Transcription
This is really, I think, particularly damaging to Gavin's case because while Gavin's definition of veneration is kind of inchoate, it's not very well defined. The one thing that seems to be consistent and what he identifies as veneration is this sense that the image constitutes a link between the worshipper and that thing which is signified, right? So he often refers to it, icons as windows to heaven. That's what he says has to date from the late seventh century or at best the sixth century. And folks, this is in Gavin's own sources. This isn't some obscure book that, you know, you really have to go far afield to find. This is in the book that Gavin has pointed to multiple times.
So in Dr. Orland's response to you and Michael Garden, he introduced a word, equivocation. And I, I would, I would like to introduce a word, and that word is called contextomy. Not a very pretty word, is it? Um, bonus points if you can get that reference. Contextomy is, uh, it's like an appendectomy, only with context. So instead of an appendix, you're removing context, right? But where an appendix is useless, this context was, is actually functional and useful. So contextomy is removing a passage from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. And it's my contention that there, in a couple of very acute cases, that, um, Dr. Orland built his case on a couple of fairly clear cases of contextomy. We're going to look at a couple of those right now.
Yeah, this is going to be about three instances in the MyComies. We're going to look at Paul Corby Finney, Robin Jensen, overall misrepresentation of the source text and the thrust of the source text, the, uh, MikComre Anthology, and the, like I said, the overall misrepresentation of the state of mainstream scholarship. So let's look at the first one. Um, so this is the introduction. Uh, this is the preceding, this is, this is the voice of Dr. Orland, uh, prefacing a quote he's going to, uh, present of MyComre. He says, "MyComre, in his outstanding article in this more recent book, if you want to get a really recent view overview of both the historical evidence and the scholarship, what he concludes is that," and this is the quote that he brings up. This is a screenshot from, from his video. He says, "What the iconoclasts were reacting against was the recent from circa 680 transformation of images of Christ and the Saints into icons through which the holy person could be manifested. Any mentions of icon veneration before this point are either interpolations or referring to the apopha images, which were relics."
Now, if that sounds a lot like what I just summarized as being Leslie Breaker's revisionist argument, to be like, that's because it's exactly what Humph is doing here. He's not advocating. This is not his conclusion at all, which is very clear from the preceding paragraph. This is in the context of the long summary of the scholarship that Humph is giving. Even though he's speaking in something like his own voice here, he's really recounting. It's very, very clear from the text that this is not my conclusion at all. This is MyComre summarizing not only someone else's position, but a position that this whole volume, as we saw, is about to push back on. So the impression given here that MyComies agrees that the more likely date is 680 for the emergence of veneration is just, it's just false. It's not what the text says.
So you see, like, one, one paragraph up from that particular quote, you see MyComre introducing the section where he's summarizing Brewbaker and Halden, not his own viewpoint. So he says, "While Brewbaker and Halen did not adopt all of Spec's," so he just summarized Paul Spec, he had just summarized Marie Francine, right, the two of the more skeptical scholars that led up to the Breaker Holden thesis. Um, and here he segues from that summary of Paul Spec into the Breaker and Halden summary. And this is the sentence where he's introducing that quote that Gavin Orland mistakenly attributes to to to MyComre. He says, "While Brewbaker and Halen do not adopt all of Spec's conclusions and nuance others, they do endorse the majority and they weave these together with the work of others, including AAP, both on iconoclasm and Byzantium in general during the period." And then he begins that section where, uh, Dr. Orland pulled that quote and mistakenly thought it was Mike Humphrey's making his own conclusion.
