It is not difficult to understand why leaders of communities of early Christians that did not at first observe an annual commemoration of the death and resurrection of Christ might have desired to adopt the practice that they saw among the Quartodecimans. Nor is it hard to appreciate why they would have preferred to locate this innovation on the Sunday immediately following the Passover rather than on the actual feast itself: as Sunday was already the occasion of their regular weekly celebration of the paschal mystery, it would obviously be easier to develop that existing liturgical day than to persuade congregations to embrace a completely new event, and one that was associated with Jewish practice, from which many churches were then trying to distance themselves.
Although the existence of this Sunday celebration is only first explicitly recorded in the sources cited by Eusebius in connection with the paschal controversy in the late second century, several scholars have continued to defend the position that it was at least as ancient as the Quartodeciman observance.1 Eusebius himself claimed that it was ‘in accordance with Apostolic tradition’, but it should be noted that this was simply his own opinion (though also shared by fifth-century church historians) and not part of the older sources that he quotes.2 Those sources merely show that it had become a widespread custom by the second half of the second century and make no claim as to its greater antiquity. There were in existence, Eusebius said, letters of various synods of bishops held at the time:
from those who were then assembled in Palestine under the presidency of Theophilus, bishop of the diocese of Cæsarea, and Narcissus, of that of Jerusalem; likewise from those at Rome, another [letter] bearing the name of Bishop Victor, about the same question; and one from the bishops of Pontus under the presidency of Palmas, since he was the eldest; and one from the dioceses of Gaul which were under Irenæus’ supervision. Furthermore, [a letter] from those of Osrhoene [= Edessa] and the cities of that region, and personal [letters] from Bacchylus, bishop of the church of the Corinthians, and from very many more, who expressed one and the same opinion and judgment and voted the same way.
Their unanimous verdict was ‘that the mystery of the Lord’s resurrection from the dead should never be celebrated on any other day than the Lord’s day, and that on that day alone should we observe the close of the paschal fasting’ – Eusebius’ words, it should be noted, and not a quotation from an original document. However, he does reproduce an extract from the statement agreed at the synod of Palestinian bishops (c. 180) mentioned in the quotation above, in which those bishops assert that the church of Alexandria also observed the feast on Sunday and that letters were regularly exchanged between themselves and that church so that they were in agreement on the date each year.3 Nevertheless, the very fact that it was necessary for the question to be so extensively debated at that time is itself evidence for how widely established was the opposing Quartodeciman tradition.
An important consideration with regard to the antiquity of the Sunday celebration of Easter is the date when Christians first began to observe the weekly Lord’s day, as they could not have chosen that occasion for their annual feast before Sunday had become established as a regular weekly occasion for worship. As we have noted earlier in this book,4 there is no firm evidence for that to have happened before the end of the first century. If this was the case, then the Quartodeciman practice does appear to have preceded it by a considerable period of time.
Some scholars would date the emergence of the Sunday Pascha much later still, on the basis of the language used in the paschal controversy at the end of the second century. Eusebius records that Victor of Rome attempted to excommunicate all the churches that were persisting in the Quartodeciman observance, but other bishops disagreed with his action and wanted to maintain peace and unity. Irenaeus then wrote on behalf of the bishops of Gaul. While concurring that the Sunday celebration was the only right practice, he urged Victor not to excommunicate the others for observing another ancient custom, because
such variation in the observance did not begin in our own time but much earlier, in our forefathers’ time. Incorrectly, as it would seem, they kept up an ignorant custom of their own that they had made for posterity. And nonetheless, they were all at peace … In their number were the presbyters before Soter, who headed the church of which you are now the leader – namely, Anicetus and Pius, Hyginus and Telephorus, and Xystus. They themselves did not observe, nor did they permit those with them to do so, and in spite of the fact that they were not observant, they were at peace with those who came to them from the dioceses in which it was observed.5
