Read an anonymous work entitled _A Disputation against the Jews
and those who hold the same Heretical Views, and those called
Quartodecimans,[593] who do not celebrate the Holy Easter Feast
in the first month as the Hebrews do_. The style is concise and
free from redundancies, but somewhat bombastic. The author asserts
that our Lord Jesus Christ did not partake of the regular Paschal
feast[594] on the holy fifth day, for that day was not laid down,
but on the following day; that He did not even then lawfully eat
what He did eat; for He ate neither lamb, nor unleavened bread, and
observed none of the practices which those who keep Easter according
to the law are in the habit of observing. He asserts that He partook
of a private, mystic feast, from which He gave bread and wine to His
disciples.
Another tractate is also included, by a certain Metrodorus, a list
of twenty-eight cycles of nineteen years for calculating the holy
Paschal feast. This Metrodorus, whoever he was (for I have not
been able to learn anything about him), beginning with Diocletian,
has collected the Easter days for 533 years,[595] according to the
received and accurate computation of the fourteenth day. For neither
the Church nor ancient tradition appears to have observed those days.