Gordon Shigley

Sunday Sabbatarians cite this same lack of controversy as proof that Christians had already substituted Sunday observance by the time the New Testament writers penned their works. Willy Rordorf's influential work, Sunday, saw the silence as 'the most eloquent proof that the observance of Sunday had been recognized by the entire apostolic Church and had been adopted by the Pauline churches.'

Both Sabbatarian groups are aware they face problems with the historical record. Sunday Sabbatarians remain embarrassed over the lack of Scriptural authority for the supposed transfer of the Sabbath to Sunday. No New Testament passage claims God, Jesus, the Apostles, or any Church Council changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday--a fact Saturday Sabbatarians have used since the sixteenth century as an effective tool for gaining converts. On the other hand, they can find no New Testament passage commanding gentiles to observe Sabbaths. Moreover, Saturday Sabbatarians need to explain why no one seemed to notice or object to the change of the Sabbath if Christians were indeed observing a Saturday Sabbath when the supposed switch to Sunday did take place.

The reason Christians did not debate which day they should observe as a weekly Sabbath is both simpler and finds a wider body of supporting evidence. Christian Jews continued to observe a seventh-day Sabbath. Since Sunday never competed for the title among these believers they had no reason for such a debate. Gentile Christians had even less reason to argue about which day was the Sabbath because they observed no Sabbaths at all. What is the evidence?

Sabbatarians assume Sabbathkeeping began at Creation. They are unconcerned why neither the term "Sabbath" nor any command to observe a weekly day of rest appears in the Creation narrative. Why Scripture commends not one patriarch or prophet for observing Sabbaths or, more importantly, why it chastises no one for failing to do so before the Exodus, they dismiss as incidental. Rather, God's blessing of the seventh day of Creation and the Sabbath commandment's reference to God's resting after the work of creation must mean, Sabbatarians feel, that God commanded the first humans to observe a weekly Sabbath every Saturday:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:8-11

If this passage furnished the rationale for the WHEN of Sabbath observance, the wording of the same commandment in Deuteronomy provided the WHY:

Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. Deuteronomy 5:12-15 (Italics supplied for emphasis.)

As Christians of the first and second centuries would see later see it, this "memorial of Creation" originated at the Exodus as a spiritual discipline to safeguard a people for whom generations of slavery had produced a hardness of heart and a tendency to forget God. Between the annual Passover celebrations, each weekly rest from manual labor of any kind served as a reminder that God had rescued Israel from slave labor in Egypt.

This reason for Sabbath observance matches the view of early rabbinical authorities. Jubilees states "the Creator of all things . . . did not sanctify all peoples and nations to keep Sabbath thereon, but Israel alone" (see Jubilees 2:19-31). Mekilta Shabb notes "If a Gentile come to put out the fire they must not say to him 'put it out' or 'do not put it out,' since they (gentiles) are not answerable for keeping the Sabbath" (Shabb. 16:6-8). Like circumcision, the custom of Sabbathkeeping represented an everlasting sign of a covenant between God and Israel alone:

Say to the Israelites, "You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the Lord, who makes you holy." Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death; whoever does any work on that day must be cut off from his people. For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day must be put to death. The Israelites are to observe the Sabbath, celebrating it for the generations to come as a lasting covenant. . . . Also I gave them my Sabbaths as a sign between us, so they would know that I the Lord made them holy. Exodus 31:13-16, Ezekiel 20:12

Did the earliest Christians, who remained devout and observant Jews, also feel God "did not sanctify all peoples and nations to keep Sabbath thereon, but Israel alone?" Christian Jews who were members of Judaism's Pharisee party urged the young Church not to let ethnic or cultural issues influence what customs gentile converts should follow:

Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, "The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses." The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: "Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear?" Acts 15:5-10

The argument that seemed most persuasive in allowing a dichotomy of practice was simple: if God had not required gentiles to take up customs that distinguished them from Jews before giving them the Holy Spirit, on what grounds should the Church demand conformity? The Council sent messengers to confirm the written decision:

Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell. Acts 15:27-29

Would Greeks or Romans who were thinking of joining the Church assume this meant Christians should observe a weekly Sabbath? Neither Sunday nor Saturday Sabbatarians can deny they make this assumption.

