A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

This raised a further possibility for Christians. They could not contemplate altering the total number of ten in the Commandments, which had been foundational for Judaism since at least the Deuteronomic period (see pp. 60–61), but they might renumber the Commandments. A renumbering would involve tucking the graven-image prohibition inside Commandment One, rather than making it a free-standing Commandment Two (that meant dividing up the Commandment against covetousness at the end of the sequence to preserve the number ten). This was the conclusion drawn by Augustine of Hippo, and in it he was followed by the entire Western Church down to the Reformation, when some (but, as we will see, not all) Protestants returned to the question and pointedly began numbering the Decalogue once more in the Jewish fashion, thus justifying their deep hostility to traditional ecclesiastical art (see pp. 618–19).