Crucial to the interpretation of this passage is the meaning to be given to the verb ‘observe’ (τηρε
ν) in this context. The traditional opinion, still maintained by a number of scholars today, is that it should be understood as ‘observe 14 Nisan’,6 but others have argued that it actually means ‘observe Pascha’, that is, that those who did not ‘observe’ did not keep Pascha at all.7 If so, that would mean that before the time of Bishop Soter, that is, before about 165, no annual Easter observance at Rome existed on either day. Yet even these scholars are prepared to admit that the Sunday observance might well have been adopted a little earlier than this in some other churches, especially those of Alexandria and Jerusalem. If the claim by Epiphanius can be trusted, that the controversy over the paschal date began after the bishops of Jerusalem were no longer ‘of the circumcision’, that would make it around 132. At that time, following the Bar Kochba revolt, Jews (and Jewish Christians) were expelled from the city and the leadership of the Jerusalem church passed into the hands of Gentiles. They would no doubt have wanted to distance that church from Judaism and so very likely could have been the ones to introduce for the first time then a Sunday Pascha in place of the Quartodeciman observance, a development that was subsequently imitated elsewhere.8
The theory that the Sunday celebration was derived from the Quartodeciman one, whenever it was that the latter came into existence, helps to explain several otherwise somewhat puzzling features of the general early Christian observance of Easter, not the least of which is the meaning that was given to it. For, not only in Quartodeciman circles but also at first among those who kept the feast on Sunday, the original focus of the celebration was not on the resurrection of Christ, as one might have expected if it had always been associated with the Sunday, but on his death. Thus, for example, Irenaeus in Gaul in the late second century says:
The passages in which Moses reveals the Son of God are innumerable. He was aware even of the day of his passion: he foretold it figuratively by calling it Pascha. And on the very day which Moses had foretold so long before, the Lord suffered in fulfilment of the Pascha.9
While this seems a perfectly natural orientation for a feast originally situated on the Jewish Passover to have taken, it appears to be a less obvious path for the Sunday celebration, if it were not originally derived from the Quartodeciman custom.
A second feature that seems to suggest that the Sunday Pascha derives from an older Quartodeciman observance is the apparent universality of fasting on Holy Saturday. As we saw earlier in the book when discussing signs of the continuing influence of the Sabbath on early Christianity,10 many churches refused to allow any fasting to take place on a Saturday, except for the one Saturday in the year that preceded Easter. It is easier to see how this major departure from the norm could have come into existence if there were already a well-established tradition of fasting during the day on 14 Nisan in preparation for the Quartodeciman celebration that night: when Pascha was moved to the Sunday, the fast day would have accompanied it and displaced the usual prohibition with regard to that day. This in turn helps to explain the remark by Irenaeus in his letter to Victor concerning the paschal controversy, that the disagreement did not merely concern the day of Pascha but also the length of the preparatory fast.
For some think it necessary to fast for one day, others two, others even more days; and others measure their day as lasting forty hours, day and night. And such variation in the observance did not begin in our time but much earlier, in our forefathers’ time.11
Those who fasted for one day would be the Quartodecimans; those fasting for two days would be some of those observing Sunday as Pascha, because the Saturday fast would then have been preceded by the normal weekly Friday fast;12 and those fasting for 40 hours would have joined those two days together in a continuous fast from Friday morning to Saturday night, without breaking it for a meal on Friday evening. This is also the first reference to the development among some of a regime of fasting for ‘even more days’ in preparation for the feast, a practice that seems also to have been known to Tertullian and becomes increasingly common in later sources.13 It may possibly owe its origin to the transfer of an original period of fasting by Quartodecimans during the Week of Unleavened Bread after Pascha, which may be alluded to in the Gospel of Peter, to a week of fasting before Pascha when that feast came to be celebrated on a Sunday and followed by the 50 festal days of Pentecost.14 However, a six-day fast from Monday until the end of the Saturday night vigil is first explicitly mentioned in the third century by Dionysius of Alexandria and by the Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum.
