Novation of Rome.

        The ablest Christian leader at Rome in Cyprian's day was cleaely Novatian. He had received baptism on a sickbed, the so-called clinical baptism, but he became a presbyter of the Roman church and evidently its leading presbyter, for when the see was vacant, after the martyrdom of Fabianus, in A.D. 250, he had charge of the affairs of the church and wrote two letters in its name to Cyprian, probably in August-September of that year (Epistles 30, 36). When Cornelius was elected bishop in zsi, however, Novatian refused to acknowledge him as bishop and allowed himself to be chosen rival bishop, by a minority in the church, on the issue of refusing readmission to the church to those who had left the church during the persecution and now wanted to return to it. Cornelius favored readmitting them, but Novatian held they could never return to Christian fellowship. From this doctrine of a “pure” church, which was very much that held by Hippolytus twenty years earlier, Novatian and his followers came to be called Cathari, or Puritans. It must be noted that the schism had nothing to do with the doctrine of the church but only with its discipline. But Novatian and his supporters were excommunicated at a Roman synod, held in October of 251, although the Cathari succeeded in maintaining their separate existence for two and perhaps three centuries thereafter.

        Novatian must have left Rome for a time in the persecution under Gallus (A.D. 251-53) or Valerian (253-60), for he seems to have written pastoral letters to his flock from some place of refuge; such as his works On Shows, On Jewish Foods, and On the Advantage of Modesty. The historian Socrates (d. after 439) says that he suffered martyrdom in Valerian's persecution, A.D. 257 (Church History iv. 28), but in 257-58 the treatise To Novatian was addressed to him, as Harnack thinks by Xystus II, bishop of Rome, so that we really do not know when or how he died.

        Eusebius gives an account of the Novatian affair in Church History vi. 43, with some quotations from a letter of Cornelius to Fabius of Antioch about it, and from Dionysius of Alexandria to Novatian, urging him to relinquish his claims and return to the church. Eusebius always calls him Novatus, confusing him with the Carthaginian presbyter of that name. He accepts Cornelius' judgment of him-that he was a designing and self-seeking adventurer.

        Novatian was the first considerable Latin writer of the Roman church. Jerome, in his account of him (On Illustrious Men 70), gives a list of nine works of his: On the Passover, On the Sabbath, On Circumcision, On the Priesthood, On Prayer, On Jewish Foods, On Zeal, On Attalus, and On the Trinity and adds that he wrote many others. The work On the Trinity Jerome describes as a great volume, “a sort of epitome of the work of Tertullian, which many mistakenly ascribe to Cyprian,” but it is among the works of Tertullian that Novatian's book On the Trinity has been preserved.