Melito of Sardis

Melito served as bishop of Sardis in western Asia Minor during the second half of the second century, making him one of the most prominent Christian leaders of the Ante-Nicene period. His homily Peri Pascha (On the Pascha), rediscovered in papyrus form in the twentieth century, is the oldest complete Paschal sermon known to survive and is celebrated for its rhetorical brilliance and its typological reading of the Exodus narrative as a foreshadowing of Christ's passion. He was a prolific writer — Eusebius of Caesarea preserved a catalog of his works — though nearly all of his writings were lost until modern manuscript discoveries restored Peri Pascha and fragments of several other treatises. Melito addressed an apology to Emperor Marcus Aurelius on behalf of Christians; Jerome reports that Tertullian esteemed him as a prophet among the faithful, and Origen also mentions him, though with a critical note on his view that God is corporeal. He is venerated as a saint in Eastern Christianity, and his paschal theology exerted lasting influence on subsequent liturgy and christological reflection.

Peri Pascha is also studied for a more troubling reason: it contains some of the earliest and most explicit language in Christian literature charging “Israel” with collective responsibility for the death of Christ — an early seed of the “deicide” accusation that scholars of Jewish–Christian relations (Lieu, Cohick, Wilson) regard as a landmark in the prehistory of Christian anti-Judaism. The same rhetorical power that makes the homily a liturgical masterpiece thus also makes it a sober object of historical study.