Dionysius, in a letter written about the middle of the century, indicates that he was aware of a variety of practices, some people fasting for the full six days, others for two, three, or four days, and some none at all, but he appears to imply that either six days or just the Friday and Saturday were more usual. In the same passage he deals with what was obviously a related topic – when the fast and vigil should end so that eating could begin. Again there was variety. While noting that the church at Rome waited until the hour of cockcrow to end the paschal fast, a practice he described as ‘generous and painstaking’, he acknowledged the existence of two other customs: some finished before midnight, and these he censured as ‘remiss and wanting in self-restraint’, and others stopped between those two points, and these he said should not be treated ‘altogether severely’. Although he disapproves of the former, they may not in fact have been merely lax but possibly a remnant still keeping to the original Jewish time of the Passover meal, and those in between seem to be in line with what had been the more usual Quartodeciman custom.15 What is particularly interesting is that Dionysius links the question to the time of Christ’s resurrection because, he says, there was general agreement that one ought not to start the feast until after that, even though the canonical Gospels fail to specify a precise hour at which it happened.16 This is a clear indication that, as a natural consequence of the transfer of the celebration of Pascha to Sunday, its primary focus had begun to shift from the Passion to the resurrection. Tertullian provides an even earlier indication of this trend in North Africa when he states that the Catholics there had begun to understand the reason for the Friday and Saturday fast to be because it was the time ‘when the bridegroom is taken away’ (Mark 2.20; Luke 5.35).17
It has already been remarked earlier that, underlying part of Didascalia Apostolorum, appear to be prescriptions for a Quartodeciman observance. These have been re-worked by one or more later hands (how many is a matter of scholarly dispute) to accommodate a Sunday Pascha, resulting in a complex and somewhat confusing appearance, including an idiosyncratic chronology for the final week of the life of Jesus. Rouwhorst has argued that this section of the church order did not reach its final state until the fourth century and not the third as most others have supposed.18 He also claims that because the text makes such a strong appeal to the example of the apostles in order to justify both a full week of fasting and also the Friday–Saturday fast, both of these fasts must have been innovations and were here being defended against Quartodecimans who practised neither of these customs.19 Thus as it now stands, the church order attempts to find a basis for the six-day fast by asserting that Judas was paid for his betrayal ‘on the tenth day of the month, on the second day of the week’, and so it was as though Jesus had already been seized on that day, in fulfilment of the requirement in Exodus 12.3 and 6 to take a lamb on the tenth day of the month and keep it until the fourteenth. It then continues:
Therefore you shall fast in the days of the Pascha from the tenth, which is the second day of the week; and you shall sustain yourselves with bread and salt and water only, at the ninth hour, until the fifth day of the week. But on the Friday and on the Sabbath fast wholly, and taste nothing. You shall come together and watch and keep vigil all the night with prayers and intercessions, and with reading of the Prophets, and with the gospel and with psalms, with fear and trembling and with earnest supplication, until the third hour in the night after the Sabbath; and then break your fasts …20
This passage is interesting in several respects. First, the biblical prescriptions about the timing of the Passover have been adapted to fit a quite different chronology from the original Quartodeciman one. Obviously in most years the ‘second day of the week’ and the actual ‘tenth day of the month’ cannot have coincided, but the author expects the readers to understand the Monday of the paschal week as being the symbolical equivalent of the tenth day.