Before the end of the first century Paul, whose ministry centered on reaching gentiles, suggested that the custom of regarding any day as more sacred than another belonged with those "disputable matters" that needlessly invited believers to judge one another. Writing to the predominantly gentile congregation in Rome, Paul advised:

Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables . . . One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord . . . Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. . . Romans 14:1-13

If Paul's reference to "one day more sacred than another" included Saturday, this may be the only New Testament passage specifically permitting gentile converts to practice Saturday sabbatarianism. Modern Sabbatarians, nevertheless, have not rushed to embrace this interpretation since the call for toleration caries the clear implication that treating no day as more sacred than another represents an equally valid position for Christians. If, on the other hand, Paul did not mean to include Saturday, this would seem to allow gentiles to observe as "more sacred than another" a day other than Saturday, at least as an option. It is not clear which interpretation Saturday Sabbatarians consider more hazardous.

Evidence that Paul's readers took his advice at face value surfaced after the turn of the century when Justin Martyr worshipped in this congregation. Justin, a gentile convert from Neapolis in Palestine, became the most notable of the second century defenders of Christianity. While traveling in Ephesus, Justin had met Trypho, a Jewish scholar and rabbi with whom he engaged in a philosophical dialogue about Christianity. Making the case for Christianity against Jewish objections, Justin asked Trypho and his companions:

Is there any other matter my [Jewish] friends, in which we [Christians] are blamed than this, that we live not after the law, and are not circumcised in the flesh as your forefathers were, and do not observe Sabbaths as you do? (italics supplied for emphasis)

Trypho replied,

But this is what we are most at a loss about: that you [Christians], professing to be pious, and supposing yourselves better than others, are not in any particular separated from them, and do not alter your mode of living from the nations, in that you observe no festivals or sabbaths, and do not have the rite of circumcision; and further, resting your hopes on a man that was crucified, you yet expect to obtain some good thing from God, while you do not obey His commandments.

Justin countered that since righteous people had existed before either circumcision or Sabbathkeeping, God had never intended these ordinances for all mankind. If circumcision was necessary, Justin said, God would not have made Adam uncircumcised. Similarly, Abel, Enoch, Lot, Noah and Melchizedek pleased God although they knew nothing of Sabbathkeeping:

Moreover, all those righteous men already mentioned, though they kept no Sabbaths, were pleasing to God; and after them Abraham with all his descendants until Moses, under whom your nation appeared unrighteous and ungrateful to God, making a calf in the wilderness: wherefore God, accommodating Himself to that nation, enjoined them also to offer sacrifices, as if to His name, in order that you might not serve idols. Which precept, however, you have not observed; nay, you sacrificed your children to demons. And you were commanded to keep Sabbaths, that you might retain the memorial of God. For His word makes this announcement, saying, "That ye may know that I am God who redeemed you."

Like rabbinical authorities who regarded circumcision and Sabbathkeeping binding only on Jews, early converts appeared to have no difficulty articulating why neither custom characterized the lifestyle of gentile Christians. If Christian Jews persisted in circumcising their children, they did so because Judaism, not Christianity, demanded it. If they continued to observe the various festivals and Sabbaths of the Jewish liturgical calendar (and most probably did), they did so because they were Jews, not because they were Christians. Would not gentile Christians already willing to endure torture and death for their faith observe a weekly Sabbath if they thought this custom was a Christian obligation? As Justin asked Trypho:

For if we patiently endure all things contrived against us by wicked men and demons, so that even amid cruelties unutterable, death and torments, we pray for mercy to those who inflict such things upon us, and do not wish to give the least retort to any one, even as the new Lawgiver commanded us: how is it, Trypho, that we would not observe those rites which do not harm us - I speak of fleshly circumcision, and Sabbaths, and feasts?

