Alex SorinvsGnostic Informant

Sorin argued that early Christians venerated sacred objects, including portrait icons, and that this practice goes back well before the first few centuries AD.

Sorin pointed to the Old Testament tabernacle built to a pattern shown on the mountain, Hebrews describing the tabernacle as a copy of heavenly worship, and Psalm 138, where Israelites bowed toward the temple after God's presence had left it in Ezekiel 11.

Sorin cited Eusebius, writing around the 310s, describing a miracle-working statue of Christ that Eusebius called a tropaea, a Greek term for military victory monuments, which Sorin said is favourable language.

Sorin said Eusebius reports portraits of Christ, Peter and Paul that go back to the apostolic era, and that the Acts of John, dated to the 100s, already attacks Christian veneration of portrait icons.

Sorin cited the Anglican scholar Hugh Wybrew, who links icons to funerary portraits and says Christian images were garlanded and had lamps lit before them as early as the 3rd century, and said Protestant scholars also accept this.

Sorin said Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus refer to veneration of the imperial portrait, which he linked to 1 Peter 2:17's instruction to honour the emperor.

Sorin cited John Chrysostom's homily on Meletius, in which Christians gave the name Meletius to their children for protection and carved his image on rings, seals, cups and walls, which Sorin said shows the practice was established by Chrysostom's time.

Sorin concluded that enemy attestation in the 100s, Chrysostom at the latest, and the scholarship on the temple as an image show that the earliest Christians venerated icons, and that this practice is apostolic and pre-apostolic.

Gnostic Informant argued that early Christianity came out of Judaism, which at that time outlawed graven images under the Second Commandment, so that even coins carried no images of prophets.

Gnostic Informant said there are no surviving images of Jesus from the 1st or 2nd century, and that the oldest from the 3rd century come from Christian catacombs rather than churches.

Gnostic Informant said the earliest surviving venerated image is from a 3rd-century catacomb that was originally pagan and was later reused by Christians with biblical scenes.

Gnostic Informant said Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius all discuss a heresy of icon veneration using the word eikon, and that Hippolytus called Carpocrates' images of Jesus a heresy rather than a wrong way of making them.

Gnostic Informant cited Epiphanius in the 4th century, who on visiting a church in Jerusalem found an image of Jesus on a door and tore it down.

Gnostic Informant said synagogue images first appear at about the same time as Christian images, in the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Gnostic Informant argued that early Christianity should mean the 1st century and perhaps up to about 200, and that treating 3rd-century Christianity as early is not good methodology, since the Edict of Caracalla in 212 brought many new converts who already knew images.

Gnostic Informant said he does not argue that the church is wrong to have come round to icons, and that he thinks the iconoclasts were wrong and distinguishes idols from icons. The question, he said, is whether early Christians believed in icon veneration, and his answer is no.

Sorin said Irenaeus objected to the Carpocratians using images improperly, placing images of Christ beside pagan philosophers and figures in a way that differed from Christian practice.

Sorin said the Epiphanius letter survives in a Greek text that calls the Jerusalem image idolatrous and a Latin text that omits this, and that he regards the Greek as controlling, so Gnostic Informant was relying on the Latin.

Sorin said the lack of surviving early icons is explained by periods of iconoclasm and Roman persecution, including the Diocletian persecution, when sacred objects were confiscated and destroyed.

Gnostic Informant said the Epiphanius passage he cited is the Greek text, where the Jerusalem image is called an eikon, and that he was not aware of the idolatry wording Sorin attributed to the Latin.

Sorin said Tertullian's passages against images come after his conversion to Montanism, so they could be read as enemy attestation from someone who had left the faith.

Gnostic Informant replied that the Montanists were not far from the wider church at the time, being another wing of the church, and that he did not think they differed from Orthodox Christians on images.

Sorin said Tertullian converted to Montanism around 200 and was already a Montanist when he wrote against Praxeas and against images, so he was not writing as an Orthodox Christian.

Sorin said early writers did not describe worship in detail because Christians withheld the mysteries from outsiders, and that Basil, in the mid-to-late 300s, says they did not write the mysteries down so as not to profane them.

Sorin said Gnostic Informant had made concessions about the 200s, and argued that because the first attested veneration is from the 200s, the practice must have started 50 to 70 years earlier, in the 100s, so the ambiguous period is about a century.

Gnostic Informant said he is not arguing that the iconoclasts were correct and that he understands the difference between idolatry and icons. His main point is that a dominant attitude against images, inherited from Jewish practice from the Maccabean period, carried into early Christianity.

Gnostic Informant said the oldest surviving image of Jesus dates to about 235 from Roman catacombs, and that the only earlier item is pagan graffiti mocking Jesus with a donkey's head, so the gap should be explained by the attitude against images.