The Church Fathers · c. 160–170
On Pascha
Peri Pascha
Melito of Sardis · d. c. 180
What it is
A rhetorically dazzling Easter sermon reading the Passover lamb as a figure of Christ, in surging parallel clauses built for performance rather than study.
Why it lasted
The finest surviving piece of second-century Christian rhetoric — and, in its charge of deicide against Israel, an early source of a poison the church carried for centuries.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below. The Library catalogues it; it does not host the text.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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