Besides making it clear why neither Jews nor Christians associated Sabbathkeeping with Christianity, Justin's conversation with Trypho destroys any credibility for the hypothesis that persecution had motivated gentile believers such as those in Rome to give up observance of a seventh-day Sabbath. As late as A.D. 150 Sabbathkeeping would have represented no threat had Christians felt obliged to practice this custom. Christians neither circumcised their children nor observed a weekly Sabbath for an entirely different reason: they believed God had instituted these customs as a spiritual safeguard and discipline for a specific people, the Jews, at a specific point in their history, the Exodus, for a specific reason--to counter their hardness of heart from generations of Egyptian slavery. As Justin stated to Trypho:

For we [Christians] too would observe the fleshly circumcision, and the Sabbaths, and in short all the feasts, if we did not know for what reason they were enjoined you,--namely, on account of your transgressions and hardness of your hearts.

Christians Who Observed Saturday

Jesus observed the dietary laws of the Nazarene sect and celebrated the new moon festivals and Sabbaths of the Jewish calendar. He customarily participated in Sabbath services at the local synagogue. Even the Sabbath conflicts between Jesus and Jewish leaders centered on breaches of the Sabbath Halaka, not on prohibitions in the Torah. He might heal on the Sabbath, for example, but no one caught Jesus working in the carpenter shop on Sabbath. Despite the assumptions of Sunday Sabbatarians, there is no evidence Christian Jews abandoned the Jewish liturgical calendar following the crucifixion. It seems improbable that Jews who believed in Jesus could openly violate the Sabbath and still worship in the temple with its extensive Sabbath services,¹⁰ yet believers assembled in the temple after the ascension.¹¹ Peter and John healed the crippled beggar on their way to pray at the temple.¹² When Paul returned to Jerusalem after establishing several gentile churches, Christian leaders told him of the thousands of Jewish believers in Jerusalem, all of them "zealous for the law,"¹³ a position hardly compatible with disregard for the Sabbath. Even the rumor that Paul had been teaching not merely gentiles but Jews "not to live according to Jewish customs" represented a threat to his safety.¹⁴ To defuse the potential conflict, Church leaders in Jerusalem suggested that Paul participate in a Jewish purification rite at the temple to show that he himself was "living in obedience to the law."¹⁵

The evidence simply does not suggest that, compared with their neighbors, Christian Jews showed any less devotion to the Jewish liturgical calendar or that they participated less frequently in synagogue services. On the contrary, we can be certain they continued to attend synagogue even after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 because first century rabbinical authorities felt it necessary to introduce into the liturgy a curse against Christ, the Birkath-ha-Minin, for the express purpose of discouraging Jews contaminated with Christianity from participating in synagogue services.¹⁶ Saturday Sabbatarians cite this liturgical innovation as proof that all Christians observed a seventh-day Sabbath, but the assumption that gentile Christians the world over assembled for worship in the local synagogue each week clearly goes beyond the evidence. There is no reason to suppose that uncircumcised gentiles in Antioch, Rome, or Corinth, for example, were in the habit of attending synagogue each week.

The church, of course, still included congregations with significant numbers of Jewish believers who remained Saturday Sabbatarians. In the third century Origen cautioned some Christians in Alexandria who, like most Christians, held a worship service on Saturdays as well as Sundays, not to "observe the Sabbath" after the Jewish manner. Because Jesus' crucifixion and death occurred on Friday, Origen regarded the merriment, idleness, and feasting associated with the Judaic Sabbath observance as inappropriate for Christians. (Indeed, the piety of the Roman Christians extended to observing a fast every Saturday rather than just the Saturday before Easter--an innovation they urged on other Christians with little success.) He suggested to Jewish believers a more solemn "Christian Sabbath":

Forsaking therefore the Judaic Sabbath observance, let us see what kind of Sabbath observance is expected of the Christian. On the Sabbath day [Saturday], nothing of worldly activity should be done. If therefore desisting from all worldly works and doing nothing mundane but being free for spiritual works, you come to the church, listen to divine readings and discussions and think of heavenly things, give head to the future life, keep before your eyes the coming judgment, disregard present and visible things in favor of the invisible and future, this is the observance of the Christian Sabbath.

