The Quartodecimans

Keeping the Passover week by its dates in the feasts, rather than by the days of the week, is not a new idea brought in to unsettle old ones. Its roots reach back to the first and second centuries, to churches that stood close to the apostles in time and claimed to have received their custom from them. Church history calls them the Quartodecimans, from the Latin quarta decima, “the fourteenth.”

The Fourteenth Day

The Quartodecimans were early communities of believers, found above all in the province of Asia, the western part of what is now Turkey. They kept the Pascha, the yearly feast of Yeshua’s death and resurrection, by its date: the fourteenth day of the first month, whatever day of the week that date happened to fall on.

The church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, writing early in the fourth century, describes them this way. The churches of all Asia, he says, “as from an older tradition,” held that “the fourteenth day of the moon, on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the lamb, should be observed as the feast of the Saviour’s passover” (Ecclesiastical History 5.23). They followed the date the Torah had fixed: “on the fourteenth of the month, between the evenings, is a Passover to the LORD” (Leviticus 23:5).

Eusebius himself kept the other custom, yet he reports both sides fairly. He writes that the churches in the rest of the world ended their fast on the day of the resurrection, and that they too appealed to apostolic tradition. Both sides, then, claimed the apostles. The question this chapter asks is narrower: what did the churches nearest to John say they had received?

Polycarp of Smyrna

One of the men who kept the fourteenth was Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who died a martyr in the middle of the second century. Irenaeus of Lyons had heard Polycarp as a boy, and he later remembered how Polycarp used to tell of his time with John and with the others who had seen the Lord (Eusebius 5.20).

Irenaeus also records a visit Polycarp made to Rome, in the days when Anicetus led the church there. The two men disagreed about the Pascha, and neither could move the other. In the words of Irenaeus, Anicetus could not persuade Polycarp “not to observe what he had always observed with John the disciple of our Lord, and the other apostles with whom he had associated” (Eusebius 5.24). Even so, they kept the peace, and Anicetus gave Polycarp the honor of leading the Lord’s Supper in his own church before they parted.

Polycrates Writes to Victor

Some decades later the question returned, and this time less gently. About the year 190, Victor, bishop of Rome, pressed the churches of Asia to give up the fourteenth and keep the feast of the resurrection only on the Lord’s Day, as synods elsewhere had decided. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, gathered the bishops of Asia at Victor’s request and wrote back on their behalf. Eusebius preserved his letter (Ecclesiastical History 5.24).

It begins without hesitation: “We observe the exact day; neither adding, nor taking away.” Then Polycrates names the “great lights” of Asia who now sleep: Philip, whom he calls one of the twelve apostles; John, “who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord” and fell asleep at Ephesus; Polycarp in Smyrna, bishop and martyr; and others. And he says of them all:

“All these observed the fourteenth day of the passover according to the Gospel, deviating in no respect, but following the rule of faith.”

He adds that seven of his own relatives had been bishops before him, that he was the eighth, and that “my relatives always observed the day when the people put away the leaven.” And he closes by saying that he is not frightened by threats, for “those greater than I have said ‘We ought to obey God rather than man.’” He was quoting Peter and the apostles before the Sanhedrin, the high council in Jerusalem.

Acts 5:29 But Peter and the apostles answered and said, "We must obey God rather than men.

What the Letter Shows

The letter is a plain witness. A bishop of Ephesus, in the second century, says that his churches kept the Pascha by the exact date, the fourteenth, and not by a day of the week, and he traces the custom through Polycarp to John and Philip. The fourteenth is the day of the Passover itself, the day that, as John records, was still ahead when Yeshua died, and that began after His body had been laid in the tomb.

His phrase about the leaven fits the same picture. Polycrates calls the fourteenth “the day when the people put away the leaven,” naming it as the day on which the unleavened days began. As we saw in Chapter 20, the household’s last leavened meal came as the thirteenth began, the house was cleared in the daytime of the thirteenth, and from the evening that opened the fourteenth no leaven was eaten. Polycrates had the custom from his fathers.

Victor and Irenaeus

Victor’s answer was severe. Eusebius writes that he “immediately attempted to cut off from the common unity the parishes of all Asia,” and declared them excommunicate. Many bishops rebuked him for it. Among them was Irenaeus, who himself kept the resurrection feast on the Lord’s Day. Yet he wrote to Victor that he should not cut off whole churches of God for keeping the tradition of an ancient custom, and he reminded him that the bishops of Rome before him had kept the peace with those who observed the fourteenth. It was in this letter that Irenaeus told the story of Polycarp and Anicetus.

After Nicaea

The question did not rest. In 325 the bishops gathered at Nicaea agreed that all the churches should keep the Pascha on one and the same day. The council’s letter to the church of Alexandria, which Socrates Scholasticus preserves, says that “all the brethren in the East who have heretofore kept this festival when the Jews did, will henceforth conform to the Romans and to us” (Ecclesiastical History 1.9). From then on, those who still kept the fourteenth were treated as standing outside the rule of the church, and the charge brought against them was that they were following the Jews.

Yet they did not disappear. The same historian, writing in the fifth century, records that John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, deprived many of the Quartodecimans of their churches during his visit to Asia and Ephesus (6.11). He also records that Nestorius, who became bishop of Constantinople in 428, turned against the Quartodecimans throughout Asia, Lydia, and Caria, and that many lost their lives in the disturbances that followed at Miletus and Sardis (7.29). The keeping of the fourteenth was still alive into the fifth century, and it was still being pressed out.

Not a Later Invention

None of this is told to win an argument by counting bishops. Scripture stands on its own. But a reader who has followed the earlier chapters may have wondered whether anyone in the early church kept the Passover week by its dates in the feasts. The answer is yes. Churches that traced their teaching to John kept the fourteenth, which Polycrates called “the day when the people put away the leaven,” the day from which no leaven was eaten, and they refused to give it up when Rome demanded it.

Their witness survives in one more place, not in a date but in the bread on the table. The next chapter turns to it.