On "On Pascha" by Melito of Sardis, edited by Alistair Stewart-Sykes ***

I didn't come to this book for Melito's work on Passover, as I have read it before. I came to it to read what Stewart-Sykes had to say about it. I wanted something short, but if I wanted a fuller explanation, I probably would have been better off with his book The Lamb's High Feast. And then again, I wasn't sure I wanted to read that long a discussion of the work.

As an intro text, this one works fine. One learns who Melito was and what the basic context was and receives a short analysis of the text. Melito, Stewart-Sykes claims, was Jew with a strong background in Greek rhetorical tradition. The text itself has annotations that further explore the allusions. Following it is a collection of fragments having to do with Melito or with the Quartodeciman movement.

I think the main thing I learned is that there were, according to Stewart-Sykes, more than one type of Quartodeciman. While all kept the Pascha on the fourteenth, some kept it at the same time as certain Jewish people, while others kept it at midnight. There wasn't much discussion about whether that meant the fourteenth or the fifteenth, since there was also a controversy, among Jews, on whether to keep Passover at the start of the fourteenth or the end.