The Apostolic Constitutions in the fourth century carried similar advice. Did Origen's target audience extend beyond Christian Jews? If there were other Christians who engaged in Sabbathkeeping, the custom clearly fell short of characterizing general Christian practice. In the same century Epiphanius, for example, referred to a Jewish sect whose members, unlike "true Christians" and possibly similar to modern Jews for Jesus

do not differ in any essential thing from [the Jews], since they practice the custom and doctrines prescribed by the Jewish law, except that they believe in Christ. . . Therefore they differ both from the Jews and from the Christians; from the former, because they believe in Christ; from the true Christians because they fulfill till now Jewish rites as the circumcision, the Sabbath and others.

It is worth noting that one could use the phrase "on the Sabbath" without advocating sabbatarianism. "The Sabbath" was such a common designation for Saturday near centers of Jewish commerce that even pagan traders could understand it referred to the seventh day of the week. Christians who assembled for a worship service on Sunday could also gather "on the Sabbath" (Saturday) without resorting to Sabbathkeeping. For example, Athanasius (also fourth century) described how Christians came "on the Sabbath" to worship Jesus even while denying this meant Christians observed a weekly Sabbath on Saturday (or any other day):

On the Sabbath day we gathered together, not being infected with Judaism, for we do not lay hold of false Sabbaths, but we come on the Sabbath to worship Jesus . . . and not we alone despise the Sabbath, but the prophet is the one who cast it aside and said, "Your new moons and Sabbaths my soul hates."

Athanasius did not claim that Christians regarded Sabbathkeeping as an obligation they now practiced on Sunday (although Sunday Sabbatarians might prefer to read him in just such terms). Rather, he seemed to imply that the Lord's Day festival of Christianity had, since the beginnings of the faith, displaced any obligation among gentiles to observe Sabbaths on any day of the week. The distinction is important. Instead of claiming that Sabbathkeeping was a custom Christians should now practice on the first day of the week because Jesus or someone else had transferred this obligation from Saturday to Sunday, Athanasius remains consistent with Christian writers who denied that Sabbath observance on Saturday, Sunday, or any other day was ever a Christian obligation. Lest Sabbatarians feel this interpretation is too narrow, it was Athanasius himself who stated, "We [Christians] keep no Sabbath day."²⁰ Clearly, Christian writers could use the phrase "on the Sabbath" without subscribing to sabbatarianism, indeed, while making sure their readers did not interpret a worship service on Saturday as Sabbathkeeping.

Two church historians in the following century, Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus, noted that Christians the world over assembled for worship "on the Sabbath" although neither man endorsed Sabbathkeeping. Most Christians, Sozomen wrote,

assemble on the Sabbath, as well as on the first day of the week, which custom is never observed at Rome or at Alexandria. There are several cities and villages in Egypt where, contrary to the usage established elsewhere, the people meet together on Sabbath evenings, and, although they have dined previously, partake of the mysteries.

Christians who elected to celebrate communion "on Sabbath evenings" were technically meeting after the Sabbath had ended. The time for celebrating communion apparently varied somewhat between Christian communities. Echoing Sozomen's observation, Socrates Scholasticus wrote that most churches celebrated communion "on the Sabbath of every week, yet the Christians of Alexandria and Rome, on account of some ancient tradition, have ceased to do this."²² Corporate worship and the celebration of communion on any day of the week falls short of forcing the conclusion that gentile Christians practiced sabbatarianism. Saturday Sabbatarians nevertheless continue to quote both Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen as proof that most Christians the world over not only advocated but practiced Saturday sabbatarianism as late as the fifth century. They do so despite clear evidence, both before and after this point in time, which affirms that gentile Christians observed no Sabbaths at all.

