Novatianism

When the emperor Decius ordered every subject of the empire to sacrifice in 250, a great many Christians complied, and once the pressure lifted they wanted to come back. Novatian — the most learned theologian in the Roman church and the first there to write substantial theology in Latin — held that the church had no authority to receive them. God might forgive apostasy, but the church could not presume to. When Cornelius, who took the lenient view, was elected bishop of Rome in 251, Novatian's supporters had him consecrated as a rival bishop, one of the earliest such rival consecrations the city had seen. His congregations called themselves the Katharoi, the pure, and they spread across the empire and lasted for centuries. At the end of the fourth century they still held several churches in Constantinople and more across Phrygia and Bithynia. What stands out is how little separated them in doctrine. Their bishop attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 and accepted its creed, and the council's eighth canon set out terms for receiving Novatianist clergy — terms they largely declined. Later tradition remembers Novatian himself as a martyr, though the record on that is not firm.