Melito

Worth knowing

• Bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor, and one of the first Christians we know of to travel to Palestine specifically to establish which books belonged in the Old Testament.
• On the Pascha, his Easter sermon, was lost for roughly seventeen centuries and recovered from papyri in the twentieth. It is the earliest surviving Christian Easter homily.
• It is also an early source for the charge that the Jewish people killed God — a strand of the tradition that later Christians have had to reckon with honestly rather than quietly.

The book

On the PaschaMelito of Sardis, On the PaschaChristology

Who else was alive

Melito against everyone else in the game.