Nicaea II Reconsidered: Pseudepigraphy, Contextomy, and the Problem of Ecumenical Reception

J. Neil Daniels

Introduction

When the bishops at Nicaea finished their work in October 787, they wrote to the emperors Constantine VI and Eirene that sacred images of Christ and the saints were to be fully accepted "as from the beginning God's holy catholic church inherited," as the originators of the church's teaching and the inspired fathers after them had laid it down in law. Their letter to the clergy of Constantinople said the same thing more compactly. The council had added nothing and deleted nothing, and what the church had handed down "from the beginning," by word and in writing, "includes representations in painted images" (Price, 38). That is a historical claim. It names a period, the apostolic age and the patristic centuries that followed, and it asserts that a practice was present there. Claims of that kind can be checked.

Richard Price's translation of the Acts, published in two volumes by Liverpool University Press in 2018 and reissued in paperback in 2020, makes the checking easier than it has ever been for English readers. Price is Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at Heythrop College, a Senior Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, and a priest of the Diocese of Westminster. He accepts the council. He also writes, in his general introduction, that the iconoclast contention that reverence toward images did not reach back to the golden age of the fathers, still less to the apostles, "would be judged by impartial historians today to be simply correct" (Price, 43). The Catholic editor of the council's own Acts has conceded the historical point on which the council staked its case.

This essay does not argue that the theology of icons stands or falls with Nicaea II's patristic citations. Orthodox and Catholic theologians ground the practice in the Incarnation, in liturgical tradition, and in the development of doctrine, and those arguments have to be met on their own terms. The question here is narrower. Price observes that the council measured ecumenical authority along two lines, which H. J. Sieben called the vertical (fidelity to the fathers and earlier councils) and the horizontal (the assent of the church in its full geographical extent), and that the Acts gave the vertical line sharper emphasis (Price, 49–50). The council claimed both for itself. It said the veneration of images was an apostolic and continuously received tradition, and it said its decree expressed the faith of the universal church. Following the lead of Andrew Messmer's brief critique, what follows tests each claim against the council's own evidence, drawing on Price's commentary, Ernst Kitzinger's classic study of the pre-iconoclast cult, and Thomas Noble's work on the Carolingian response.

The Vertical Claim: A Tradition "From the Beginning"

What the Council Cited, and What It Could Not

The Acts contain no iconophile text earlier than Athanasius (Price, 39). Price is careful to add that this was ordinary conciliar procedure. Constantinople II (553) cited no pre-Nicene authors either, and Constantinople III (680–681) managed only a handful of passages it wrongly believed to be early. By the eighth century "the fathers" meant the champions of the Nicene faith, and no one expected proof to reach behind 325 (Price, 39–40). The absence of pre-Nicene texts is less damning in itself than it first appears. What it does mean is that the council's "from the beginning" was an inference drawn backward from the fourth century, and the inference was weak at both ends.

Behind the fourth century, Kitzinger found no literary source before 300 that would lead a reader to suspect Christian images beyond the most laconic symbols. When Christian art first drew written comment in the early fourth century, the comment was restrictive: the Council of Elvira ruled that there should be no pictures in church, lest what is worshiped and adored be painted on the walls (Placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere, ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur), and Eusebius refused Constantia's request for an image of Christ (Kitzinger, 86 nn. 5–6). The fourth-century writers who defended images at all defended them as instruction for the unlettered (Kitzinger, 87). The first literary notice Kitzinger could find of proskynēsis performed before painted images comes from the first half of the sixth century, in an uneasy inquiry from Julian of Atramytion to Hypatius of Ephesus about what should be tolerated in churches (Kitzinger, 94). The earliest evidence of image veneration actually presented at Nicaea II came from the Life of John the Faster, written shortly after 610, and from lives of Theodore of Sykeon and Symeon Stylites the Younger composed in the following decades (Price, 42). Price dates the rise of veneration earlier than skeptics such as Brubaker and Haldon (Price, 4). Even on his reckoning, the practice the council called apostolic enters its own dossier in the seventh century.

