Melito of Sardis

Melito was bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor in the second half of the second century, a city with a wealthy, ancient Jewish community whose enormous synagogue archaeologists have since uncovered, and where the Christian congregation lived alongside it.

He was famous in his own time and then almost completely lost. Eusebius lists around twenty works of his by title; nearly all are gone.

Two things survived by different accidents, and each is a first of its kind.

The first came out of the sand. In 1932 and again in the 1930s and 40s, papyrus manuscripts surfaced in Egypt containing a text called Peri Pascha, On the Passover. It is Melito's Easter sermon, and it is the oldest full Christian Easter homily in existence. It is written to be spoken: short hammering lines, repetitions, direct address, a preacher reading Exodus 12 aloud and then showing the congregation the lamb in it. He is the Passover of our salvation. He was led like a lamb and slaughtered like a sheep.

The sermon also contains long stretches of bitter accusation against the Jewish people for the death of Christ, in language that later centuries used badly; that is part of the document and is not passed over here.

The second survived because Eusebius copied it. Melito wanted to know exactly which books belonged to the old covenant, so he traveled east to Palestine, to the country where the events happened, made accurate inquiry, and wrote the list down for a man named Onesimus. It is the earliest Christian list of Old Testament books anyone has. It runs from the five books of Moses through the prophets in an order close to the Hebrew Bible, and it does not include Esther.

He also wrote an Apology to Marcus Aurelius, arguing that Christianity and the empire had grown up together, born in the reign of Augustus, and that the emperors who persecuted the church were the bad ones.

Melito kept the Passover on the fourteenth of Nisan, with the churches of Asia, against the Roman practice of always keeping it on a Sunday. When the controversy came to a head a generation later, Polycrates of Ephesus listed him among the great lights of Asia asleep in the Lord: Melito the eunuch, who lived entirely in the Holy Spirit, who lies at Sardis awaiting the visitation from heaven when he shall rise from the dead.

He died about 180.

Sources: Melito, On the Passover; Eusebius, Church History IV.13, IV.26, V.24; the fragments of Melito (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.