On the Pascha and the strife at Laodicea

other · 165 · Sardis

Melito dates his own work, which is rare enough to be worth saying: while Servilius Paulus was proconsul of Asia, at the time when Sagaris suffered martyrdom, there arose in Laodicea a great strife concerning the Passover, and these things were written. He is not recorded as a party to the strife at Laodicea — he says only that it happened and that he wrote then, and this dataset does not make him a participant in it. Eusebius' fragment is all that survives of the two books. A Paschal homily recovered on papyrus in the twentieth century, the Peri Pascha, is generally identified with this work, and the identification is standard but argued.

To settle what the Pascha is and when it is kept, at the moment a quarrel about it broke out in the next city.

Two books, of which Eusebius quotes the opening sentence and nothing else survives under that title.