Pseudepigraphy

Where the golden-age fathers were silent, spurious texts filled the gap, though fewer than one might expect. Price identifies a long narrative attributed to Athanasius about a pierced image of Christ at Berytus that bled and worked miracles, which he thinks arose in seventh-century polemic against Jews, and a single clear forgery of iconophile origin: a letter from Basil of Caesarea to Julian the Apostate (Price, 41). That letter supplies the only sentence in the council's patristic dossier that says what the council needed a golden-age father to say. "Basil" honors and reveres the features of the saints' images "especially because this was handed down and not forbidden by the holy apostles, and they are portrayed in all our churches" (Price, 41, citing 314). The one text asserting apostolic transmission is the one text no scholar attributes to its author. Price adds that the spuriousness of both works would have been as obvious to Byzantine iconoclasts as it is to modern readers (Price, 41).

Spurious material also reached the council through Rome. Pope Hadrian's letter to the emperors, read at Session II, invoked the Silvester legend to show that churches had been painted since Constantine's conversion (Price, 158) and cited the Basil letter (Price, 71 n. 256). The letter of Gregory II to Patriarch Germanos read at Session IV carries an interpolated iconophile section (Price, 64 n. 223). Neither Hadrian nor the Franks knew the Basil letter was spurious (Price, 71 n. 256). None of this shows that the council fathers forged anything. It shows that the tradition they received had been padded, and that the padding sat exactly where genuine evidence was missing.

Contextomy: Basil and the Prototype

The council's most important authentic citation was Basil's sentence that the honor paid to the image passes over to the prototype (On the Holy Spirit 18.45). Basil was defending the worship of the Son as the natural image of the Father: one honor, because one Godhead. Price's judgment on the whole cluster of such texts from Athanasius and Basil is that each argued for the worship of Christ as the Father's image, and "none of them addressed the question of images made by hands" (Price, 41). This is contextomy in its textbook form, a quotation lifted from the setting that governs its meaning and made to support something that setting does not. A maxim about intra-Trinitarian honor may be capable of analogical extension to a painted panel, and Theodore the Stoudite later built such an extension on the single hypostasis of Christ (Price, 45 n. 159). That extension is an eighth- and ninth-century argument. It cannot serve as evidence that Basil practiced or approved the veneration of icons, which is the use the florilegium made of him.

The misreading had consequences inside the council. Commenting on Basil in Session IV, John the synkellos concluded that there are "not two venerations but one," of image and archetype together (Price, 45). The council never formally adopted his position, but Price notes that it fit the ritual facts, since the prostration, lights, and incense offered to icons were the highest ritual honors the church had devised (Price, 45). Basil's sentence, detached from the Trinity, pulled against the council's own distinction between the lesser veneration of honor owed to images and the worship owed to God alone. Price, following Hans Georg Thümmel, calls the resulting tension a contradiction that neither Nicaea II nor the later iconophile theologians resolved (Price, 49 n. 170).

Disqualifying the Witnesses

Two fourth-century authorities stood squarely against the veneration of images, and the council disposed of both without answering either.

The anti-image writings attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis were dismissed in Session VI as forgeries (Price, 432). Their authenticity is still disputed, and calling it settled would overstate the case. What can be said is that modern scholarship has not vindicated the council's dismissal with anything like unanimity. Price reports that Thümmel judged the defense of authenticity to hold the field, and he remarks that a forgery of this extent and quality would be a stylistic masterpiece beyond anything the eighth century is known to have produced (Price, 40 n. 148). Kitzinger declined to adjudicate the disputed fragments but observed that even the most skeptical scholars did not doubt Epiphanius's opposition to religious imagery, which his undisputed writings secure (Kitzinger, 93 and n. 29). The Refutation read at Session VI then undercut itself. In arguing the texts spurious it quoted Epiphanius's letter to Theodosius, where he complains that he had often urged his fellow clergy to remove the images and they would not listen, a sentence Price calls manifestly no iconoclast forgery (Price, 432). A council that pronounced a witness forged while quoting a line that confirms his testimony had classified its evidence before weighing it.

