But Christians did depict God.
Etaoin, not having a great artistic sensibility, I am not well versed in art history, but I honestly cannot think of any Christian depictions of God the Father apart from the famous hand touching fingertips with Adam in the Sistine fresco. That, and any such others, must of course be only metaphorical devices for the artistic theme and not meant as assertions about the nature of God, since the official position of the Christian Church since at least the First Council of Nicaea in 325, and surely before that as well, has been that (following the Hebrew conception, for the God of both Christianity and Islam is the Hebrew God) God is ubiquitous and not bounded by space, time, or energy (though God may manifest variously at different times and places). This seems to differ from the assertions made Greek and Roman religious sculpture. The assertions in those cases seem to have been that the gods could choose to show themselves or not, but at the same time that they were discrete beings and had forms somehow similar to those of humans. How can the gods live on Mount Olimbos if they are not spatially bound? Again, this type of anthropomorphic consideration was strongest among the Greeks.
...But (Paul) had some marketing talent, so he junked the unpopular bits of Judaism like the dietary laws and circumcision, and the rest is history.
I should say so! In fact, that consideration diminishes Paul's singular genius. What he did, was nothing short of inventing, not a new religion, but a new kind of religion, the religion of faith: of "correct belief" rather than "correct practice". Before that, all religions were basically systems of practice, of ritual. This applies even to Jewish observance, for the observance of the 613 Torah mitzvoth (248 of them positive instructions, and 365 of them negative) by Jews are basically the ritual acts of the Jewish religion. In other words, Judaism is a religion of "correct practice" in which each man's faith is a personal matter. In the Pauline vision, though, each man's faith is the business of the community, of the Church as a whole. Even so, the earliest Christian churches, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and their contemporaries, maintained strong ritual elements within their practices, but the practices which emanated from the Protestant Reformation can be seen as the fulfillment, the flowering, of the Pauline religious vision, where in ritual is diminished and faith is viewed as the way to achieve that other Christian invention: salvation. As one author wrote: "What matters (with Christianity) is individual salvation. And the way salvation is to be achieved is not (through) how one behaves externally with the rest of the world, but (by) how one is internally with God." This is the Pauline vision; it is Paul's essential contribution to the religion, and to the hitherto unforeseen type of religion, which is his (rather than Jesus') creation.
It appears to me that I may have offended your sensibilities. If so, then please accept my apologies. I should learn to better suppress the impulse towards such Dawkinsian rhetoric, especially since my belief is notably different from what his was.
I would ask what points you disagree with, but we are already deep into a tangent here, and I don't know what the tolerance for tangential discussions are on LD; I would not want Pacifica to be forced to reel us back in to being "on topic".