The question remains: Did any gentile Christians during the first three centuries observe a Sabbath on either Saturday or Sunday? If it seems reasonable to grant that some gentiles in predominantly Jewish-Christian congregations may have attended synagogue and even observed a Saturday Sabbath, evidence for any gentile champion of Sabbathkeeping during this period has yet to surface. Moreover, discovering such evidence would only suggest that Saturday sabbatarianism was at least an option for non-Jewish Christians. To go beyond this and argue that Christians regarded Sabbathkeeping as a primary doctrine of the faith, or that Saturday sabbatarianism was the norm for all Christians when some person or organization decreed Christianity should switch Sabbath observance to Sunday raises the question of why no one seemed to notice or object to the supposed change. Saturday Sabbatarians cannot point to the lack of controversy before A.D. 100 as proof that all Christians observed Saturday, suggest someone changed the Sabbath to Sunday shortly thereafter and then ignore the same silence. Any intimation that Christians in Rome, due to their prestige or because they were renowned for their faith, could have forced a Sunday Sabbath on Christians who were still observing a Saturday Sabbath appears less convincing in the light of Jewish criticism of Christianity. Trypho did not chide Christians for observing a Sunday Sabbath. What Jews found puzzling, he said, was why Christians observed no Sabbaths at all.

Christians then as now did not have to be Sabbatarians in order to have a regular time for corporate worship. When the evidence becomes available shortly after the end of the first century, every known group of Christians (including Jewish Christians who continued to observe a Saturday Sabbath) worshipped before or after work on the first day of the week. Justin's defense of Christianity included a description of Christian worship services:

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits . . . But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead.

Sunday clearly was no Sabbath. Even the phrase "as long as time permits" suggests an early morning service to accommodate the demands of a work day. Although we do not know how long this tradition of Christian worship had been in place when Justin recorded his remarks (circa A.D. 150), no one claims it was a custom just begun. If this pattern of worship services extended back even a few decades, we have a glimpse of how gentile Christians worshipped within the lifetime of the Apostles.

The practice of assembling before or after work on Sunday clearly antedated the conversations between Justin Martyr and Trypho. The Didache, a document most historians assign to Christian communities in Syria somewhat earlier, carried this instruction for worship and leadership:

On Sunday, the Lord's own day, come together, break bread and carry out the Eucharist, first confessing your sins so that your offering may be pure. Let no one who has a quarrel with his friend join the meeting until they have been reconciled, so that your offering is not polluted.

Christian assembly on the first day of the week may extend to the very beginnings of the faith. Following news of the empty tomb, the disciples assembled that Sunday evening:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" John 20:19.

Saturday Sabbatarians, eager to note this passage does not support Sunday sabbatarianism, suggest a desire to observe a Sunday Sabbath was hardly the motive for assembly. They are correct. Nothing about this meeting suggests the disciples thought Sunday had become the new Christian Sabbath. Instead, say Saturday Sabbatarians, fear of the Jews comprised the primary motive for this assembly of believers on the first day of the week. That assumption appears less certain. If the disciples had simply been afraid of the Jews, it would have made more sense to avoid assembly. They had met, despite their fear, to discuss the incredible news of the day. John's reference seems, instead, to stress the miracle of Jesus appearing among the disciples despite the locked doors. Note that the following Sunday they were "in the house again," the earliest possible repetition of the meeting a week earlier, when Jesus appeared among them "though the doors were locked."²⁵

A few weeks later Christians were celebrating the Jewish festival of Pentecost which fell on Sunday.²⁶ These same believers had been meeting "every day" in the temple, some of those gatherings necessarily falling before or after work on Sunday. Somewhat later Paul worshipped with the Christians in Troas on the first day of the week:

On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking until midnight. There were many lamps in the upstairs room where we were meeting. Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "He's alive!" Then he went upstairs again and broke bread and ate. After talking until daylight, he left. Acts 20:7-11

This particular service began before midnight (clearly after the Sabbath) and lasted until dawn the following morning. The length of the service, not that it took place "on the first day of the week," seems to have been exceptional. Paul, arriving a week earlier, had been in Troas for at least one and possibly two Saturdays. It is not impossible that congregations with a significant contingent of gentile believers may have needed some time other than the seventh day of the week and some place other than the local synagogue for specifically Christian activities such as communion. This gathering "on the first day of the week," although unrelated to Sabbathkeeping, further hints that what became the most common time for assembly among all Christians after the turn of the century had roots within the Apostolic period.

The service at Troas is reminiscent of Christian assemblies that Pliny the Younger, a Latin author serving as Roman consul under Emperor Trajan, described in a letter dated A.D. 112. He wrote that in Bithynia the people known as Christians

were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day, before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food, but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.

Although no internal evidence from this description proves these Christians were assembling on the first day of the week, that possibility is hardly outrageous. Pliny clearly points to Christians who gathered before dawn for a service that included communion--a set of events typical of the Christian services Justin Martyr described a few decades later. Christian assembly before or after work on the first day of the week represented no novelty during or after the first two centuries.

On March 7, 321, the emperor Constantine declared Sunday a civil holiday. Both pagans and Christians associated with agriculture (surely a significant fraction of the economy) could work on Sunday with the Roman government's full blessing. Litigation and circus events on Sunday continued without restraint. Despite attempts by Saturday Sabbatarians to portray Constantine's proclamation as confirmation that Christianity had adopted Sunday sabbatarianism, his edict had nothing to do with anyone's observance of Sabbath on any day of the week. Four months later (July 3, 321) Constantine specified that "all men shall have the right to emancipate and to manumit on this festive day, and the legal formalities thereof are not forbidden."²⁸ Did Christians in Rome (or anywhere else) suddenly start observing Sunday as a Christian Sabbath? Clearly not, as we shall see. Although Eusebius (c. A.D. 260-340), the bishop of Ceserea in Palestine, suggested in a commentary on Psalm 92 that worship on the Lord's Day fulfilled any worship activities prescribed by this Psalm, this hardly made Sunday a Christian Sabbath.²⁹ Sabbatarian literature tends to tag as "Sunday observance" any reference to Christian assembly on the first day of the week, often leaving the impression that Christians continued to advocate Sabbathkeeping while switching the day for observance from Saturday to Sunday. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not a single reference from the first four centuries states or even implies that Christians thought the Lord's Day had become a Christian Sabbath.

When Constantine decreed Sunday a civil holiday in honor of the sun god, one of many pagan deities, Christians were neither observing nor referring to Sunday as a Sabbath. Nevertheless, we can hardly expect that believers who heretofore had squeezed their assemblies in before dawn or after work would have overlooked the advantage that Constantine's proclamation had on the time constraints of their own services. Constantine's edict made Sabbath keepers of no one, least of all the believers in Rome with their tradition of observing no Sabbaths at all. Recall that a half century after Eusebius and more than two hundred years since Justin and Trypho noted that Sabbathkeeping was not characteristic of Christianity, Athanasius confirmed that Christians were not Sabbatarians. "We [Christians]," he said in terms difficult to misinterpret, "keep no Sabbath day."³⁰

It should have been easy, once Sunday became a civil holiday, for any believer wishing to observe Sunday as a Sabbath to do so. The time Christians allowed for services may have increased, yet no one regarded Sunday as a Sabbath.

Jerome, (A.D. 345-420), the leading biblical scholar of his time, confirmed that Christians still did not treat Sunday as a holy day of rest when he described typical activities among the women at the famous religious community at Bethlehem. Following Sunday morning services these women, he observed, returned home and then "devoted themselves to their allotted tasks, and made garments either for themselves or for others."³¹ Note that this reference to Christians resuming work activities after worship assembly on the first day of the week occurred when it was perfectly possible not to work had anyone wished to observe the Lord's Day as a Sabbath.