Eusebius received harsher treatment. His Letter to Constantia refused the emperor's sister an image of Christ on the ground that the glorified Christ cannot be portrayed. Session V answered with passages from his letter to Euphration proving him an Arian and with a fifth-century critic, Antipater of Bostra, faulting his doctrinal precision (Price, 382, 403–406). The letter itself does not appear in the Acts. Price argues that it must have been read, since otherwise the sudden need to prove Eusebius heterodox makes no sense, and that its text was then suppressed from the published record, whether at first publication or in a later revision (Price, 403 n. 84). On the substance he is blunt: the letter is a classic expression of early Christian reserve toward realistic portrayals of Christ and the saints, and Eusebius's semi-Arianism is irrelevant to it. No one is known to have criticized Eusebius as a quasi-Arian before Nicaea II, and Price suspects his Nicene troubles were dug up because Hiereia had cited the letter (Price, 382). Frances Young's verdict on his Christology, that Eusebius was "Arian in tendency" while never accepting the Arian conclusion that the Logos was mutable or made from nothing (Young, 16), shows how blunt the council's instrument was. It also cut both ways. Once Eusebius had been declared a heretic, the council could not use his favorable references to images, such as the statue at Paneas, which John of Damascus had cited freely (Price, 406). A witness to Christian practice was answered with an attack on his Trinitarian theology.

The letter of Nilus of Ancyra, which recommended aniconic decoration for a church, met a third method. The iconophiles produced a different, iconophile version of it. Price judges the iconoclast version the more plausible, while trusting neither completely (Price, 40).

The Construction of an Artificial Consensus

Taken together, these moves produced a patristic record in which every hostile witness had been reclassified: Epiphanius as forged, Eusebius as heretical, Nilus as rewritten. Meanwhile legend, hagiography, and late or spurious letters entered as evidence for antiquity. The unanimity that resulted was an artifact of the sorting. Kitzinger read the same centuries differently, as an undercurrent of iconoclasm running through the whole history of the church from its aniconic beginnings to the eighth-century explosion, with practice repeatedly outrunning both opposition and theological defense (Kitzinger, 85–87). Price notes that some prominent churches remained aniconic, Hagia Sophia among them (Price, 15 n. 69). He grants that the golden-age passages collected in the iconoclast Horos of 754, which taught that the true image of a saint is the imitation of his virtue, are authentic enough, that many more could have been added, and that the fathers of that age did not speak of venerating images (Price, 432).

The iconoclasts overplayed their hand, and fairness requires saying so. Their florilegium argued that the fathers deplored images altogether, which let the iconophiles answer with genuine texts: Gregory of Nyssa weeping before a painting of Isaac's sacrifice, Chrysostom noting with approval the popularity of portraits of Meletius of Antioch (Price, 42). Chrysostom knew such images and did not condemn them, though he attached little importance to them (Price, 264 n. 106). The iconophile victory on this point was real. It refuted a claim the council did not need to refute and left untouched the claim the council needed to make.

Production, Use, and Veneration

Three things need separating: the production of Christian images, their devotional use as aids to memory and prayer, and their cultic veneration by bowing, kissing, incense, lamps, and petition. Evidence for the first does not establish the third. Price states the gap plainly. The iconophiles produced fourth- and fifth-century texts that mention religious images without disapproval, and one may suspect the devout often prayed before them, yet "no single passage from any of these fathers gave an explicit stamp of approval to such veneration" (Price, 41). The Horos of 787 shows the same slippage. Its positive reasons, that images confirm the reality of the Incarnation and stir memory and devotion, are in Price's words sound points that "tell us nothing about the propriety of venerating images" (Price, 44).

Gregory the Great held the line between use and veneration in his second letter to Serenus of Marseilles in 600. He praised Serenus for forbidding the adoration of images and rebuked him for smashing them, since pictures stand in churches to instruct the unlettered and not to be adored (Price, 71). A pope could approve the first category and forbid the third in a single sentence.

The strongest objection to this distinction comes from Thümmel, whom Price endorses. In late antique piety there was no clear boundary between setting up an image and venerating it, so the very existence of icons is prima facie evidence of cult, though Price adds that deductions from physical objects remain speculative (Price, 6). The point has weight, and it should restrain confident Protestant readings of the catacombs. It does not supply what the council claimed, which was a law laid down by the fathers and a practice handed down by the apostles. And Thümmel himself noted that this blurring was what Epiphanius saw coming: he refused to settle for images that were set up but not adored, because he judged the one would become the other (Price, 6 n. 27). Historians of the period, Price included, fault Kitzinger for folding apotropaic uses and miraculous images into the category of veneration (Price, 2). The categories are the historians' own.

