The Sabbatians and the Keeping of the Passover

During the same reign a division arose among the Novatians over the keeping of the festival of the Passover, and from this dispute another sect sprang up, called the Sabbatians. Sabbatius, who had been ordained presbyter by Marcian along with Theoctistus and Macarius, took up the opinion of the fellow presbyters who had met at Pazum in the reign of Valens. He held that Christians ought to keep the feast of the Passover as the Jews do. At first he broke away from the church in order to practice greater austerity, for he claimed to follow a very strict way of life. He also declared that one reason for his breaking away was that many who shared in the mysteries seemed to him unworthy of the honor. But when his plan of bringing in new practices was found out, Marcian said he regretted having ordained him. It is said that he was often heard to exclaim that he would rather have laid his hands on thorns than on the head of Sabbatius. [a]

Seeing that the people of his diocese were being torn into two factions, Marcian called all the bishops of his own party to Sangarus, a town of Bithynia near the sea, not far from the city of Helenopolis. When they had assembled, they summoned Sabbatius and asked him to state the cause of his grievance. Since he complained only of the differences in keeping the feast, they suspected that he was using this as a pretext to hide his love of the first place. So they made him declare on oath that he would never accept the office of bishop. When he had taken the required oath, they were all of one mind and voted to hold the church together. The difference in keeping the Passover feast, they said, ought by no means to be made a reason for separating from communion, and they decided that each person should be free to keep the feast according to his own judgment. They passed a canon on the subject, which they called “the Indifferent Canon.” Such was the business of the assembly at Sangarus.

From that time on Sabbatius held to the usage of the Jews. Unless everyone happened to keep the feast at the same time, he fasted according to the custom, but ahead of the others, and celebrated the Passover with the usual observances by himself. He spent the Saturday, from evening until the appointed hour, keeping vigil and offering the prescribed prayers; and on the next day he gathered with the rest of the people and shared in the mysteries. At first the people did not notice this way of keeping the feast. But as time went on it began to draw attention and to become more widely known, and he found a great many imitators, especially in Phrygia and Galatia, where this way of keeping the feast became a national custom. In the end he openly broke off communion and became the bishop of those who had taken up his views, as we will show in the proper place.

For my part, I am astonished that Sabbatius and his followers tried to bring in this new practice. The ancient Hebrews, as Eusebius relates on the testimony of Philo, Josephus, Aristobulus and several others, offered the sacrifices after the spring equinox, when the sun is in the first sign of the zodiac, which the Greeks call the Ram, and when the moon is in the opposite part of the sky and on the fourteenth day of her age. Even the Novatians themselves, who have studied the subject with some care, declare that the founder of their heresy and his first disciples did not follow this custom, which was brought in for the first time by those who met at Pazum. They say that at old Rome the members of this sect still keep the same practice as the Romans, who have never departed from their original usage in this matter, the custom having been handed down to them by the holy apostles Peter and Paul. Again, the Samaritans, who keep the laws of Moses scrupulously, never celebrate this festival until the firstfruits have ripened. They say that in the law it is called the Feast of Firstfruits, and that before these appear it is not lawful to keep the feast; so the spring equinox must necessarily come first. That is why I am astonished that those who claim to follow the Jewish custom in keeping this feast do not conform to the ancient practice of the Jews. [d]

Apart from the people mentioned above and the Quartodecimans of Asia, all the heresies, I believe, keep the Passover in the same way as the Romans and the Egyptians. The Quartodecimans are so called because they keep this festival, like the Jews, on the fourteenth day of the moon; hence their name. The Novatians keep the day of the resurrection. They follow the custom of the Jews and the Quartodecimans, except when the fourteenth day of the moon falls on the first day of the week. In that case they keep the feast as many days after the Jews as there are days between the fourteenth of the moon and the following Lord’s day.

The Montanists, who are called Pepuzites and Phrygians, celebrate the Passover in a strange way of their own invention. They find fault with those who fix the time of the feast by the course of the moon, and they claim that it is right to go by the cycles of the sun alone. They count each month as thirty days, and they reckon the day after the spring equinox as the first day of the year, which by the Roman way of counting would be the twenty-fourth of March. It was on this day, they say, that the two great lights appointed to mark the times and the years were created. They prove this by the fact that every eight years the sun and the moon meet at the same point in the sky. The moon’s cycle of eight years is completed in ninety-nine months and in two thousand nine hundred and twenty-two days; and during that time the sun makes eight revolutions, each of three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days. For they reckon that the day on which the sun was created, as recorded in Sacred Scripture, was the fourteenth day of the moon, falling after the twenty-fourth of March and corresponding to the sixth of April. They always celebrate the Passover on this day when it falls on the day of the resurrection; otherwise they celebrate it on the following Lord’s day. For it is written, they claim, that the feast may be held on any day between the fourteenth and the twenty-first.