Page "Montanism" Paragraph 17

* Some of the Montanists were also " Quartodeciman " (" fourteeners "), preferring to celebrate Easter on the Hebrew calendar date of 14 Nisan, regardless of what day of the week it landed on.

Mainstream Christians held that Easter should be commemorated on the Sunday following 14 Nisan.

However, uniformity in this matter had not yet been fully achieved when the Montanist movement began ; Polycarp, for example, was a quartodeciman, and St. Irenaeus convinced the Pope to refrain from making the issue of the date of Easter a divisive one.

Later, the Catholic Church established a fixed way of calculating Easter according to the Julian ( and later the Gregorian ) calendar.