The Argument from Silence

The Refutation in Session VI argued that because the six earlier councils had not condemned images, they had accepted them (Price, 460 and n. 137). The inference would make every uncondemned practice of the eighth century conciliar. The one earlier canon that did address images, Canon 82 of the Quinisext Council (692), ordered that Christ be depicted in human form in place of the lamb, and later iconophiles found it more useful than the Acts of 787 (Price, 63). It prescribes depiction. On veneration it says nothing.

The Strongest Case for Nicaea II

Defenders of the council have better arguments than its florilegium, and three deserve a hearing. The first is christological. The God who cannot be circumscribed became visible in the flesh of Christ; to depict that flesh is to confess it, and the prohibition of Exodus 20 concerned the invisible God. The argument is old. Kitzinger shows that Eusebius already had to answer it in his reply to Constantia (Kitzinger, 93 n. 29). The second concerns the prototype. Because honor passes through the image to the one depicted, the veneration of honor (timētikē proskynēsis) differs in kind from the worship (latreia) owed to God alone, a distinction the iconophiles drew from Anastasios of Antioch's reading of Matthew 4:10 (Price, 44). The third is developmental. The church may articulate what the apostolic deposit implied, and a late attestation no more condemns icon veneration than the late appearance of homoousios condemns the Nicene Creed.

Grant each argument for the sake of discussion. None of them establishes the council's historical claim. The christological argument, if sound, justifies depicting Christ. It says nothing about kissing an icon of Saint Nicholas, and Price, again citing Thümmel, notes that veneration of images of Christ is far less attested in actual practice than veneration of images of the Virgin and the saints (Price, 48 n. 169). The prototype argument explains what veneration would mean if the church practiced it; it cannot show that the church of the fourth century did, and the distinction it protects was, as we have seen, unstable within the Acts themselves.

The developmental argument is the serious one, and the council did not make it. Price describes the iconophile view of Christian history as "virtually a denial of history" in favor of a religion perfect from the first and needing no addition or subtraction (Price, 43). A council that announced it had added nothing and deleted nothing (Price, 38) cannot be defended as a council that developed doctrine without revising what it said about itself. The stakes were not small. Among the anathemas appended to the Horos is one against those who do not kiss the holy and venerable images (Price, 73, citing 577). The Libri Carolini answered that no one is saved by adoring images apart from faith, while countless saints enjoy heaven who never possessed or adored an image (Price, 73). A developed practice might be permitted. Nicaea II made it a matter of communion and justified the demand with a history that its own evidence does not bear out.

The Horizontal Claim: The Faith of the Universal Church

The Council's Own Test

Nicaea II supplied the criterion by which its ecumenicity should be judged. The Refutation of Hiereia read at Session VI denied that council ecumenical status because the pope had not collaborated with it and the oriental patriarchates had not accepted its decrees (Price, 49, citing 442). Hiereia had called itself the seventh ecumenical council without legates from Rome or the East, and Constantine V had not even invited the pope (Price, 25, 65). Nicaea II measured Hiereia by participation and reception. It can be measured the same way.

The Eastern Patriarchates

Two presbyters, John and Thomas, claimed to represent Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. Price states that they had certainly not been mandated by the patriarchs they claimed to represent (Price, 25), and his commentary on Session III goes further. The dossier read there included Tarasios's synodical letter, a reply from anonymous "high priests and priests of the east" explaining that Tarasios's envoys had been kept from the patriarchs for fear of the Arabs, and an old synodical letter of Patriarch Theodore of Jerusalem dating to about 767. Price judges the anonymous reply most probably concocted in Constantinople by Tarasios and the two synkelloi after their arrival, notes that trustworthy evidence points to good relations with the caliphate at the time, and treats the request that three patriarchs send only two representatives as a post factum alteration (Price, 199–201). John and Thomas look more like refugees who arrived at a convenient moment; Thomas became archbishop of Thessalonica, and John was still in Constantinople in 795 (Price, 202). Jerusalem was represented by a letter twenty years old (Price, 202–203). The accurate statement is that only Rome and Constantinople possessed direct patriarchal representation.

