The Fourteenthers
Transcript
Now this title might stump you a little bit: “The Fourteenthers.” What could this possibly be about? Well this actually refers to a rather significant debate in the early church. The Latin here is quarto decimani, and we just turn that into English as “the fourteenthers.” I’m not sure that’s an English word, and I’m not even sure that’s a Latin word. This is a reference to the idea of the fourteenth of the month, and of course this is a particular month, the fourteenth of Nisan.
The controversy here has to do with the celebration of Easter. In the early church there were two different views that vied for attention. One of these is represented in the church father Polycarp. That great name that means “many fish.” Polycarp, who was martyred in 155, was a “fourteenther.” He held to the view that no matter what day of the week, the fourteenth of Nisan is the day that Easter should be celebrated. It was linked up as it is in the Gospel's account to the celebration of Passover in the Old Testament, and to make that connection to Passover and the 14th of Nisan, Polycarp was insistent that we celebrate Resurrection Day and we celebrate Easter on the 14th of Nisan.
Well there was another view in the early church that it would be celebrated on the Sunday after the 14th of Nisan, and this particular view was held by Anicetus. At the time Anicetus was the Bishop of Rome. He died in 168, and the record is not all that clear if he died of natural causes or is martyred. But when Polycarp and Anicetus squared off on this date, they actually decided to agree to disagree. Now that’s crucial for a lot of reasons. Number one, it shows us that in the early church there was no singular bishop who exercised authority over the other bishops, no Pope as it were. But that power really was in the plurality of the bishops. Polycarp did not have to submit to Anicetus’ view, he could carry on his view and that was celebrated in the churches under his bishopric. And the churches under Anicetus and the other bishops who shared Anicetus’ view, would celebrate Easter according to their view and their bishopric.
But it wasn’t good enough to just sort of leave these two sides, in fact, in the next couple centuries, this debate raged on. It had a level of intensity of almost the early Christology debates. And we speak of the Council of Nicaea that met in 325. And we speak of how they dealt there with Arianism and the view that Christ was less than God, and the wonderful Nicene creed that comes to us. Well, also at the Council of Nicaea they debated this Quartodeciman controversy, and the ruling was that it would be the Sunday after the 14th of Nisan.
Well that seemed to suffice for a number of centuries and then we come along in 1582. In 1582 Gregory XIII gives us a new calendar. He moves the “world” off of the Julian calendar and onto what has been called the Gregorian calendar. Now that’s not necessarily the case in the Eastern churches, so we need to put “world” in quotes there. In the Eastern churches the celebration of Easter is different from that in the Western churches, both the Catholic and the Protestant churches. But in the Gregorian calendar not only could we have this fixed day, but now we needed a new formula. And it goes something like this:
Easter is celebrated the 1st Sunday following the 1st ecclesiastical full moon, on or after the vernal equinox.In other words, Easter can go anywhere from March 22nd, because the vernal equinox is March 21st, until April 25. And so I was always a bit confused myself as to how this comes about; and there you have it. The crucial thing of course is not the date—the crucial thing is, what are we celebrating? And as we think about the 14th day of Nisan, we are remembering this link back to Christ as our Passover Lamb. And not only do we remember this link back, but we also have those wonderful words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. This is the event upon which Christianity is built—the death and the resurrection of Christ.