He also talked, he, you know, this is in his, I believe this is his first video. Yeah, this is the first video. Um, I actually ended up pointing this out to Dr. Orland and in the comment of the second video, and he, he pointed me back to his first video. He says, "Well, MyComre actually says this in other places too." So, you know, basically he responded, says, "Show me where he doesn't say this." And so I went back and looked at the first video. Um, and he says, "MyComre refers to quote a long scholarly tradition dating the rise of the icon from relative obscurity to ubiquity to the sixth and seventh centuries." And yes, MyComre does note that long scholarly tradition. As, as we've seen, there is a long scholarly tradition of doing that. But when we restore the full context of that, here's the full context: "Study of the sixth and seventh century Christian Roman art is overwhelmingly focused on icons with a long scholarly tradition dating the rise of the icon from relative obscurity to ubiquity to this period at least in the Mediterranean. However, as Benjamin Anderson tells us, this attention to the icon is not a fair reflection of what actually happened at the time. If one were to judge the period entirely on its own merits, other changes were more obviously significant, such as the ending of the production of statuary."
Well, something like that. I, I have to believe that, uh, that Gavin has picked that quotation up from someone else who was transmitting it because the context is so clearly inverting the sense that he puts on it. Yeah, yeah. Again, we're not describing motive or anything here, but it's, you know, the, yeah, either you, either someone else mined this, like pulled this quote for you and and missed, missed the context themselves, or you just missed the full context of the quote and and kind of did a contextomy.
Okay, so then we've got another quote from Humph from the same introduction. "What strikes a neutral reader of Na's florilegium," again, the bouquet, the selected quotes, "what strikes a neutral reader of Na's," this is Na 2, and this is, uh, yeah, this is still, this is still MyComre's, "what strikes the neutral reader of Na 2's florilegium, their own selected quotes, right, the iconophile Council of Na 2, is the relative paucity of its evidence." So he, what the quote is saying here is that the iconophile Council of Na 2 in 787, it, their selected quotes, their bouquet of patristic sources, is relatively thin. The compilers could not find any church fathers explicitly supporting icons. But let's add the context back. "What strikes a neutral reader." So I'm going to put this quote back up again. "What strikes a neutral reader of Na's florilegium is the relative paucity of its evidence. The compilers," that is, the Nicaean II fathers, the iconophile, uh, fathers at Nicaean II, "could not find any church father explicitly supporting icons." And look, there's a period here. Except that's not how the sentence reads in the actual text. Let's read the last sentence in the full context. "The compilers could not find any church father explicitly supporting icons, comma, as none had, not necessarily because they objected to images, the iconoclasts also struggled to find significant patristic support, but because it was not then an object of debate."
So the full context says that they both struggled to find patristic support, which is consistent with the, the Mary Charles Murray and Paul Corby Finney objections to that, the florilegium that comes out of Council of Nicaea and is collected again by Hugo Koch. We see that there's been significant pushback against the idea that there was, and even, even Richard Price to some degree talks about both sides struggled to find support from, quote, "the Golden Age of the Fathers" to support either the iconoclast or iconophile position.
So now let's, let's widen our gaze a little bit, a little bit, and look at the volume as a whole. Um, this is the, this is a snapshot of the table of contents from the MyComre volume. These are the first two essays in Part One. The Part One is "Images Before Iconoclasm." So you can see there's, I think, four sections in this, maybe five. And the first one has two essays in it that address the question at hand, which is images before iconoclasm. What we find in the Robin Jensen, and this is Robin Jensen. She, Robin Jensen is a very, very visible figure in this, in this conversation. She's at Notre Dame. She's written a number of books. Um, and she's one of the prominent scholars in this field. Jensen, uh, in, in most of her volumes, I know that at least in, uh, her book, *Idols to Icons*, and also *Face to Face*, which is about portraiture, the emergence of the portraiture tradition in the early church, she endorses explicitly and enthusiastically