Reception in the East followed the same pattern. A century later Photios told the eastern patriarchs that the Arabs had made it so difficult to send them the Acts that they had been following the council's injunctions without knowing them to be the council's, which Price reads as an admission that the patriarchs neither knew nor recognized it (Price, 204). For centuries Nicaea II was absent from the lists of ecumenical councils in Syria and Palestine. The Melkite conciliar synopses and canonical collections omitted it, and in the twelfth-century inscriptions honoring the councils in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, every council is commemorated in Greek except Nicaea II, whose inscription is in Latin, the work of Latin clergy using a Western synopsis (Price, 204). Price concludes that the gap between the proclaimed unanimity of the patriarchs and the reality reflects the unreality of the pentarchy after the Arab conquests, a notion Hiereia had treated as defunct and Nicaea II revived to discredit Hiereia (Price, 204). By the test the council applied to its rival, the oriental patriarchates had not accepted its decrees. For centuries they did not know them.

Rome

Rome was invited, sent legates, and endorsed the doctrine. Its acceptance of the council as ecumenical is another matter, and here the date 880 needs stating exactly. Writing to Charlemagne in 792 or 793, Hadrian said he had accepted the council lest the Greeks relapse into their error, admitted he had not answered the emperor, and threatened to declare Constantine VI a heretic unless the confiscated papal estates in Sicily and Calabria and jurisdiction over southern Italy and Illyricum were restored (Price, 66–67). Price concludes that Hadrian accepted the iconophile decree while withholding the ecumenical status the council claimed, and he accepts Theodore the Stoudite's report of 809 that Rome regarded Nicaea II as a local council correcting a local transgression (Price, 67). Around 870 Hincmar of Reims could still reject the council as held without the authority of the apostolic see (Price, 74).

The change came through diplomacy. In 873 Anastasius Bibliothecarius urged John VIII to count Nicaea II as the seventh council so that the anti-Photian council of 869–870 could be counted the eighth. John, needing Byzantine help against the Saracens, made peace with Photios, and on 26 January 880 his legate Cardinal Peter declared at the Council of Constantinople that Rome judged it right "to call it the seventh and to number it with the other six holy and ecumenical councils" (Price, 75). Price insists the delay had nothing to do with doubts about doctrine (Price, 75), and the concession should stand. What the episode demonstrates is narrower and more interesting. Rome's acceptance of the council's teaching and its recognition of the council's rank were separated by ninety-three years, and the rank was granted in a negotiation over property, jurisdiction, and the numbering of councils.

The Franks

The Council of Frankfurt (794) is often cited as a Western rejection of Nicaea II, and it needs careful handling. The Latin translation that reached Charlemagne was, in Noble's words, hastily and poorly done, and the Franks treated it as an official record without realizing it was a translation (Noble, 160–161). Frankfurt's second canon condemned those who taught that images of the saints should receive the same service and adoration as the Trinity. The statement came from a mistranslation of Constantine of Konstanteia, who had said the opposite in Session III (Price, 68–69; Noble, 170–171). Read minimally, Frankfurt condemned a proposition Nicaea II never affirmed and Rome equally rejected (Price, 69).

The Frankish objection went deeper than the translation. Theodulf of Orléans, writing the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (the Libri Carolini), knew correctly translated passages that drew the distinction between honor and worship, and he rejected the distinction because it did not justify praying to images or ascribing miracles to them (Price, 70). The Franks were not iconoclasts. They accepted images and refused them veneration, and they appealed to Gregory's letter to Serenus as the authentic tradition of the Roman see (Price, 70–71). The Opus objected that the council had no right to define doctrine for the whole church without investigating the opinion of the church in each of its parts, and that if it had avoided novelties and remained content with the teaching of the ancient fathers, it could have been called ecumenical (universalis) (Price, 72). The Frankish annals called Nicaea a pseudosynod. Noble concludes that the Franks rejected it and refused to let it be called seventh or universal, while avoiding an outright record of that rejection in front of papal legates (Noble, 170–172). Their own theory of universality was thin, resting on the idea that bishops of two or three provinces teaching what the church had always taught acted universally (Noble, 180). Their ecclesiology is no model, but their testimony about reception stands.

