Melito Of Sardis (d. 190)

Formerly it was thought that Christian rhetoric did not begin until the fourth and fifth centuries. The discovery, however, of a sermon by Melito, bishop of Sardis, known as "On the Passover" suggests that a tradition of skilled rhetoric and sermon construction had begun earlier. Melito's sermon carefully blends typology, analogy, and parallelism. Scholars now believe that two distinctive styles of preaching existed in the second century: the unstructured, informal homily of the lay person and the highly developed oration typified in "On the Passover. " The Importance of the Sermon The sermon of Melito "On the Passover" is the work of the famous and influential bishop of Sardis who is known to have written voluminously but whose literary productions have been almost entirely lost. The discoveries have identified not only the sermon, but have also enabled scholars to correctly assign authorship to other ancient fragments wrongly assigned until now. It is an important discovery because…