Melito of Sardis

Melito of Sardis was a second-century Christian bishop of Sardis in Lydia, in the Roman province of Asia (western Asia Minor). Almost nothing is known of his early life or origins; neither a birth year nor a birthplace is recorded in surviving sources. He appears in the historical record as a leading figure of the Asian churches during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180). Eusebius of Caesarea, drawing on earlier documents, presents him as a prolific writer and apologist. Polycrates of Ephesus, writing to Pope Victor I near the end of the second century, numbered Melito among the “great lights” of Asia and called him “the eunuch, who lived entirely in the Holy Spirit,” language generally taken to mean that he lived in celibacy. Polycrates also states that Melito “lies in Sardis, awaiting the episcopate from heaven,” which is the basis for placing both his death and burial in that city, conventionally around 180, before Polycrates wrote.

Melito’s literary output was extensive. Eusebius lists numerous titles, among them works on the Church, the Lord’s Day, faith, creation, baptism, truth, the devil, the Revelation of John, and the incarnation, as well as an apology addressed to the emperor and a collection of extracts (Eclogae) from Scripture. Nearly all of these works are lost except for fragments preserved by Eusebius, later catenae, and other patristic citations. The apology, composed after the death of Lucius Verus (169) and during Marcus Aurelius’s sole or later co-reign, argued that Christianity should enjoy legal recognition. Melito associated the rise of the Church with the peace of the Augustan age and contended that the empire and the Christian community had flourished together; persecution, in his view, was an innovation of bad emperors. In the same body of extracts he recorded one of the earliest Christian lists of the books of the “old covenant” (palaia diathēkē), a phrase he is among the first known writers to apply to the Hebrew Scriptures. He stated that he had traveled to the East, to the place where the Scriptures were preached and done, in order to obtain accurate information about their number and order. His list of Old Testament books, given by Eusebius, follows a Palestinian reckoning: it includes the Law, historical books, Psalms, Wisdom literature, and the prophets, and notably omits Esther.

The only work of Melito to survive substantially complete is the homily Peri Pascha (On Pascha), recovered in the twentieth century from Greek papyri and from Coptic, Syriac, and Georgian witnesses. It is a highly rhetorical, typological sermon on the Exodus Passover as a figure of Christ’s passion, death, and redemption. Melito identifies Christ with the Passover lamb and develops a theology of the incarnation and the two-fold reality of the Savior—suffering as man, victorious as God—in language that later readers have compared with emerging two-natures formulas. The homily also contains severe denunciations of Israel for the rejection and killing of Christ, passages that have been much discussed in the history of Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric. Melito was a Quartodeciman: with other Asian churches he observed the Pascha on the fourteenth of Nisan, whatever the weekday, a practice Polycrates defended by appeal to Melito and to the apostle John. Later notices, including Jerome’s De viris illustribus, praise Melito’s eloquence; Tertullian, according to Jerome, admired his elegant and declamatory style. A few later writers associated him with millennialist opinions, but the evidence is thin and disputed. He is commemorated as a saint on 1 April in the Roman Martyrology and in some Eastern calendars, remembered as bishop, apologist, and witness of the Asian church in the later second century.