endorses Mary Charles Murray and Paul Corby's rejection of early Christian aniconism and the treatment of the apologists to in order to prove the early church was aniconic. And Jensen, uh, brings a real theological sophistication to this that's, um, kind of sets her apart from a lot of the scholars in this field because she, she really can go in and and deal with Clement, deal with Origen, and look at the theological context. Um, and so in both of those two volumes, they're both really, really good. Uh, if you're interested in this, her writing is very approachable, very clear, it's, um, very accessible. Both *Face to Face*, and, uh, *Face to Face* again, the portrait, the, her history of early Christian portraiture, which is really important for her, and I'll, I'll touch on that in a second, but also, um, *Idols to Icons*, which is early Christian attitudes towards art in general, she dates the veneration of the emergence of Christian portraiture, dates veneration to the emergence of Christian portraiture in the late fourth century. So her argument is that, um, once portraiture emerges, then prayer to that saint through the image is inevitable. It's implied. Um, because she says that once you move from the narrative kind of Old Testament art where you've got Jonah or Moses or Isaac being sacrificed, which are more narrative contexts, when you present a figure only as a portrait, there's really no other purpose. There's no didactic purpose. Um, you know, there might be some decorative purpose there. But I would point out the decorative comes from the Latin *decor*, which is to honor or venerate. So to Michael, in your point, the simple act of painting a portrait is an act itself, an act of veneration, if you're going to, to decorate is to honor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the big thing about making that kind of distinction that there's, you know, uh, veneration over here and then there's commemorative over here is you've got to demonstrate that that distinction was framed in that way by the sources on which you're relying. Or well, and what we're going to see is that represents the, the, to my mind, as far as I can tell, that's the major break between what we're going to see in a little bit is this new emerging school of thought that comes out of, um, a guy named Jos Ellner. We'll look at him in a second, but they've really made a break from treating images as kind of these static footballs in an ideological fight, right? That image really is an unnuanced, passive participant in a historical and theological contest. Whereas what you see with Barber and Jos Ellner and Benjamin Anderson, they're like, wait a minute, the images have content. The images tell us. And Jensen does this too. I, you know, she kind of bridges the gap between the schools of thought. She's very much engaged with the traditional argument, but then with Jos Ellner, he just comes out with his essay, "Discourse of Images," and just reframes the whole thing and says, "Look, we're paying too much attention to textual sources." This, you see this in Benjamin Anderson too, we'll see in a second, but let's look at the images. Let's, and let's look at the historical context in which images were presented. They'll tell us a lot. Maybe they tell us the most important things. But we'll get to that in a second.
Okay, so, um, and here's, here's another, another case where I think, I think Dr. Orland misses, uh, something significant. He says, "Robin Jensen notes iconic portraits of Apostles, Saints, and Christ mostly appeared only toward the end of the fourth century." That is true. That is a, a key facet of our whole project. "They're still rare at this time, and they're definitely not venerated." That is not true. Robin Jensen is very clear. The veneration emerges alongside the portraiture. And we can see in, in her own essay in the, the MyComre anthology, "By the early fifth century, the value of religious narrative art for instructing viewers, or, or portrait images for facilitating prayer, veneration to a saint, seems to have been basically approved." This is like by the fifth century, just not, she's not saying it emerged in the fifth century. Since by the early fifth century, right, it has been basically approved by many, if not most church authorities, despite its potential for prompting adoration on its own terms. And this, this goes to her overall argument. And, and again, I would point to *Face to Face* and *Idols to Icons*. Um, and this is, this is a quote I found from a YouTube interview where she's, uh, probably as, as direct as any of the other quotes. "Is the development of the portrait at at the end of the fourth century emerges at a time where pagan cultic practices are going away and are no longer in any way threatening to