Library › St Photius the Great › Library
Library
St Photius the Great, tr. Freese, 1920; selections
Codex 115: Anonymous, Against the Quartodecimans—Metrodorus, On the Date of Easter
Read an anonymous work entitled A Disputation against the Jews and those who hold the same Heretical Views, and those called Quartodecimans,1 who do not celebrate the Holy Easter Feast in the first month as the Hebrews do. The style is concise and free from redundancies, but somewhat bombastic. The author asserts that our Lord Jesus Christ did not partake of the regular Paschal feast2 on the holy fifth day, for that day was not laid down, but on the following day; that He did not even then lawfully eat what He did eat; for He ate neither lamb, nor unleavened bread, and observed none of the practices which those who keep Easter according to the law are in the habit of observing. He asserts that He partook of a private, mystic feast, from which He gave bread and wine to His disciples.
Another tractate is also included, by a certain Metrodorus, a list of twenty-eight cycles of nineteen years for calculating the holy Paschal feast. This Metrodorus, whoever he was (for I have not been able to learn anything about him), beginning with Diocletian, has collected the Easter days for 533 years,3 according to the received and accurate computation of the fourteenth day. For neither the Church nor ancient tradition appears to have observed those days.
Notes
- They celebrated Easter or the Paschal Feast on the day of the Jewish Passover (the 14th of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish year, corresponding to March-April), whatever day of the week it fell on. See the exhaustive account in Hefele, History of Christian Councils, i, 298, (1871).
- The Jewish Passover.
- i.e. For a cycle of 532 years (28 X 19) and one year more, when a new cycle should begin. Metrodorus possibly lived in the sixth or seventh century. On this difficult subject, see article “Easter” in Dictionary of Christian Antiquities.