More than a century and a half later the Lord's Day was still no Sabbath. The Nestorian patriarch Ishu'-Yab (c. 585), although strongly committed to removing any obstacles that might prohibit Christians from assembling for worship on the Lord's Day, had no objection to Christians working or traveling after church services had ended.³²

Constantine's edict in A.D. 321 was significant not because the act introduced or formalized Sunday Sabbath observance among Christians, but because it represented a starting point for a process that increasingly restricted what work Roman citizens could engage in on Sunday. About a half century after Constantine's act Theodosius I (A.D. 379-395) forbade litigation and circus events on Sunday,³³ yet if Christianity now taught that Sunday was the new Christian Sabbath, most Christians remained unaware of this development. In the following century Augustine could still affirm that Christianity had transferred none of the obligations of the Sabbath commandment to the Lord's Day.³⁴

Farmers throughout the empire worked on Sunday until the middle of the sixth century when the Council of Orleans (A.D. 538) finally prohibited what Constantine's decree had allowed. Hardly champions of Sunday Sabbath observance, Council leaders expressed concern that some Christians might use the decision as an excuse for idleness on Sunday.³⁵ If someone had told Jews to observe Sabbath the way Christians treated the Lord's Day, it is doubtful they or anyone else would have recognized this as Sabbathkeeping. Legislation that made it possible for farmers to join other Christians in a weekly service each Sunday even while it warned against the dangers of idleness neither qualified the first day of the week as a Sabbath nor Christians as sabbatarians.

Alcuin of York (A.D. 735-804), Anglo-Saxon scholar and chief educational adviser to Charlemagne at Aachen, may not have been the first to openly confuse the Lord's Day with Sabbath observance, but as a time frame for when gentile Christians, long since a majority within Christendom, began associating Sabbathkeeping with the Lord's Day, the eighth century is far closer than either the first or second. For Alcuin, any work whatever on the Lord's Day was not merely a breach of civil law but, for Christians, a moral offense.³⁶ By the twelfth century Christian leaders openly attempted to justify the de facto Sunday sabbatarianism among Christians with biblical references to the Sabbath. R.J. Bauckham notes that "Peter Comestor (d. 1179) may have been the first exegete to apply the Sabbath commandment literally to the Christians observance of the first day . . ."³⁷

When the greatest scholastic theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), claimed "The Sabbath is changed into the Lord's Day,"³⁸ any hope of disentangling the Lord's Day from the Sabbath faded. What for centuries had been the festal Lord's Day had now become a "Christian Sabbath" complete with a list of what work or recreational activities, if any, were appropriate for Christians to engage in on Sunday.

Martin Luther discarded as unscriptural the Sunday sabbatarianism that had flowered between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Characteristically blunt, Luther advised Christians:

If anywhere the day [Sunday] is made holy for the mere day's sake--if anywhere anyone sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty.

Luther had no problem with Christians assembling for worship on Sunday but, like Justin Martyr, Augustine, other Reformers, and even modern Roman Catholics, he made a distinction between Sunday as a festive day appropriate for rejoicing and Christian worship services, and Sunday as a Sabbath analogous to the Jewish practice. For Luther Sunday was no Sabbath. He could not have imagined that Protestants themselves would reintroduce the practice. Sabbatarianism snuck in the back door of Protestantism in the middle of the sixteenth century when English Puritans urged a "Christian Sabbath" far more strict than anything Catholicism had advocated.⁴⁰ Christians could not light fires in their homes on the [Sunday] Sabbath. They should prepare their meals on Saturday to avoid cooking on the Sabbath. By applying Old Testament prescriptions for Sabbath observance to the first day of the week, Protestant Sabbatarians made Sunday nearly indistinguishable from Jewish Sabbathkeeping in nearly every respect except the day.

