Few disciplines have been more
marked by repeated, competitive ideological investments from generations of
Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars than the study of the early Church. In
the case of ancient Christian art, the excessive Protestantism which determined
the pure faith of both late ancient Judaism and early Christianity to have been
aniconic, probably anti-iconic, even iconoclastic before the third century AD
has been rightly corrected. But the current consensus on the enthusiasm of
early Christians for art is probably also excessive. Despite the uses made of
images by some third-century Christians – especially in Rome, to judge by our
surviving archaeological evidence – Christianity never raised images to the
level of scripture itself. This is in specific contrast to the stance taken
by Mani (216–76) whose Picture-Book appears to have had canonical status
in a universalizing salvific and scriptural religion that deliberately borrowed
from, and adapted many features of, Christianity and was designed to be in
direct opposition to it. Moreover, the strand of opposition to images within
Christianity – an opposition on the one hand to pagan practice as well as some
of ancient polytheism’s more complex intellectual discussions of art (such as
Dio Chrysostom’s Olympian Oration, for example) and on the other to
Manichaean visual scripture – remains a feature of some theological attitudes
to art up to and including the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm in the eighth and
ninth centuries. We may say that within the range of early Christianities, the
use of art (largely to support burial, liturgy and scripture – never to replace
any of them) represents one option, an option which remained predominant
(though occasionally challenged) within the forms of Christianity that won out
after the Edict of Toleration. (Jaś Elsner, “Graeco-Roman and Christian art in
late antiquity,” in T&T Clark Handbook of The Early Church, ed.
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli; John Anthony McGuckin; Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski [London:
T&T Clark, 2022], 351-52, emphasis in bold added)
