Early christian usage

[angell1]

incense, candles, statues.

were they used?

i thik incense were used relatively late? why is that.

what about the early church fathers on statues and candles?

 

[irenaeuslyons]

On incense:

The Jews who served in the temple used incense as linked below.
Link

Also, in the book of Revelation linked below, the prayers of the saints rose to heaven as incense. It is likely, St. John was describing something very familiar to him in the liturgy. Also, the ancient liturgy of St. Mark the Evangelist uses incense.
Link

 

[patrick457]

incense, candles, statues.

were they used?

i thik incense were used relatively late? why is that.

what about the early church fathers on statues and candles?

I can only give a short answer. I’m focusing on images.

To sum, early Christians did have images* (the earliest images which we could definitively identify as Christian appeared somewhere about AD 200), but at first their reception was far from universal. Some Christians - particularly from the ranks of the clergy - didn’t like images at all. (In other words, image-making was more the preserve of the laity.) Sure, there’s the whole issue of the ban against graven images and stuff, but the main reason why these people weren’t in favor of imagery was due to the association of images and image-making with paganism. Already by the mid-3rd century, however, we have evidence of changing attitudes and by the next century, religiously meaningful paintings began to occur in Christian contexts, although there were still some ‘iconophobes’ here and there. Only after paganism was longer a competing presence did Christian reception of images become almost universal, because there was no longer any memory of an association of them nasty pagans with art.

So it’s really gonna depend on which Father you’ll read. Some (such as St. Gregory of Nyssa or St. John Chrysostom) were lenient towards images, others (like Eusebius or St. Epiphanius of Salamis) just didn’t like 'em.

• When I say ‘images’ you should really imagine something like paintings (on walls or panels), mosaics, or reliefs instead of statuary. There’s only a handful of early Christian statuary - people avoided them then for the same reason as I mentioned above: three-dimensional sculptures reminded them too much of the images of emperors and Greco-Roman gods, so Christians at first stuck with two-dimensional media. (That’s also the same reason why the East developed icons.) We western Christians only got statues because the medium was reintroduced during the early Middle Ages, when the memory of pagan statuary was no longer vivid.

 

[judynurse]

There are images (icons and pictures) painted in the catacombs of Rome, many dated pretty reliably to the 2nd Century and a few which are very likely from the first Century, when the Christians met and had Mass in the Catacombs due to the persecution by the Romans when it was simply not possible to build a Church (it was against Roman laws at the time, outside of the Temple in Israel and a few pagan temple which still stood in Greece). They sure wouldn’t have been allowed to build a church for Christ in Rome itself! As to candles, have you ever read the story of the Maccabees? They used lamps with oil in them in the Temple, and even poor homes had a dish or two with oil in them and a wick for light. Wax candles just weren’t used then. That occurred later. Probably the earliest Churches to be built had lamps also. As the poster above stated, statues came later, when they were no longer so closely connected with the pagans. The Apostles were Jews, so of course, they wouldn’t carve a statue. They did have symbols though, – the fish was one of the first ‘symbols’ used by Christians. The Crucifix came later, after the Romans, basically. It would be the equivalent of having a representation of the electric chair to you. For the earliest believers, the Cross was an instrument of death and used by the Romans for executions. It took awhile before they began using the Cross as a symbol and longer before actual Crucifixes were carved.

 

[dmar198]

incense, candles, statues.

were they used?

i thik incense were used relatively late? why is that.

what about the early church fathers on statues and candles?

I’ve never looked up candle usage in the early Church before. I suppose they would have had to light up dark church rooms somehow, though, and candles were one of the technologies they had for doing that.

As far as incense goes, there is lots of evidence of early Christian usage of incense. Incense appears being offered to God the Father in the Book of Revelation and to God the Son by the three wise men in Matthew chapter 2. There is good evidence the early Christians followed these examples. In the second and third centuries Christians frequently quoted Malachi 1:10 as a prophecy that Christians were fulfilling, and it mentions the offering up of incense by Gentiles to God. In the fourth century incense use is mentioned as part of the Liturgy in both the east and the west.

As far as images go, the earliest evidence of Christian imagery appears in the New Testament. The Book of Hebrews says that there were images of cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant and that these foreshadowed the religion of Christianity. There is evidence that early Christians used images for similar purposes, so that may be what the author is referring to. Also, St. Paul possibly mentions an early crucifix in Galatians 3:1.

In the second and third centuries, various Church Fathers mention how images may be used to honor God. St. Irenaeus mentions this several times, and Tertullian testifies that Catholics carved images of the Good Shepherd onto chalices that were used in commemorating the Lord’s Supper. We also have archeological evidence of early Christian imagery because we find Christian imagery in the Catacombs that date back to the 200s. By the fourth century Christian imagery is extremely common and can be found on banners of the Roman army, on coins of the Christian emperors, and in iconography in the major churches. Also, several of the passages of the Bible are described in vivid detail that paints a mental picture in the minds of listeners. It is only a natural development of this that these vivid descriptions would be painted. Thus, Christian imagery goes back to the New Testament and developed from that source.