What I am saying is what I was taught in high school
history class, but it may be true to reality.
Christianity was born in a mixed culture,
part Greco-Roman but
part speakers of semitic languages, such as Aramaic and Hebrew, who historically were not users of images in their worship, at least not in the ways that the speakers of Greek and Latin, and for that matter
Egyptian dialects, were.
Islam was born in a different and more homogeneous, largely desert-dwelling group of cultures, which
had at most only marginally participated in the image-rich cultures of ancient
Mesopotamia,
Egypt,
Greece, and
Rome. The tendency to episodes of
iconoclasm in Christianity
comes with the Bible and its writers, who, even in the
Greek books, apart from Luke and Paul,
had had little involvement with image use in religion--and Paul, that candid, rather dear
man, certainly was troubled about such differences.
When we use terms such as Judaeo-Christian, not only does this imply the combined Hebrew and Greek Bibles but also the conversion, remarkably, of a world in which images were as pervasive as they are today.
Pat L.
