venerate the matter through which salvation came to me, as if filled with divine energy and grace." He includes in this latter category the ink in which the gospels were written as well as the paint of images, the wood of the Cross, and the body and blood of Jesus. This distinction between worship and veneration is key in the arguments of the iconophiles. The iconophile response to iconoclasm included: Assertion that the biblical commandment forbidding images of God had been superseded by the incarnation of Jesus, who, being the second person of the Trinity, is God incarnate in visible matter. Therefore, they were not depicting the invisible God, but God as He appeared in the flesh. They were able to adduce the issue of the incarnation in their favour, whereas the iconoclasts had used the issue of the incarnation against them. They also pointed to other Old Testament evidence: God instructed Moses to make two golden statues of cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant according to , and God also told Moses to embroider the curtain which separated the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle tent with cherubim . Moses was also instructed by God to embroider the walls and roofs of the Tabernacle tent with figures of cherubim angels according to . Further, in their view idols depicted persons without substance or reality while icons depicted real persons. Essentially the argument was that idols were idols because they represented false gods, not because they were images. Images of Christ, or of other real people who had lived in the past, could not be idols. This was considered comparable to the Old Testament practice of only offering burnt sacrifices to God, and not to any other gods. Regarding the written tradition opposing the making and veneration of images, they asserted that icons were part of unrecorded oral tradition (parádosis, sanctioned in Catholicism and Orthodoxy as authoritative in doctrine by reference to Basil the Great, etc.), and pointed to patristic writings approving of icons, such as those of Asterius of Amasia, who was quoted twice in the record of the Second Council of Nicaea. What would have been useful evidence from modern art history as to the use of images in Early Christian art was unavailable to iconodules at the time. Much was made of acheiropoieta, icons believed to be of divine origin, and miracles associated