... “As this belief was founded above all on Scripture, the written Word of God, the earliest images of Christ were also created out of written letter-and-word signs, or were visual translations of the verbal imagery of the Bible. In the ancient world, such signs and symbols inspired awe, The name of God in the Hebrew Bible is so sacred it cannot be pronounced; its etters, YHWH, have a title of their own, the tetragrammaton, the Greek word for ‘four letters’. Metaphors are used throughout both the Hebrew bible and the Gospels to suggest that Godhead is so far beyond human understanding it can be apprehended only by analogy.”
--- from The Image of Christ catalogue of the exhibition Seeing Salvation