Saint
Melito of Sardis (died c.
180) was the
bishop of Sardis, near
Smyrna in
Asia Minor, and a great authority:
Jerome, speaking of the
Old Testament canon established by Melito, quotes
Tertullian to the effect that he was esteemed a prophet by many of the faithful. His feast is celebrated on
April 1.
Aside from a
homily "Concerning the Passover" in the
Bodmer Papyri, only fragments of his works survive. Melito was a prolific early Christian writer, judging from lists of them preserved by
Eusebius and
Jerome. He wrote a celebrated
Apology for Christianity which he sent to
Marcus Aurelius.
Melito provides us with what is probably the earliest known Christian canon of the Old Testament (accounting for the uncertainty with regards to the precise date of the
Muratorian fragment). The
Catholic Encyclopedia states that "Melito's Canon consists exclusively of the protocanonicals minus
Esther". However, Melito includes
Wisdom, which is part of the
Roman Catholic and
Eastern Orthodox Deuterocanon.
Melito's
Peri Pascha ("Concerning the Passover") is a text that was assembled from surviving fragments in the 1930s, and translated into English in the 1940s. Prior to the recovery of the full text less the opening folio among the Bodmer Papyri the order in which the fragments had been assembled was a possible reconstruction. It is clear from Eusebius that Melito celebrates Passover on the fourteenth of Nisan, rather than the Sunday following (Eusebius
Historia Ecclesiastica 5.24), hence he was a
Quartodeciman.
In this homily, Melito formulated the charge of
deicide, namely that Jews were responsible for the
crucifixion of Jesus. He proclaimed that "God has been murdered; the king of Israel has been slain by an Israelite hand." His preaching would later inspire
pogroms against the Jews.
According to the
Catholic Encyclopedia Melito believed in a
Millennial reign of Christ on Earth. He wrote against idolatry or relying on teachings of fathers to condone it (Melito's
Apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus). He presented elaborated parallels between the Old Testament, the form or mold, and the New Testament, as the truth that broke the mold, in a series of
Eklogai, six books of extracts from the Law and the Prophets presaging Christ and the Christian faith; a passage cited by Eusebius contains Melito's famous canon of the Old Testament.
Origen, in a brief note, relates that Melito ascribed corporeality to
God, and believed that the likeness of God is preserved in the human body. The note is too brief to tell exactly what Melito might have meant by this.
A letter of
Polycrates of Ephesus to
Pope Victor about 194, mentioned by
Eusebius, (
H.E. 5.24) states that "Melito the
eunuch" was interred at Sardis.
Melito's reputation as a writer remained strong into the Middle Ages: numerous works were
pseudepigraphically ascribed to him.
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