gods.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 53.2Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · God needs no temple, image, or lamps.
Demonstration of the Gospel 5.9.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · A painting at Mamre shows the three guests with the greater one in the middle, the Savior; the next heading introduces Jacob.
Theophany 3.39Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
Life of Constantine 1.3.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 337–339 · Human monuments, paintings and statues are perishable and cannot portray an immortal soul.
Letter 360Basil of Caesarea · ca. 357–378 · A confession of faith in the Trinity and the incarnation, with the invocation of saints and the veneration of their images, presented as an extract from a letter of Basil to Julian.
Commentary on Romans 1:23Ambrosiaster · ca. 366–384 · Ambrosiaster lists examples of idolatry, Babylonian, Egyptian and Israelite, to show the folly of those who changed God’s glory into images of men and beasts.
Letter 51.9Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Epiphanius tells how he tore down a painted curtain bearing an image in a village church, sends a replacement, and warns John against the Origenist Palladius.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 27.6.9Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · They keep portraits of Jesus said to be made under Pilate.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 27.6.10Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · They venerate images of Jesus beside philosophers.
Sermon 316.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · A painting in the church shows Stephen stoned and Saul keeping the clothes; Saul, made Paul by God's will, now reigns with Stephen, and Augustine asks both to pray for the Church.
City of God 4.9Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine turns to Jupiter as the supposed author of Rome's greatness, noting Varro's view that the one God worshipped without images is Jupiter under another name, and Varro's criticism of images.
City of God 4.30Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine cites Cicero's Balbus, who condemns the fables and images of the gods yet cannot separate Rome's ancestral religion from superstition.
City of God 4.31Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine shows that Varro privately rejected the popular gods, thought religion purer without images, and came near to believing in one God governing the world.
City of God 6.7Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine argues that civil religion contains the same indecencies as the stage — the sacristan who diced with Hercules, the rites of Attis and the castrated Galli — so the two theologies cannot be separated.
City of God 6.10Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine quotes Seneca's lost treatise Against Superstitions, which mocked the civil cults more boldly than Varro, but faults Seneca for still practicing what he condemned.
City of God 7.5Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine reports Varro's claim that the images of the gods symbolize the world-soul and its parts, and argues that even this natural theology reaches only the soul, not the God who made the soul.
City of God 7.8Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine mocks the interpretation of two-faced Janus as the open mouth and of four-faced Janus as the four quarters, ending with Christ's word 'I am the door.'