The core of this dissertation consists of close readings of late ancient Christian narratives with a focus on the role of material images within them and how, through narratological means (such as focalization, characterization, pacing, the use of space, etc.), the authors of these texts affirm, upset, and complicate audience expectations surrounding the encounter of divinity in material objects. Chapter 1 identifies four distinct but interrelated arguments that occurred repeatedly from the second to ninth centuries as Christians grappled rhetorically with the tension between the phenomenological effect of epiphanic images and their status as lifeless matter. I characterize these as ontological, epistemological, demonological, and psychological/ethical arguments. Chapters 2–5 show how different narratives from the fourth through eighth centuries explored and capitalized on this paradox of living images by playing paradoxically in the spaces between animate and inanimate that characterized both human beings and material images in Late Antiquity. The central narratives analyzed in this project, gathered for comparison for the first time, are the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian, the Martyrdom of Mark, the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, and the Image of Berytus. Despite varied dates, concerns, plots, and purposes, each narrative features “living images” as key characters in their tales. These characters—two healing saints who travel between shrine and image, a martyred apostle, a shattered statue, a talking stone sphinx, monstrous cannibals, and, finally, bleeding icons of Jesus and Mary—along with the ways they are encountered, present opportunities for the authors of these texts not only to carve out Christian spaces for material cult, but also to reflect upon the disjunctions between spiritual and corporeal life by blurring and redrawing the boundaries of what counts as living. The authors of these narratives put forth such reflections not directly, but by playing on, affirming, and subverting knowledge about the (in)abilities of images to mediate the presence of divinity in the world, and in particular by selectively attributing “signs of life” (such as movement, speech, sight, blood) to Christians, pagans, Jews, and material objects. The project contributes to the study of late ancient Christianity primarily by offering fresh analyses of Christian texts and providing models for incorporating evidence from narratives into studies of ancient materialities. By positioning my argument and methodology in relation to the study of icon veneration in the era before the Iconoclast Controversy, as well as in relation to how the “New Materialisms” movement has influenced recent work in the history of Christianity, I show how sophisticated narrative poetics complicate retrievals of ancient Christian views on the relations between images and divinity. By focusing on the particular, diverse narratological choices made by rhetorically interested human agents, however, I argue that a dynamic, flexible ancient Christian discourse on images allowed them to navigate both the problems and opportunities presented by material images, rejecting the special objects of others as “lifeless idols” but experiencing their own as “living images” with links to divine realities.