(70. 9. 7), but this was corrected, for the sake of accord and harmony, at the
Council of Nicaea. Again, the Audians claim support from the‘Ordinance of
the Apostles’,^161 but Epiphanius reinterprets their teaching as a demand for
unity,‘so that there would be no schisms or divisions’(70. 10). Thus, the
Audians‘deceive men and women...with their parade of keeping the original
tradition and following the Ordinance of the Apostles’(70. 14. 1); as in John
Chrysostom’s homily, unity of practice is paramount.^162
Epiphanius locates the Audian heresy in the Taurus mountains, Syria,
Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and at one time also in Gothia (70. 14–15).
This wide geographical spread does not necessarily mean large numbers—
Epiphanius himself claims that they are‘still very few’—but what is interesting
is that the Audians are located in the Roman Near East, precisely where, as we
have seen, the practice of observing Easter with the Jews had always been
prevalent. Effectively, this means that a local Christian tradition was being
renamed, in this late fourth-century work, a‘heresy’.
In a more legal context, the new set of heresies appears around the same
time in the above-mentioned Canons of Laodicea, where the seventh canon
reads:
Persons converted from heresies, that is, of the Novatians, Photinians, and
Quartodecimans, whether they were catechumens or communicants among
them, shall not be received until they shall have anathematized every heresy,
and particularly that in which they were held. (Hefele and Leclerq 1907:
999 – 1000)This canon implies excommunication, and sets out a procedure for readmis-
sion of repentant heretics into the Orthodox Church. It may be assumed that
Novatians and Quartodecimans (if not also Photinians, of whom we know far
less) are mentioned together in this canon because of their deviant reckoning
of the date of Easter. Their appearance in this relatively early text of church
canons suggests that these heresies achieved, almost from the outset, a for-
mally recognized legal status.
It did not take long, indeed, for imperial legislation to join in. In 382, the
joint emperors—by then all pro-Nicene—issued a law condemning those‘who
do not convene on the same day for Easter’.^163 In the earlyfifth century,
imperial legislation began referring to specific heresies by name. Novatians
thus appear in an imperial constitution of 413:
We do not permit to go unavenged that transgression by...those deserters and
fugitives from the company of the Novatians...whose name is derived from the(^161) i.e. theDidascalia: the passage cited below, n. 180.
(^162) Williams (1987–94) ii. 410–18.
(^163) Codex Theodosianus16. 5. 9 (Pharr 1952: 452). The law, probably a rescript, was issued on
31 March by the emperors Gratian, Theodosius I, and Valentinian II.
416 Calendars in Antiquity