Another Example of Nicene Christianity Accomodating Itself to Constantine's Dictates

 Epiphanius’ account of the Audians is one of those passages where Nicene Christianity basically says the quiet part out loud: “Yes, we changed it for Constantine. And that’s fine.”

Look at how the story is framed. The Audians are presented as stubborn cranks who insist on keeping Pascha with the Jews, “contentiously” celebrating at the same time as the Jewish Feast of Unleavened Bread. Epiphanius concedes – in passing, almost off-hand – that this really had been the custom of the church. It “used to be” the practice. That alone already undercuts the later party line that the “Quartodecimans” were some fringe Asiatic deviation. Here the Nicene heresiologist openly acknowledges that the church once behaved exactly the way the Audians now behave.

Then he has to deal with their accusation.

The Audians say, quite simply: you abandoned the fathers’ Paschal rite in Constantine’s time, out of deference to the emperor, and changed the day to suit him. Some even push it further and claim the feast was shifted to Constantine’s birthday. Epiphanius doesn’t dismiss this as a slanderous fantasy; he never says “that’s historically false.” Instead he changes the subject. He argues that, since Pascha doesn’t fall on a fixed civil date every year, the charge about Constantine’s birthday is “worthless” on a technicality, and then immediately pivots to the real point: the emperor’s concern was “for the unity of the church.”

In other words, yes, Constantine imposed a Paschal policy; yes, the council legislated it; but that was a good thing because unity trumps inherited practice.

And that’s the pattern. The entire passage is one long exercise in retrofitting the post-Nicene settlement as if it were simply the working out of apostolic intention. Epiphanius actually admits what the Audians rely on: that there was an apostolic ordinance which, on the face of it, sounds like “celebrate when your brethren of the circumcision do; celebrate with them.” The whole Arian/anti-Arian fight about Scripture gets repeated here in miniature: the literal wording leans one way, but the “correct” reading is the one that safeguards the current orthodoxy.

So he has to reinterpret the phrase “your brethren of the circumcision.” Not Jews in general; not “the synagogue”; no, it’s supposedly those Jewish-origin Christians, the fifteen “bishops from the circumcision,” who, in his story, governed the church in the earliest phase. The apostles, we are told, really meant: follow the timing worked out by those ex-Jews who now lead the church, so that we all keep one date. The Audians, says Epiphanius, “ignorantly” missed that nuance and thought the text meant “keep it with the Jews.”

Once you see what he’s doing, the logic is almost comically circular.

First move: concede that there was once a mess – different Pascha dates, East vs West, Polycarp vs Victor, Alexander of Alexandria vs Crescens, and so on. Admit that the god-fearing chaos went on “even from the earliest days” and that it only got worse “since the church was thrown into disorder after the time of the circumcised bishops.” So the ideal golden age was when Jewish Christians still ran things; then came confusion; then Constantine and the council fixed it.

Second move: canonize the fix. The Nicene bishops, assembled “from every quarter,” investigated and determined one common rite “as befits its date and rite.” This is presented as God’s own work through Constantine: two great acts – (a) the council and its creed, with Arius deposed; (b) the “rectification” of the Paschal feast for the sake of unity. Creed and calendar are a package deal, the twin sacraments of the Constantinian settlement.

Third move: now blame the dissidents not for lying about the change, but for refusing to accept it. The Audians are not dangerous because they misrepresent history. Epiphanius actually gives them historical ammunition by rehearsing the old quarrels and the apostolic ordinance. They are dangerous because they cling to the old pattern against the emperor-backed majority. Their sin is not “getting the sources wrong” so much as refusing to subordinate their reading of those sources to the needs of imperial-church unity.

That is what I mean by “another example of Nicene Christianity accommodating itself to Constantine’s dictates.” Nobody here is pretending that Constantine wasn’t decisive. On the contrary, Epiphanius calls him “most beloved of God and forever the most blessed,” and credits him with being the instrument by which God tidied up both doctrine (Nicaea vs Arius) and time (the Paschal computation). There is no embarrassment about imperial interference. What has to be defended is not the historical continuity of the rite, but the theological legitimacy of letting the emperor’s concern for “unity” override older practice and older texts.

The way the Ordinance of the Apostles is handled is especially revealing. Epiphanius insists it is “not spurious,” that it contains no falsification of faith or order, that it is full of correct canonical regulations. He wants it on his side. The only way to keep both the authority of the text and the authority of Constantine’s settlement is to allegorize the obvious. “Your brethren of the circumcision” can’t be the synagogue, because that would vindicate the Audians. So it becomes a kind of technical term for a now-vanished leadership class of Jewish Christian bishops whose memory conveniently supports the current policy of one unified catholic date.

But under the allegory, the underlying tension is exposed. There really were Christians – not only Audians – who knew their local tradition, read the apostolic ordinance in a straightforward way, and drew from that a critique of the Nicene/Constantinian innovation. Epiphanius can’t deny that they have a case. He can only reframe the whole story so that Constantine’s interference becomes the providential restoration of the original apostolic intention for unity, and the stubborn literalists become enemies of peace.

Put this alongside the broader picture of the fourth century. Again and again, “Nicene orthodoxy” presents itself as timeless, but the actual details come from councils convened at imperial pleasure, settlements negotiated under imperial pressure, and compromises justified after the fact by creative readings of Scripture and pseudo-apostolic regulations. The Audians are one more little crack where the plaster slips and you can see the brickwork. They shout, “You changed the fathers’ rite for the emperor,” and the reply is not, “No, we didn’t,” but, “Yes, but God used the emperor for unity, and the real meaning of the fathers was always to agree with us.”

Once you accept that logic, Constantine’s dictates become, retroactively, the mind of the apostles. And any group that refuses those dictates – whether over homoousios, or over the Paschal date – automatically shows itself to be “heretical,” not because it can’t quote texts, but because it won’t let the new imperial consensus be the lens through which all old texts must now be read.