The ante-Nicene Christians were not usually iconoclast in the sense of opposing all religious art whatever. It is true that a few early Christians (like Tertullian or Clement of Alexandria) were more rigorously aniconic. But from at least the third century we also find paintings on tombs in the catacombs, symbolic engravings on lamps, carvings on furniture, (eventually) sarcaphogi, and so forth.26 The primary concern of the early Christians was the cultic uses of images that were so ubiquitous in the surrounding pagan culture. Their wholesale rejection of such practices formed a distinctive
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