Alexander Severus
The 4th-century Christian Aelius Lampridius produced the earliest known written records of Christian images treated like icons (in a pagan or Gnostic context) in his "Life of Alexander Severus" (xxix) that formed part of the "Augustan History". According to Lampridius, the emperor Alexander Severus (), himself 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. Saint Irenaeus, ( 130–202) in his "Against Heresies" (1:25;6) says scornfully of the Gnostic Carpocratians: