How do Protestants reconcile iconoclasm with the incarnation itself?

### Background Protestants across the ages have criticized and prohibited icons and worship of icons of Jesus: John Calvin, *Institutes of the Christian Religion*: > God’s glory is corrupted by an impious falsehood whenever any form is attached to Him R. Scott Clark: > To picture His manhood, when we cannot picture His Godhead, is a sin, because we make Him to be but half Christ; we separate what God has joined ### Incarnation Protestants also believe in the incarnation: that God took on a physical form of a man named Jesus, and that Jesus retains a physical form of a human man today and into eternity, see the *Westminster Shorter Catechism* as an example of this belief: > Christ, the Son of God, became man, by taking to himself a true body, and a reasonable soul, being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, and born of her, yet without sin ### Premises The premise of the question is as follows: Protestants believe **p1**. God (the son) took on physical form **p2**. Humans saw this physical form in the 1st Century CE **p3**. Some of those people worshiped Jesus while he was in the physical form Then reasonable logical inferences: **i1**. Those followers of Jesus continued to remember what Jesus physically looked like **i2**. When praying to Jesus, those people had a mental image of Jesus's face and prayed to that in their minds ### Question - Are any of the premises or inferences wrong according to Protestants? - Were the first followers of Jesus/Christians prohibited from making illustrations of Jesus? - Were the first Christians sinning when imagining Jesus's physical form when praying? - Why would putting an image of the incarnate Jesus to paper be a sin if people saw him and knew what he looked like? - Why would praying to an image of Jesus be wrong if praying to his physical form was not wrong?