Had posterity been enabled to have several such representations executed during the first century when the figure, dress, and every-day habits of the Reformer were still fresh in the memory of his contemporaries, perhaps the Christian world would be more Christ-like; the dozens of contradictory, groundless, and utterly meaningless speculations about the “Son of Man” would have been impossible; and humanity would now have but one religion and one God. It is this absence of all proof, the lack of the least positive clew about him whom Christianity has deified, that has caused the present state of perplexity. No pictures of Christ were possible until after the days of Constantine, when the Jewish element was nearly eliminated among the followers of the new religion. The Jews, apostles, and disciples, whom the Zoroastrians and the Parsees had inoculated with a holy horror of any form of images, would have considered it a sacrilegious blasphemy to represent in any way or shape their master. The only authorized image of Jesus, even in the days of Tertullian, was an allegorical representation of the “Good Shepherd,”[249] which was no portrait, but the figure of a man with a jackal-head, like Anubis.[250] On this gem, as seen in the collection of Gnostic amulets, the Good Shepherd bears upon his shoulders the lost lamb. He seems to have a human head upon his neck; but, as King correctly observes, “it only _seems so_ to the uninitiated eye.” On closer inspection, he becomes the double-headed Anubis, having one head human, the other a jackal’s, whilst his girdle assumes the form of a serpent rearing aloft its crested head. “This figure,” adds the author of the _Gnostics_, etc., “had two meanings--one obvious for the vulgar; the other mystical, and recognizable by the _initiated alone_. It was perhaps the signet of some chief teacher or apostle.”[251] This affords a fresh proof that the Gnostics and early _orthodox_ (?) Christians were not so wide apart in their _secret doctrine_. King deduces from a quotation from _Epiphanius_, that even as late as 400 A.D. it was considered an atrocious sin to attempt to represent the bodily appearance of Christ. Epiphanius[252] brings it as an idolatrous charge against the Carpocratians that “they kept painted portraits, and _even gold and silver images_, and _in other materials_, which they pretended to be portraits of Jesus, and made by Pilate after the likeness of Christ.... These they keep in secret, along with Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, and setting them all up together, they worship and offer sacrifices unto them _after the Gentiles’ fashion_.”