Christians, and they start to develop an idea that you could actually pray to an image. This is clearly happening at the end of the fourth century and end of the fifth century." This is my emphasis, by the way. Um, Christians are no longer so worried about mistakenly venerating the wrong kind of thing or mistakenly venerating the wrong kind of, wrong, the wrong image of God. And so it's her, it's Robin Jensen, and it's kind of unique to her. This is her particular project to say that there was a hesitancy on the part of the early church to make portraits because prior to Constantine, prior to the, to, you know, it's 313 Edict of Milan and like the peace that emerged in the fourth century and the, the rapid falling away of pagan practices, um, the early church would have been hesitant, this is Jensen's argument, to make standalone portraiture because of its proximity to pagan veneration. This is not that different from the reasons, let's say, Orthodox, he doesn't do statuary to this day, right, by and large, right? Um, there was a, a good, a good interview I think with, uh, Max Mcconaughey with, uh, uh, Father Father Trenham, where he talks about that. There's a whole video recently where he talks about why Orthodox don't do statuary for similar reasons. But again, Jensen, first of all, she's dating the rise of veneration to, you know, a century and a half earlier, at least, than what Kit Singer allows for. So she's, there's some, there's more debate, right? So against Dr. Orland's contention that, quote, "there is no debate," there is debate in his own sources. And she dates it to, uh, again, the late fourth century, the 300s, late 300s. Um, she also, there is debate about the aniconism of the early church. She's not saying that the early church thought that art in worship was idolatrous at all. She pushes back on that because she endorses Mary Charles Murray and Paul Corby's rejection of that idea, right? She just said there was hesitancy to develop portraiture because of its proximity to pagan worship. And then she says, "During the last decades of the 20th century, scholars begin to challenge these judgments." She's talking about, um, the, the, again, the consensus that we're acknowledging exists. I mean, Jensen acknowledges it, Paul Corby Finney acknowledges it, Mary Charles Murray acknowledges that there is this long scholarly tradition, there is something like a mainstream consensus around the Kit Singer model. What, what I'm again, what I'm trying to show here is that the dissent against that position is significant. It's highly credible, and it's present in Gavin's own sources. That's what I'm saying. Not saying Gavin has no case to make. I'm not saying that there is no scholarly consensus. I'm saying that that consensus is not nearly as strong as he's, he's making it, and that the case against that consensus is is contemporary, it's highly credible, there's a lot of it, and it was present in his own sources. And so, yeah, and it, a lot of it starts in '77 with Sister Mary Charles Murray, who is fascinatingly enigmatic, by the way. If any, if anybody can find out any biographical background on Mary Charles Murray, the best I can find is she's, I think she's an editor now, like, I, it's, it's wild, like even her name is a little enigmatic. Is she a sister? Is she, she Catholic nun? Is she married? I don't know. Um, but, but she writes this one essay, and then she kind of, there's not much else about her, but she, massively influential essay that really inaugurates an era of pushback against, you know, it's a good 25 years after the Kit Singer article, nearly 25, it's 20, 20-ish, and it really inaugurates a separate school of thought, right, pushing back on the Kit Singer thesis. And then Paul Corby Finney, what we're going to see in a second.
Okay, before we get to Paul Corby, gotta put a button on the My, My Humphry volume. Benjamin Anderson writes the second essay. Benjamin Anderson's even more of a problem. He criticizes directly both the Singer model and the Breaker model, both the traditionalist, traditionalist and the revisionist model. He dates the veneration to at least the early sixth century and probably much earlier. So I'm going to rip through some Benjamin Anderson quotes here. "Scholars, both traditionalists and revisionists, have tended to treat the preserved narrative text as direct proxies for contemporary practice. And yet, as Jos Ellner rightly remarks, shifts in the level of textual noise regarding the cult of images need not and probably do not directly reflect reality. They could result from any number of different causes, in potion, yes, but also changing generic conventions and accidents of preservation." This is a, this is a pretty consistent type of criticism of the Kit Singer model. You see this