Polycrates Of Ephesus

Around the year 190 the churches of the Roman empire nearly split over a calendar.

The question was when to keep the Passover, the Christian Pascha. The churches of Asia Minor kept it on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan, whatever day of the week that fell on, ending their fast on the day the lambs were killed. They were called Quartodecimans, from the Latin for fourteenth. Rome and most of the West always ended the fast on a Sunday, the day of the resurrection. Both sides had kept their custom as long as anyone could remember.

Victor, bishop of Rome, decided the difference had to end, and moved to cut the Asian churches out of communion.

Polycrates was bishop of Ephesus and the senior figure of the province. He convened the bishops of Asia and wrote back to Victor, and Eusebius preserved the letter.

It is one of the plainest documents of the second century. Polycrates did not argue from theology. He argued from graves. We observe the exact day, he wrote, neither adding nor taking away, and then he listed the great lights who lay asleep in Asia and had kept it this way. Philip, one of the twelve, at Hierapolis, with his daughters. John, who leaned on the Lord's breast and who wore the priestly plate, at Ephesus. Polycarp of Smyrna, bishop and martyr. Thraseas of Eumenia, martyr. Sagaris, martyr. Papirius. Melito the eunuch of Sardis. All these kept the fourteenth day, he said, according to the Gospel, and never swerved.

Then he made it personal. He said he had lived sixty-five years in the Lord, that seven of his relatives had been bishops before him and he was the eighth, that he had gone through all the holy Scriptures, and that he was not frightened by things said to intimidate him, because greater men than he had said, we must obey God rather than men.

Victor issued the excommunication anyway. It did not hold. Bishops across the empire wrote to him objecting, Irenaeus of Lyons most sharply, reminding him that his own predecessors had kept the peace with Asia over this very difference, and that Polycarp and Anicetus had parted friends after failing to agree. Victor backed down.

Polycrates died about 196. The Asian churches kept the fourteenth for another two centuries.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History III.31, V.24; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Polycrates.