The reasons for this variety are perhaps to be sought in the
diverse traditions about Jesus that circulated in the early Christian
centuries, thus prompting different liturgical forms of celebrating
him. For example, Eusebius reports a controversy that arose in
the second century because certain churches in Asia, who claimed
this was their ancient tradition, celebrated Easter on the same day
as the Jewish Passover, which could fall on any day of the week,
and not on Easter Sunday. Against this Asian peculiarity, bishops
elsewhere in the Roman world protested that by ‘apostolic tradi-
tion’ Easter ought to be celebrated on a Sunday. The bishops
of Asia remained obstinate, however, citing their own precedents
and traditions from the disciples Philip and John (Ecclesiastical
History5.23–4). Recent study of the work Peri Pascha(On the
Pasch) by the early second-century bishop Melito of Sardis has
suggested that this Asian practice could originate in a Christian
celebration coinciding with the Jewish feast of Passover that
commemorated not only the deliverance of the Israelites from
Egypt as described in Exodus, but also the deliverance of God’s
new chosen people, the Christians, through the Messiah Jesus,
whose coming the Old Testament Exodusnarrative prefigured
(Stewart-Sykes 1998). Moreover, this Asian practice might reflect
a regional divergence as old as the gospel traditions themselves.
Whereas the synoptic gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, and
Luke describe the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples occur-
ring on the day of the Jewish Passover, the gospel ascribed to John
places it a few days earlier (see p. 72). Also, the eucharistic
sayings of Jesus (promising eternal life to those who eat his body
and drink his blood) are central to the Last Supper narratives in
the synoptics. In the Gospel of John, however, they appear not
in his account of the Last Supper, but much earlier in the story
of Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the five thousand (John 6.53–8),
when explicit reference is made to the bread (manna) sent
from heaven to the Israelites following the exodus from Egypt
(John6.31–2). Such divergences in the gospels point not only
to the possibility of different understandings of Easter, but also
ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
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