in Porphyry, um, where just because you've got a text that says a thing doesn't mean it reflects reality, right? You need more than just a collection of quotes and texts. Um, you need, you know, sometimes, and this is the, the thrust of Benjamin Anderson's essay, is that the texts and the images operate in different spheres. Why are we privileging the text versus the images? The images tell us as much about the conviction, practices, and theology of the church as the texts do. That's, and we could rabbit hole in Benjamin Anderson's essay. It's a really, it's, it's a great, he makes some really great points. That, and this is consistent with another guy, Thomas Matthews, when he, he wrote a pretty well-received book. He's not a Christian, and he says some other pretty wild things, but his, his, um, basic argument is that the image are the leading, um, aspect of Christianity's victory over paganism. It's called his book is called *Clash of the Gods*, and he argues that it's images really that do the debate. It's the image of Christ in communion in the catacombs, just opposed to the conquering Zeus, the violence of the, the Pantheon, that really is the initial clash between Christianity and paganism. This is again, kind of, this is the school of thought, let's look at the images, let's look. And so Anderson, uh, he says, "These examples will suffice to introduce the fundamental challenge in relating artistic thought and practice in the sixth and seventh centuries to the emergence of the iconoclastic controversy in the seventh and eighth. It is, namely, necessary to abandon the line graph approach to the early centuries." He's, he's talking about Kit Singer's fever curve here. This idea, Anderson says, you can't treat veneration like the GDP of a country, like it gets to some, like critical mass and, you know, you have a, you have a, everything blows up and collapses. Like it's more complicated than that. It's geographically distributed, things could be reorganized, you could, and this is ultimately what Anderson's argument is, is that it wasn't the cumulative pressure of an amount of veneration that hits some, like red line. It was rather reorganization of images within temple context that created, um, the, that initiates Leo the Third's reaction against it. But we'd have to dive into Anderson's essay to get, get deeper into that. But, you know, the, the line graph, Kit Singer's line graph approach, and Brewbaker's line graph approach, one that seeks first to chart fluctuation in quote, "the power of images" by collecting attestations that preserve narrative sources, and then to identify approximate causes for those changes. It's like this idea that we're going to go find text and then try to infer the actual history and reality is problematic. "The second person, inscriptions provide evidence stronger still than the stories collected by Kit Singer of a widespread cultural understanding that an image can, to borrow the formulation of BBE and Halen, serve as an intermediary between the viewer and the holy person represented." This is a really, this is really a key argument of of Anderson. And, you know, maybe in another, another video we can dig into this, but Anderson does two things in his essay. One, he looks at the, the, the Council of Trullo, the Quinisext Council, as a key text because it can't be interpolated because we know the Quinisext Council was, was, um, not interpolated. And more importantly, the inscriptions on the images tell us what the intent, uh, what the relationship between the viewer and the images and the figures in the images are. Sometimes those inscriptions take the form of prayer, sometimes they address the viewer and invite them to consider certain things, sometimes they are dialogues between figures in the, uh, the, the art. And so he, he borrows this, uh, rubric, this categorization, for different types of addresses within the images. And, um, he makes a very strong case that, um, the, the inscriptions tell us what the longstanding relationship between viewer and image was.
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This is really, I think, particularly damaging to Gavin's case because while Gavin's definition of veneration is kind of inchoate, it's not very well defined. The one thing that seems to be consistent and what he identifies as veneration is this sense that the image constitutes a link between the worshipper and that thing which is signified, right? So he often refers to it, icons as windows to heaven. That's what he says has to date from the late seventh century or at best the sixth century. And folks, this is in Gavin's own sources. This isn't some obscure book that, you know, you really have to go far afield to find. This is in the book that Gavin has pointed to multiple times.
