3Don’t let kindness and truth forsake you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. 4So you will find favor, and good understanding in the sight of God and man. 5Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding. 6In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. 7Don’t be wise in your own eyes. Fear Yahweh, and depart from evil. 8It will be health to your body, and nourishment to your bones. 9Honor Yahweh with your substance, with the first fruits of all your increase: 10so your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will overflow with new wine.
This passage ties together faithfulness, humility, and trust in a way that feels very practical. It suggests that steady character is built in small, daily choices, like keeping your word and being kind when no one is keeping score. It also warns against leaning too heavily on our own cleverness, which is easy to do when life feels under control. The invitation is to hold our plans loosely and give our work, our resources, and our worries to something larger than ourselves.
No reading is issued today. I could not check the wording of any Antipater fragment against a text, and no public-domain English translation turned up. Antipater was a Stoic who headed the school in Athens in the second century BC and wrote on marriage. Stobaeus preserved his fragments in an anthology compiled around the fifth century AD. Without a verified passage, I will not print a quotation.
Before Easter had a settled date, two bishops agreed to disagree, and a later pope who wouldn't was talked out of it.
In the middle of the second century, the aged Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, travelled to Rome to talk with its bishop, Anicetus. The two men disagreed about when to keep Easter. Polycarp followed the practice of Asia Minor and marked Christ's death on 14 Nisan, the day of the Jewish Passover, whatever weekday it fell on. He said he had learned this from the apostle John. Rome kept the feast on a Sunday. Neither man gave way. According to Irenaeus, Anicetus then invited Polycarp to preside at the Eucharist in the Roman church, and they parted in communion.
That peace lasted about a generation. Around 190, Pope Victor I tried to impose the Sunday date everywhere. When the churches of Asia refused, he threatened their bishops with excommunication. Polycrates of Ephesus answered for them. He wrote that seven of his relatives had been bishops before him and that he had served the Lord for sixty-five years. He named Polycarp and other Asian worthies as witnesses to the old custom, and he said he would not be frightened by threats.
Other bishops, including Irenaeus, thought Victor was making too much of the matter. They reminded him that Anicetus had tolerated the same difference. The sentence was apparently withdrawn, because the Asian churches stayed in communion with Rome. Quartodeciman practice lasted in parts of Asia Minor for centuries.
The question did not go away. Accounts of the Council of Nicaea in 325 list the Easter date as one of the matters Constantine wanted settled. The dispute is also a useful early case for historians of church authority. Both sides still cite it. Some see Victor acting as though he had real jurisdiction. Others stress that Asian bishops defied him and were not cut off.
RememberChristians once argued over Easter's date for about 150 years, and its first peaceful settlement was a shared Eucharist between two bishops who still disagreed.
Read nextEusebius, Ecclesiastical History (Book 5, chapters 23–25)