Second, although six days of fasting are prescribed, a distinction is still maintained between the older two-day fast and the other days of the week: bread, salt and water are permitted after the ninth hour on Monday through Thursday, but nothing at all on the last two days. The particular importance of these final days is also emphasized a little later in the text, where the above prescriptions are reiterated:
Especially incumbent on you therefore is the fast of the Friday and the Sabbath; and likewise the vigil and watching of the Sabbath, and the reading of the Scriptures, and psalms, and prayer and intercession for them that have sinned, and the expectation and hope of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus, until the third hour in the night after the Sabbath. And then offer your oblations; and thereafter eat and make good cheer, and rejoice and be glad, because that earnest of our resurrection, Christ, is risen …21
Third, as this second extract makes clear, the Saturday night celebration is becoming focused on the resurrection rather than of the death of Christ or of the whole paschal mystery, a development already noted in Dionysius’ letter, and so Friday and Saturday in turn become memorials of Christ’s death and burial (although apparently not yet marked by any particular liturgical provisions), as the Didascalia goes on to say: ‘Fast then on the Friday, because on that day the People killed themselves in crucifying our Saviour; and on the Sabbath as well, because it is the sleep of the Lord, for it is a day which ought especially to be kept with fasting …’22
Fourth, because the term Pascha is still understood to refer to the Passion of Christ, it is used to denote the period of the memorial of Christ’s suffering and death. Thus, in the first extract, ‘the days of the Pascha’ correspond to the week of fasting and therefore end at what later Christians would call Easter Day. Tertullian too in North Africa uses the expression die Paschae in the singular with reference to a day when there was general fasting (and the kiss of peace was omitted) and presumably therefore to the Saturday,23 whereas Cyprian half a century later appears to have begun to use the word to denote the Sunday itself.24
Finally, the fast concludes at ‘the third hour in the night after the Sabbath’. Several commentators have assumed that the day is being counted as beginning at midnight here,25 and so the third hour would have been around 3 a.m., the equivalent of cockcrow commended by Dionysius. However, Rouwhorst has insisted that the Jewish reckoning of the day was being followed in this text, and therefore around 9 p.m. is meant.26 Whichever method was intended, it would have necessitated continuing the fast into what was thought of as the beginning of Sunday, something that was normally not allowed, and so the text goes on to permit an exception to that rule.27 The compiler also manages to calculate that Jesus fulfilled the saying in Matthew 12.40 that ‘the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ by counting the time from the sixth to the ninth hour on Friday as the first day and the three hours of darkness that followed as the first night, the time from the ninth to the twelfth hour and the night of the Sabbath as the second day and night, and the Sabbath day and the three hours of the following night as the third.28
Variation in the hour of the celebration that we can observe in these sources persisted into the fourth and fifth centuries. Although the early conclusion of the vigil that we find in the Didascalia (if Rouwhorst’s interpretation is correct) does seem to have faded away – perhaps because it could not be reconciled with the presumed hour of Christ’s resurrection, especially if communities had begun to reckon the day beginning at midnight – some churches continued to adhere to cockcrow, while others concluded the vigil at midnight, with correspondingly different convictions about the time when Christ had risen that justified their particular practice. Thus, while the Testamentum Domini, a church order usually thought to have originated in Syria, associates daily midnight prayer with the time of Christ’s resurrection (2.24), in the Apostolic Constitutions, also from Syria at around the same time, the fasting and paschal vigil are to continue until cockcrow, which is understood as daybreak on the first day of the week, the time when Christ rose (5.18–19). Although Egeria gives no indication of the hour when the Easter vigil at Jerusalem ended, the weekly resurrection vigil there, as we have seen,29 began at cockcrow. On the other hand, the Armenian Lectionary (dating from the first half of the fifth century and reproducing the readings, feasts and a number of the rubrics of the church at Jerusalem) states that the Easter vigil ended and the Eucharist began at midnight.30 While Augustine admits that the precise hour during the night at which Christ rose is unknown, the vigil in North Africa continued until cockcrow.31 In contrast, Jerome was familiar with a vigil that ended at midnight, which he believed to be an Apostolic custom arising from a Jewish tradition that ‘tells us that the Messiah will come at midnight’.32
Even though these differences in the hour of celebration may have continued, there was growing agreement from the middle of the third century onwards that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday following the Jewish Passover. But this did not put an end to calendrical problems. We have already mentioned in the previous chapter the difficulties involved in knowing when Passover would fall each year. Some Christians tried to solve this by calculating for themselves the date of the first full moon after the spring equinox and computing the date of Easter from that. However, because the science of astronomy was much less exact then than it is today, a variety of tables for finding the date of Easter were produced by different groups of Christians, with the consequence that the feast was often celebrated on divergent dates in different parts of the world.