Yeah, exactly, right? And, and it's, it's the second of the only two essays in the MyComre Anthology that address the topic at hand, which is the status of images before iconoclasm, which both of which contradict his statement that there's no debate. The veneration occurred, emerged no earlier than the mid, the mid-sixth century. What Anderson says here is it's part of a longstanding, this is how the Greco-Roman world was, and the, and the Christian community inherited that. Paul Corby talks about this, that the contractors and the artisans that were used at the catacombs were Greek. They were, they were, they were not Christian, they were just simply hired, and they were using a repertoire of images and techniques that were all long-standing. Um, and I think you can see in the next, in the next slide. Yeah, you can see where Benjamin Anderson just lays it out explicitly. I mean, this is, this is the key quote, I think, in the whole MikHum's volume. Again, it's worthwhile to go and read that Benjamin Anderson essay because it's, it's just a great example of how we, we should go to the images themselves and see what they're telling us because they have content, right? It's not like, I think some people, you, I grew up in like Gavin's tradition, I was Baptist growing up, and I remember in Sunday school the flannel graphs, you know, that was like the, the, the little teaching you'd have little flannel, this is how old I am, right? Like, so before we had screens, we would have these little, put flannel, and you put little pictures of Moses and Isaac and stuff, and you move them around and you play, tell stories. I think that's kind of how people think about didactic art, right? That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about very intentional compositions that create relationships within the composition. Michael's done a great job of this, looking at, um, people pointing at a star, and is this, you know, Mary presenting Christ? Like these are, there's content in those images. It, it indicates a relationship, an economy between the viewer and the viewed. Um, and to, and to your point, I, I think this is where the key, the, you know, the key question lands, is like, what is the image? What is the, what does the image do? And what, how would that have been, how would an image have been received in the early church based on the cultural context, based on the content of the images themselves? What you see is typical. And like the, what you describe as Gavin's idea that there's this, uh, that the, the collapse between the image and the prototype would be sort of an extraordinary conceptual moment, right? That a viewer would imagine that the, the image is related to the thing it's pointed to is kind of this extraordinary magical thing. You see this same thing in Kitzinger and Breaker. They both talk about this, and that's, this is exactly how they date the rise of veneration. Where Brewbaker talks about the moment where the image becomes transparent. That's Brewbaker's repeated phrase. When does the image become transparent? That's her key question. For Kit Singer, one of the things he talks about is like, when does it become magical? And so you can kind of see this reductionist modernist prejudice, not only about images, but religion in general, right? There's this sort of animistic, they even use that phrase, I think Kitzinger even uses the word animistic at one point, right? That when, at what point does Christianity fall back on its animistic practices and see images as kind of talismanic, you know, magical technologies to telephone to the spirits? Like, I think that's, that's really the imaginative frame that Kitzinger and Breaker are inhabiting. And what you see with Anderson and, and Charles Barber and Jos Ellner, especially, like, no, it's not about magic. It's not about telephoning home to, you know, some saint. Like Steven, Gerald, and Peter Brown both talk about access to the holy, right? That was the thing. What Anderson and Barber and Ellner are pointing out is like, the relation, the natural posture of a human being towards an image is to participate. There's a limited participatory nature of every image to its prototype. It's the natural human response, you know, to a picture of a loved one, right? Is they're brought to mind, they're remembered. That simple act, the simple act of painting something isn't a, is a limited way of representing them. It's nothing extraordinary. There's not this major break between, you know, the early church had this sort of reductionist view of images that there were just these static, didactic, mute objects that played no other role. That's just not, that would not have been the culture at the time. That wouldn't have been natural to, to that. So you see indeed, rather than posit a choice between Kit Singer's tipping point, Baker and Ellner, and 680, again, is there no debate? No. Here's the debate. Between Kit Singer and Breaker, Baker, Anderson rejects both. He says instead of those two, we should consider the address to an agent through its representation as a near constant in the long-term history of Greco-Roman art. He doesn't even put an entry point on it. He's like, it's, it's there from the beginning.