It did not fade quickly. In 825 a Frankish synod at Paris, meeting with the approval of Pope Eugenius II, censured Hiereia and Nicaea II together, criticized Hadrian for encouraging veneration, and spoke of the superstitious veneration of images at Rome. It ruled that since no authority commands images, no one should command them, and since no authority forbids them, no one should forbid them. Frankish churches at that date contained no painted or mosaic images (Price, 73–74). The Western change came through devotion: the crucifix replacing the bare cross around 1000, reliquaries shaped as statues, and a steady growth of painted devotional images from the eleventh century onward. Only then did Frankfurt become an embarrassment, and only with Gratian's Decretum of about 1140 did a passage from Nicaea II, the canon Venerabiles, enter Western canon law (Price, 75–76).

Byzantium

The council's reception in its home church was no smoother. Hiereia had claimed the title of seventh ecumenical council in 754. Nicaea II reversed it in 787. After military disasters under Nikephoros I, culminating in his death at the hands of the Bulgars in 811, Leo V restored iconoclasm, and a synod in 815 rejected Nicaea II and reinstated Hiereia as the seventh council (Price, 61). Images were restored in 843 under the empress Theodora, whose motives Price calls obscure (Price, 63). In the intervening generation, with two councils contending for the same number, appeals to conciliar authority carried no weight; Theodore the Stoudite and Nikephoros gave the Acts and the Horos next to no attention and found Quinisext Canon 82 more telling (Price, 63). Nicaea II's standing in the East was settled by a regency, after its authority had failed to settle anything in the dispute it was convened to end.

Conclusion

Nicaea II fails to substantiate its historical claim that the cultic veneration of icons can be demonstrated as an apostolic and continuously attested patristic practice. Its single patristic text asserting apostolic transmission is a forgery. Its central authentic citation concerned the Son's relation to the Father. The two fourth-century fathers who opposed the practice were dismissed by methods that do not survive examination, one on grounds the council's own quotation undermines, the other by an attack on his Christology and the removal of his letter from the record. Its evidence for veneration, as distinct from the presence of images, begins in the seventh century. On this point Price and the iconoclasts agree.

The council's claim to speak for the universal church fails by the test it applied to Hiereia. The eastern patriarchs neither sent legates nor, for centuries, received the decrees. Rome accepted the doctrine while withholding the rank until 880. The Franks refused the council outright, and the West accepted it only after its own devotion had changed. Byzantium itself reversed it once.

The distinction between proskynēsis and latreia matters pastorally, and Protestants misrepresent Orthodox and Catholic piety when they ignore it. It does not touch the historical question, and within the Acts it was already under strain. Theological defenses of icon veneration drawn from the Incarnation or from doctrinal development should therefore be kept distinct from the council's narrative of apostolic continuity. Those arguments may be made, but they are arguments the council did not make about itself.

Protestants have disagreed among themselves about pictures, and the Reformed have been sharpest about images of Christ. The issue Nicaea II raises is narrower than any of those disagreements. Anthony Thiselton's recent study defends the teaching force of pictures while insisting that they need the surrounding word to keep from misleading (Thiselton, 5, 214), which is close to what Gregory told Serenus. For those committed to sola Scriptura, the question remains whether Scripture authorizes the veneration of images, and that question deserves continued conversation with Orthodox and Catholic interlocutors on biblical and theological ground. What the history removes is the claim that the church always did it. The synod of Paris in 825 put its ruling on images in terms of authority: where none commands, no one should command. Nicaea II commanded, under anathema, what no apostle and no father of the golden age had commanded.

Bibliography

Hoskin, Matthew J. J. "Nicaea II, Protestants, and Icons." Ad Fontes, January 20, 2023. Accessed July 21, 2025. https://adfontesjournal.com/church-history/nicaea-ii-protestants-and-icons/.

Kitzinger, Ernst. "The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 83–150.

Messmer, Andrew. "Nicaea II: Some Criticisms." Evangelical Focus, February 6, 2022. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://evangelicalfocus.com/feature/15309/nicaea-ii-some-criticisms.

Noble, Thomas F. X. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2009.

Pocock, J. G. A. "Nicaea and Its Aftermath." In Barbarism and Religion, 93–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2015.

Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). 2 vols. Translated Texts for Historians 68. Liverpool: Liverpool University, 2018. Paperback edition, 2020.

Thiselton, Anthony C. The Power of Pictures in Christian Thought: The Use and Abuse of Images in the Bible and Theology. London: SPCK, 2018.

Young, Frances M., with Andrew Teal. From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and Its Background. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.