For example, the earliest such table that is known to us is one reported by Eusebius to be the work of a third-century Bishop Hippolytus and is found engraved on the base of a statue at Rome alleged to be that of Hippolytus.33 In order to predict the date of Easter, this combines two of the eight-year lunar cycles devised by Greek astronomers and creates seven series of a 16-year cycle, beginning in the year 222. Eusebius also reports that Dionysus of Alexandria in the middle of the third century sent out annual letters to announce what was to be the date of Easter – a practice already referred to above in connection with the second-century paschal controversy and one continued by the later bishops of that church – and that he too used an eight-year cycle.34 Another widely known table was based on a cycle of 28 years, and out of this was formed a more accurate version based on 84 years, which gained only one day over the real moon in about 63 years, and came into use later in Rome and North Africa. Anatolius of Laodicea, who died c. 282, in order to compute the date of Easter used a 19-year lunar cycle that had been known in both Babylon and Greece since at least the fourth century BCE and lost just one day in about 286 years, and his table became the basis of all those used thereafter by the church at Alexandria.35
After the Council of Nicaea, therefore, the Emperor Constantine directed that all churches were to keep the feast on the same day, reaffirming a decision that had already been made for churches in the West at the Council of Arles in 314, when it had been agreed that the Bishop of Rome should send out letters announcing the date of Easter each year.36 Constantine cites the scandal of Christians celebrating the feast on different days as a reason for this decree, but it appears that such variation was less of a concern than were the Quartodeciman and Syrian practices of continuing to use the Jewish reckoning to set the date of their celebration. The letter argued that lack of accuracy in Jewish calendrical calculation sometimes resulted in the Passover – and hence Easter – being celebrated prior to the actual spring equinox, and that this was a grave error. But the real motivation was clearly a desire to distance Christianity from Judaism: ‘it seemed unsuitable that we should celebrate that holy festival following the custom of the Jews’.37
Nevertheless, this decision did not put an end to variation, as some groups of Christians persisted in their traditional customs, and in any case no particular table to compute the date of Easter appears to have been prescribed by Constantine. Thus, the churches of Alexandria and Rome continued to use different tables from one another and assigned the equinox to different dates, 21 March in the case of the former and 25 March in the case of the latter. Another contrast between them was what should be done when the full moon fell on a Sunday: should Easter be kept on that day or on the following Sunday? As a result, in the year 387, Easter was observed at Alexandria and in northern Italy on 25 April, in Gaul on 21 March, and at Rome on 18 April.38 It took many centuries for such discrepancies finally to be resolved.
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1 These include Bernard Lohse, Das Passafest der Quartadecimaner (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1953), pp. 113–18; J. van Goudoever, Biblical Calendars (Leiden: Brill 1961), pp. 124–9, 164–75; Willy Rordorf, ‘Zum Ursprung des Osterfestes am Sonntag’, Theologische Zeitschrift 18 (1962), pp. 167–89; Cantalamessa, pp. 10–11; and most recently, Karl Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History, Liturgia condenda 7 (Louvain, Peeters 1998), p. 407.
2 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.23.1; see also 5.25.1; ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 33, 37. Similar claims are made by Socrates, Historia ecclesiastica 5.22; Sozomen, Historia ecclesiastica 7.19.1.
3 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.23.3; 23.2; 25.1; ET from Cantalamessa, pp. 34, 37.
4 Above, pp. 7–9.
5 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.24.9–14; ET from Cantalamessa, pp. 35–6.
6 In addition to the scholars already cited above in n. 1, see also Christine Mohrmann, ‘Le conflit pascal au IIe siècle: note philologique’, VC 16 (1962), pp. 154–71; Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, QL 77 (1996), p. 158, n. 42.
7 See for example Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte II: Der Osten (Tübingen: Mohr 1928), pp. 204–24; Wolfgang Huber, Passa und Ostern (Berlin: Töpelmann 1969), pp. 45ff.; Marcel Richard, ‘La question pascale au IIe siècle’, L’Orient syrien 6 (1961), pp. 179–212; Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986; 2nd edn, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1991), pp. 13–27. Talley (pp. 6–7) attempts to claim that the Epistula Apostolorum contains an explicit defence of the Quartodeciman Pascha against Christians who did not celebrate Pascha at all; but Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘Liturgy on the Authority of the Apostles’ in Anthony Hilhorst (ed.), The Apostolic Age in Patristic Thought (Leiden: Brill 2004), pp. 69–70, n. 15, thinks that this is speculative. See also Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Lamb’s High Feast: Melito, Peri Pascha and the Quartodeciman Paschal Liturgy at Sardis (Leiden: Brill 1998), p. 205, n. 288.
8 Epiphanius, Panarion 70.9; see Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte II, pp. 215ff.; Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 24–5.