So Paul Corby Finney, "Invisible God." We've talked about a few times. This is a came out in 1994. Um, Finney picks up, he looks at Mary Charles Murray's from 1977, criticizing this sort of florilegium, bouquet approach to collecting the apologists' quotes and framing them as being implicitly aniconic, um, towards Christian art. Instead, what Finney argues is that, um, well, let's look at, let's look at the way Gavin frames it here because this is very puzzling. It's, it's odd. I, I'm not sure exactly what to make of this quote from Orland, but he says, "Paul Finney has written an important book where he's referring to this consensus that all the scholarship says early Christianity is aniconic. But then, but there's the question of what precisely does it mean? What he's saying is it doesn't necessarily mean that all Christians oppose the usage of all art. What they're opposed to is the cultic usage of art, venerating it, praying to it." I, I don't know what to make of this summary because it's, it's almost a complete non sequitur to Paul Finney's thesis. Um, he does, I guess, refer to the consensus that all scholarship says early Christianity is aniconic, but he, it's not all scholarship. Like Finney is, is picking up Mary Charles Murray's dissent to this mainstream Kit Singer model. And Finney himself really plants a major flag on the ground for and elaborates extensively. And he really goes through, and if you want to read a great account of of the ideological, um, intent behind this quoting this anthologizing of the, the early church apologists' apparently aniconic quotes, the fines, the first chapter is like maybe 12 pages, it's really fast. And then there's two more chapters where he talks about how the apologists were dealing with Christian art, I mean, dealing with pagan art and pagan idolatry primarily. He makes a very compelling case, and Jensen endorses it, a lot of others endorse it. Um, Finney denies that aniconism was the general disposition of the church. This is fundamental to his thesis. The apologists' attacks were entirely focused on Greek art and pagan worship, not on Christian art or worship. Were they veer into, quote, "philosophical aniconism," as he puts it, it is to curry favor with the Roman elites who also disdained vulgar popular pagan practices. So it was part and parcel with the licentiousness of the, the ho poo, I guess, right? The, the popular pagan practices went hand in hand with sexual licentiousness, dishonesty, all of the stuff that St. Paul describes as going, going with it. Was in fact the case. And so what Finney's arguing is, and it's pretty clear that I, I think he's right, at least on some level, that the apologists were arguing to cultural elites who were more Neoplatonic and intellectually above the popular pagan practices, which were considered low, licentious, crude. What they're doing, what someone like Clement, Tertullian, Origen, doing is trying to establish better cultural standing for a hated and persecuted minority, Christianity, by appealing to the cultural elites and saying, "We're not like those ridiculous pagans. We are more like the sophisticates." Right? And this is consistent with Clement, Clement's at the school of Alexandria, right? He's, he's the one who really, not the very first, but like, he's the main figure that brings, uh, Platonism into Christianity. And his student Origen carries that forward, you know, quite, quite famously. And so, um, you can see that, you know, Finney's got a good case to make here. Um, he denies that it can be discerned from the catacomb art, at least. He's a long, long chapter on Callistus and Priscilla, both, that the catacombs. Um, but in, in his, the long examination he does, I've never seen footnotes like Paul Corby Finney. He, I mean, he has more footnotes than text, it's crazy. But, um, he goes through every image in Callistus and addresses what can and can't be discerned from it. And he flatly denies that you can decide whether it was symbolic, neutral, generic, or decorative. So I'm still, like, going back to Dr. Orland's quote here. I can't relate it to what I, I mean, if you've read the Finney, this is just a bit of an onus. Um, he's, uh, he's definitely not supporting Dr. Orland's argument, that's for sure. One of the key quotes from Finney is, "Anthology is not a history." In the end, Hugo Koch's *Bilder und Fragen* is a, this is the book that Koch puts this list of apologist quotes together, right? This bouquet of an, this anthologized apologist quotes that are designed to have this effect of painting the early church as aniconic, is a modern doxography of, of authoritative patristic testimonies carefully selected and arranged to illustrate Von Harnack's Hellenistic theory. Over time, the *Bilder und Fragen* became an influential monograph. Several prominent scholars accepted Koch's reconstruction, among them was E.R. Kitzinger. So that's just a little snapshot of Finney. He goes deep into the history of the late 19th century German, uh, ideas about early Christianity and how it influenced how we got to where the Kit Singer thesis is.
