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The earliest written records of Christian images treated like icons in a pagan or Gnostic context are offered by the 4th-century Christian Aelius Lampridius in the Life of Alexander Severus ( xxix ) that was part of the Augustan History.

According to Lampridius, the emperor Alexander Severus ( 222 – 235 ), who was not a Christian, had kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius, Orpheus and Abraham.

Irenaeus, ( c. 130 – 202 ) in his Against Heresies ( 1: 25 ; 6 ) says scornfully of the Gnostic Carpocratians, " They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material ; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them.

They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest.

They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles ".

St. Irenaeus on the other hand does not speak critically of icons or portraits in a general sense, only of certain gnostic sectarians use of icons.