It was only a matter of time before Christians who based such strict and literal Sunday sabbatarianism on Old Testament references faced a reasonable question: might the rules for Sabbathkeeping refer to the seventh rather than the first day of the week? Members of England's Fifth Monarchist movement and the emerging Seventh Day Baptists carried the reasoning behind Sunday Sabbathkeeping to its logical conclusion: if Christians were supposed to observe a weekly Sabbath after biblical or orthodox Jewish prescriptions, why not do so on the day of the week this model suggested? Saturday sabbatarianism thus entered Protestantism as a variation of the Puritan [Sunday] Sabbath although modern Saturday Sabbatarians prefer to paint themselves as inheritors of a long and unbroken line of "true Sabbath keepers" extending back to early Christianity.⁴¹ Sunday sabbatarians, although still in the majority, found themselves trapped in a defensive posture. Answering the challenge from the new Saturday Sabbatarians they suggested Jesus or the Apostles really had changed the Sabbath to Sunday or that the Sabbath commandment remained binding on Christians but maybe referred to the principle of one day of rest in seven, not necessarily to rest on the seventh day of the week, etc. Indeed, the debate between Saturday and Sunday and Sabbatarians continues to this day with almost no change in style or content.

It was a Seventh Day Baptist tract that seeded Saturday sabbatarianism among survivors of the American Millerites, a movement that collapsed after Christ failed to return to earth on October 22, 1844. Evolving into the Seventh-day Adventist Church, they have eclipsed Seventh Day Baptists in size and now constitute the largest Christian group advocating Saturday sabbatarianism. Many Seventh-day Adventists not only assume that all Christians who do not observe a Saturday Sabbath must be Sunday sabbatarians, they have elevated Sabbathkeeping to the principle focus for events surrounding the end of the world. The Bible teaches, they believe, that a sinister coalition of Sunday sabbatarians will force not merely all Christians but all humanity to observe a Sunday Sabbath. Only the second coming of Christ will prevent world authorities, acting under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, from implementing an international death penalty against those who refuse to give up Saturday Sabbath observance and adopt Sunday sabbatarianism.

Why did early Christians not debate which day was the Sabbath? The lack of controversy is neither evidence that by the time the New Testament writers completed their works Christianity had already settled on observing Sunday as a "Christian Sabbath," nor proof that all Christians were Saturday Sabbatarians. Rather, because Sunday never competed for the title among Jewish Christians and because most Christians observed no Sabbaths at all, there was no reason for Christians to debate whether Saturday or Sunday was the Sabbath. Although nearly anyone touched by Jewish culture could identify the term "Sabbath" with Saturday, that hardly committed them to sabbatarianism. Indeed, when Jews derided Christians for failing to practice circumcision and Sabbathkeeping, these believers, who were willing to face a martyr's death, had no difficulty articulating why Christians did not practice these customs. Except among Christian Jews who observed Sabbaths, practiced circumcision, and continued to venerate all the festivals within the Jewish liturgical calendar, Sabbathkeeping on any day of the week remained foreign to Christianity during the first few centuries.

For the vast majority of Christians who attend Sunday services without engaging in any sort of sabbatarianism, this conclusion is hardly startling. It is a clear challenge, however, to modern advocates of Sunday sabbatarianism such as members of the Lord's Day Observance Society. Before we can believe the Church not only championed Sabbathkeeping but switched the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, it would be helpful to see at least one example during the first few centuries of anyone referring to Sunday as "the Sabbath." Christians rejoiced in worshipping before and after work on this day, but for early Christians it was never a Sabbath. Lest Saturday Sabbatarians exult too quickly, they face a task only slightly less daunting. Until they can find some data from the same period to refute the overwhelming evidence that even the most faithful gentile Christians observed no Sabbaths at all, we cannot with any confidence assume that Saturday sabbatarianism was even an option for gentile Christianity, much less a core doctrine of the Church.

NOTES AND REFERENCES