If Christians had their own cultic use of images in worship, they could have simply said that. They were perfectly capable of articulating, had they wished to do so, a distinction between bad (pagan) cultic use of images and good (Christian) cultic use of images. Instead, they said that Christians are “those who have rejected all images and statues” (Origen) and have “no acknowledged images” (Octavius) and that “there is no religion wherever there is an image” (Lactantius), and so forth. It is impossible to fathom that such statements could be made if in fact the early Christians were bowing
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