Chapter 12　Stories in Stone

What would you call men who went around with hammers and broke all the statues they could find?You would probably say they were crazy and should be locked up.

You would be right, and they would be locked up today. But long ago around A.D.800，such men were not deemed crazy and no one tried to lock them up.They broke statues because they thought statues were too much like idols and that idol worship broke God's commandment“Thou shalt not make graven images，”or pictures of God.They thought a church especially should not have such idols or images in it.

In the Greek language, an image is called an icon and these men were called iconoclasts, a word that means image smashers. They smashed a great many statues, paintings, and mosaics, and the poor artists had to move away from the cities where the iconoclasts were if they still wanted to make statues.Sometimes the artists were hunted down and killed.

The Greek church discussed the smashing, burning, and painting over of icons for more than one hundred years. You may think this is amazing, but after a period of one hundred years, icons were fully accepted and even encouraged by the church.

Here's how it happened. Religious leaders said that if Christ were God taking the form of a man on Earth, to deny having a picture of him as a man would be the same as to deny