The Novatians of Phrygia Change the Day of Easter

About this time the Novatians living in Phrygia changed the day on which they celebrated the Feast of Easter. I will tell how this happened, after first explaining the reason for the strict discipline that is kept in their church, even to this day, in the provinces of Phrygia and Paphlagonia. [a]

Novatian, a presbyter of the Roman church, separated from it because Cornelius the bishop received into communion believers who had offered sacrifice during the persecution that the emperor Decius had raised against the church. Having broken away for this reason, and having afterward been raised to the office of bishop by bishops who thought as he did, he wrote to all the churches that “they should not admit to the sacred mysteries those who had offered sacrifice, but should urge them to repentance and leave the pardoning of their offense to God, who has the power to forgive all sin.” When these letters arrived, the people in the various provinces to whom they were addressed acted each according to his own disposition and judgment. Since he asked that those who had committed any deadly sin after baptism should not be received to the sacraments, this seemed to some a cruel and merciless course. But others accepted the rule as just and as helping to keep discipline and to promote greater devotion of life. While this question was being stirred up, letters arrived from Cornelius the bishop, promising pardon to those who had sinned after baptism. So, as these two men wrote against each other and each supported his own practice from the testimony of the divine word, it happened, as it usually does, that everyone sided with the view that suited his previous habits and inclinations. Those who took pleasure in sin were encouraged by the license then granted them and used it as an occasion to revel in every kind of crime.

Now the Phrygians seem to be more temperate than other nations, and they are seldom guilty of swearing. The Scythians and the Thracians, on the other hand, are naturally of a very hot temper, while the people of the East are given to sensual pleasures. But the Paphlagonians and Phrygians are prone to neither of these vices, and the games of the circus and the shows of the theater are not much valued among them even to this day. For this reason, it seems to me, these people, and others of the same character, so readily agreed with the letters Novatian wrote at that time. Fornication and adultery are regarded among them as the most monstrous of crimes, and it is well known that there is no race of people on the face of the earth who govern their passions in this respect more strictly than the Phrygians and Paphlagonians. I think the same reason weighed with those who lived in the West and followed Novatian.

Yet although Novatian became a separatist for the sake of stricter discipline, he made no change in the time of keeping Easter, but always observed the practice that prevailed in the Western churches. For they celebrate this feast after the equinox, according to the custom that had been handed down to them long ago, when they first accepted Christianity. Novatian himself afterward suffered martyrdom in the reign of Valerian, during the persecution that was then raised against the Christians. But those in Phrygia who are named Novatians after him changed the day of celebrating Easter at about this period, because they did not want to be in communion with other Christians even on this occasion. This was done by a few obscure bishops of that sect, who met in a synod at the village of Pazum, near the sources of the river Sangarius. There they drew up a canon appointing that the feast be kept on the same day on which the Jews keep their yearly feast of Unleavened Bread. An old man, the son of a presbyter, who had been present at this synod with his father, gave us our information on this matter. But Agelius, bishop of the Novatians at Constantinople, Maximus of Nicaea, and the bishops of Nicomedia and Cotyaeum were all absent, although the church affairs of the Novatians were for the most part under these bishops’ direction. How the church of the Novatians was divided into two parties soon afterward because of this synod will be told in its proper place. But we must now take notice of what happened about the same time in the West.