Epiphanius of Salamis and the cult of images
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | A small corpus of writings against images, formed by three long texts - the letters to the emperor Theodosius and to John bishop of Jerusalem and the so-called Tractatus contra eos qui imagines faciunt - and two minor passages, has been attributed to the name of Epiphanius, who was bishop of Salamis (Cyprus) in the second half of the 4th century. Within the horizon of the Early Christian literature, these texts are quite exceptional, since they discuss the issue of Christian images in length and they seem to anticipate the arguments of the Iconomachs in a truly astonishing way. Such anachronistic character and the fact that the iconophobic fragments are preserved only within sources tied to the Iconoclastic Controversy (except for the letter to John of Jerusalem, translated into Latin by Jerome) aroused an extensive and still open scholarly debate about the authenticity. The current paper intends to examine these iconophobic writings focusing particularly on a crucial issue, namely the explicit mention of image worship, a phenomenon that, according to some recent and authoritative studies on Iconoclasm, developed not earlier than the late 7th century. The comparative analysis of the texts attributed to Epiphanius and of other testimonies assigned to the end of the fourth century or to the first half of the fifth can shed further light on the iconophobic writings and on the origins of the Christian cult of images. |
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