9 Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 4.10.1; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 50. See also Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, p. 159.
10 See pp. 17–20.
11 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.24.12–13; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 36.
12 For the regular Friday fast, see above, pp. 29–34. In the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus the normal pre-paschal fast is said to be two days, but as a concession, those who are sick (or pregnant?) may limit their fast to the Sabbath alone (33.1–2); see Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2002), pp. 172–5.
13 Although in De ieiunio 2.2 (ET in Cantalamessa, p. 92) Tertullian asserts that his Catholic opponents regard the Friday and Saturday of the Pascha as the only legitimate days for fasting, later in the same work (13.1) he implies that they actually fast for more days, contrary to their professed principles.
14 See above, p. 46, and for Pentecost, below, pp. 69–74.
15 For the possibility of the existence a tradition of eating at the same time as the Jews, see Stewart-Sykes’ view of the Laodicean dispute, above, p. 43; and for the more usual Quartodeciman practice, above, p. 42.
16 Epistula ad Basilidem 1; ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 60–1. Athanasius in the fourth century interprets the six days as a recapitulation of the six days of creation: Epistulae Festales 1; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 70.
17 De ieiunio 2.2 and 13.1. Tertullian also speaks of the Easter vigil lasting ‘the whole night’ (until cockcrow?) in Ad uxorem 2.4.2, as does Lactantius at the beginning of the fourth century, referring to ‘watching until morning’ in Divinarum institutionum 7.19.3; ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 91, 94.
18 Gerard Rouwhorst, Les Hymnes pascales d’Ephrem de Nisibe 1 (Leiden: Brill 1989), pp. 157–90. A fourth-century date is also supported by Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum: An English Version with Introduction and Annotation (Turnhout: Brepols 2009), pp. 49–55.
19 Rouwhorst, ‘Liturgy on the Authority of the Apostles’, pp. 77–9.
20 Didascalia Apostolorum 5.18–19.1; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 83.
21 Didascalia Apostolorum 5.19.6–7; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 83.
22 Didascalia Apostolorum 5.19.9–10; ET from Sebastian Brock and Michael Vasey (eds), The Liturgical Portions of the Didascalia, Grove Liturgical Study 20 (Nottingham: Grove Books 1982), p. 28.
23 Tertullian, De oratione 18.7. Cantalamessa, p. 90, understands the expression to refer to Good Friday, but this seems less likely. Elsewhere (De ieiunio 13.1) Tertullian uses the word Pascha to cover the fast days of both Friday and Saturday.
24 See Cyprian, Epistulae 21.2; 41.1 and 7; 56.3.
25 See, for example, Cantalamessa, p. 182, note f.
26 Rouwhorst, Les Hymnes pascales d’Ephrem de Nisibe 1, pp. 173–80.
27 Didascalia 5.20.12; ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 83–4.
28 Didascalia 5.14; ET in Brock and Vasey, The Liturgical Portions of the Didascalia, p. 26.
29 Above, p. 27.
30 See John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (3rd edn, Warminster: Aris & Phillips 1999), p. 270.
31 Augustine, Sermo Guelferbytanus 1.10; 5.4.
32 Jerome, Commentarium in Matt. 4; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 99.
33 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 6.22. For the statue, see Margherita Guarducci, ‘La statua di “Sant’Ippolito”’ in Ricerche su Ippolito, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 13 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum 1977), pp. 17–30; Margherita Guarducci, ‘La “Statua di Sant’Ippolito” e la sua provenienza’ in Nuove ricerche su Ippolito, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 30 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum 1989), pp. 61–74.
34 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 7.20. For the second-century practice, see above, p. 49.
35 For further details of these and other tables, see Anscar Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press 1992), pp. 43–5; C. W. Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America 1943), pp. 11–77; Daniel P. McCarthy and Aidan Breen, The ante-Nicene Christian Pasch, De ratione paschali: The Paschal Tract of Anatolius, Bishop of Laodicea (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2003); Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press 2008).
36 Canon 1; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 94.
37 Constantine, Ep. ad ecclesias 18; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 63.
38 Ambrose, Ep. 23. For details, see Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast, pp. 45–6, 70–1.