Lastly, so Jos Ellner, again, this essay, "Iconoclasm is Discourse." I mean, I kind of think of the Ellner essay as the counterpart to Kit Singer's essay because so many people are influenced by this essay. Robin Jensen cites it, Charles Barber cites it, Benjamin Anderson cites it. Uh, it's, it's a fantastic essay. He spent, um, what, from what he says, he spent about 25 years putting this argument together. Um, and it really, we could spend a whole other episode on that. But, but, um, what he says about this, this consensus, about you're going to talk about the consensus, the modern consensus is that "the attacks on idols by the early fathers and Christian apologists are primarily directed against pagan polytheist practices in the Greco-Roman environment rather than against the Christian cultivation of religious images." So this is the Paul, this is the Finney, Charles Murray argument that Jensen and, and Ellner are endorsing here.
Cool, real quick, I'll rip through this. I'm not going to get too deep into this, just a preview of maybe future. This is more into the realm of the positive case, right? So if we, we're not going to buy into the Kit Singer or the Brewbaker model, the traditionalist or the revisionist mainstream, what else do we have? I would like, I said, there's a really interesting confluence, and this is my, I'm kind of putting them together. I'm just a layperson, kind of as an independent, you know, reader of this stuff, but it seems to me that there is a lot of support for the idea that there's a Jos Ellner, Benjamin Anderson, Barber model. They, they quote it, particularly Ellner and Barber, and then Anderson is more recent, um, scholars coming along saying very similar things, contesting this use of textual sources, looking at images, putting images front and center, and looking at images to tell us what they mean and what the context would have been in which they were received, what the relationship between the viewer and the viewed really was. Um, here's just a few more outlier views with, this is the Mary Charles Murray, "Art in the Early Church" from 1977. Jos Ellner, these are the two big ones. I think the real seminal article is if you want to look at where the foundation of both the challenge to, um, this aniconic view of early Christianity starts with Mary Charles Murray's "Art in the Early Church" 1977. Jos Ellner, 2012, um, about a year after the Brewbaker volume comes out, he writes this essay "Iconoclasm in Discourse," and it's fairly recent, right? This is the last 15 years. Um, so it's still kind of cultivating, but it's a really, immediately became a very influential, um, influential essay. Ellner is at Oxford. Um, this, this is a catalog that Michael sent me, and I'm just kind of restating it from his research, but you can see these are more quote outlier views. Robin Jensen, image veneration likely by the late 300s. Ellner and Anderson, again, image veneration likely in the 200s. Scholars like Norman Zimmerman, Carl Kaeling, image veneration likely in the 100s. This is Thomas Matthews, who we talked about earlier, in *Clash of the Gods*. Scholars who favor veneration before 325 without the veneration wording: Robert Button, Bruce Longenecker, James Hall, Alan Faber, on and on. So you can see we've got a lot of resources to draw on here, um, to, to build a case from. If we're going to use mainstream scholarship, um, there's a lot to build on, there's a lot to work with. There is a debate. I would say to Dr. Orland, there is quite a lot of debate within your own sources and, and outside of those sources. Um, there's plenty of good reasons to think that, um, if we're going to do something as, I think we have to do this very advisedly, if we're going to submit something as fundamental as our, our spiritual formation to, you know, the mainstream scholarship, then we need to be very careful and very nuanced in the way we approach it. So there, there you go.
Well, thanks so much, Dave. I think this has been, um, a very powerful case. I think as far as you can really demonstrate anything, it's been demonstrated that Dr. Orland's use of his secondary sources leaves a lot to be desired. And so, um, I'd like to invite Dr. Orland to, um, engage with this. And of course, there's no, absolutely your thesis, right? You can, you can moderate it out. That doesn't, um, totally, yeah, clearly there's, there's mainstream debate. Like, clearly there is room for Dr. Orland's perspective. It does occupy, you know, as he says, the mainstream position. It's, it is the longest standing position, but, you know, as, as we've seen, there are other perspectives that are highly credible. Yeah, yeah.
Well, thank you so much, Dave. Um, this has been really illuminating. Um, and, and we look forward to having you back on the channel. That'd be great. Yeah, I think, I think the, the next thing to do is to start building the positive case. Yeah, and really elaborate that. So cool. Well, thanks so much, Sean. This was great. This was a lot of fun. Thank you.
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