The Quartodeciman controversy, AD 190

**The first recorded attempt by Rome to impose a practice on the whole church, and the first recorded refusal.**

The question was when to keep Easter. The churches of Asia kept the Pasch on **the fourteenth of Nisan** whatever the day of the week — hence *Quartodeciman* — while Rome and most others kept it on the following Sunday. **Victor of Rome** demanded conformity and moved to cut off the Asian churches altogether.

## Polycrates answers by naming his dead

**Polycrates of Ephesus** replied, and his letter is the reason the archive treats this as a prosopographical event. He does not argue from principle. **He lists the graves.** Philip of the twelve and his daughters at Hierapolis; John, who leaned on the Lord's breast, at Ephesus; **Polycarp** at Smyrna; Thraseas, Sagaris, Papirius, Melito — all of whom, he says, kept the fourteenth day according to the gospel. He adds that he is the eighth of his family to be a bishop, and that he has gone through every holy scripture and is **“not affrighted by terrifying words”**.

**Nearly every name in that letter is a figure in this archive**, and Polycrates's argument is exactly the archive's method: the tradition is what the named dead did.

## And Irenaeus stops it

**Irenaeus of Lyon**, who kept the Roman date himself, wrote to Victor to say he was wrong to cut off entire churches for it — and Eusebius preserves his reminder that **Polycarp and Anicetus had disagreed about the same thing at Rome and parted in peace**. The excommunication did not hold.

Eusebius names the councils convened on the question, and the archive notes that this is the **second** instance of synods settling a dispute, after the New Prophecy.