Sunday as the Sabbath
I grew up in a church that believed that Sunday was the New Testament Sabbath. We went to church on Sunday and we regarded Sunday as the Sabbath. To us, the fourth commandment was speaking of Sunday.
As a young teen I decided to read through the Bible myself. I couldn't help but notice that the Shabbat [(Hebrew) Sabbath; the seventh day of the week, which God blessed and set apart for rest and holiness.] was the 7th day, that is Saturday and there was nary a mention of a Sunday Shabbat for Christians. Still, it never occurred to me that I should be keeping Sabbath on the seventh day, because to me, Sabbath and Church were synonymous and Church was on Sundays, and to me, the best part of church was when it was over.
But do you see something wrong here? Something wrong with this story I'm telling you? The fact that the Sabbath is on the seventh day is so obvious that even a teenager giving the Bible a casual reading can see it. There's no mystery. It's not hidden or some secret knowledge. It is one of the Ten Commandments! Something is peculiar is going on here. How did Sunday become honored as the Sabbath?
Many people point to paganism and claim that early Christians worshiped the sun, hence the name "Sunday." A quick look at the history of the transition to Sabbath proves it was nothing quite so sinister or simple.
This is the story of Sunday.
The Jewish War
If you have ever read through Gospels and the Book of Acts, you will have noticed that the day on which the Sabbath occurs is not an issue. In fact, The writers of the Gospels and Acts go to great pains to show us how all the action happens on the Shabbat, how YeshuaThe Hebrew/Aramaic name of Jesus of Nazareth. (lit, "salvation") is in the synagogue or healing or teaching on the Shabbat and doing his father's redemptive work on the Shabbat. The Book of Acts depicts us the believers congregating in synagogues on the Shabbat, and Paul always ministering on and teaching on Shabbat. Of all the things Yeshua is accused of, of all the things Steven is accused of or Paul is accused of in the various trials that they stand, they are never accused of breaking Shabbat. Sure Yeshua and the Sages had a lot of arguments about how to keep Sabbath and what was permissible to do on Sabbath (i.e. carrying your mat, making mud, healing, etc.), but no one suspected him of doing away with Sabbath. Not even Paul is accused of violating the Sabbath.
At the end of the book of Acts we are left with a picture of Christianity still in the cradle of Judaism, still a part of Judaism, a sect within it. Paul is left as a prisoner in the city of Rome and he is ministering to the believers in Rome. It is about the year 65 AD. Within two years, Paul goes to meet the Master when he is beheaded by Emperor Nero. A short time later, Peter too finds martyrdom in Rome when Nero has him crucified. Nero then added to his infamy by launching a massive military campaign against the Jewish state. He sent the dreaded 10th legion under the famous general Vespasian.
After Nero's death and Vespasian was made Emperor, his son Titus carried on the war by bringing the Roman army against Jerusalem. But before it was too late, our brothers and sisters heeded the words of the Master. Remember what he told them, he said, "When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city."
And concerning those days he told them, "Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath."
Why not on the Sabbath? What's wrong with fleeing on the Sabbath? If the Sabbath is not to be observed by believers, why should we care? But the Master assumed we would care, so he told us, pray that your flight will not take place on the Sabbath.
The armies came and the believers fled. The city of Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple was burned and the Jewish believers in Judea and Jerusalem either fled in exile to Transjordan or were carried off in captivity and sold as slaves along with their Jewish brothers and sisters.
Who's in charge around here?
The Church that was the Assembly of the Book of Acts, the Assembly of the Apostles, under James the Righteous ceased to be. The authority of those Apostles to whom the Master had said, "I give you the power to bind and loose, (that is to make legal decisions regarding Torah(Hebrew) instruction, guidance; specifically, the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Often translated "law" or "Pentateuch")" was gone.
Previously, when questions of law and practice, or disputes of theology had arisen, we sent to Jerusalem to find a decision from the Apostles, the disciples and the elders at Jerusalem. After 70 there is no Jerusalem. There is no Jerusalem church. There is no Authority. No one is there to answer our questions, and as first century Gentile believers, we had lots of questions.
Remember, there was still no New Testament for us to turn to. The Gospels had just been or were still being written. Paul's letters had not been compiled yet. John's epistles were not even written yet. Imagine our situation. What do we do? Who is in charge of this thing? Who can answer my questions about faith and observance? Without the Jerusalem church, where should we look for leadership and guidance...unless it is to the Church in the Capital City of the World, the city where Paul and Peter, most famous of the apostles served and were martyred? Thus the Roman Church became our new Authority by default.
What do we know about this Roman Church? We know they were troublemakers because 20 years earlier, when Claudius was Emperor, there was such a disturbance raised by the believers that he exiled all the Jews from Rome. All the Jews were exiled, not just the believers. Priscilla and Aquila were among those exiled. If all the Jews were exiled from the church at Rome, who was left? Only Gentiles. So as Jewish believers returned to Rome, they were returning to a Gentile dominated church, which was not really a problem until Rome went to war with the Jews.
The Politics of Anti-Semitism
Suppose I'm a Gentile believer living in the Roman colony of Philippi attending a Jewish worship service on the Jewish day of worship and keeping Jewish rituals when all of a sudden my country is at war with the Jews.
Previously I might have been just Jimmy the Believer from Philippi. Subsequent to the revolt I'm Jimmy-Jew-lover-enemy-of-the-state from Philippi, or even Jimmy the Jew. The politics of anti-Semitism begin taking root.
Emperor Vespasian followed up the Jewish war by imposing a heavy, punitive annual tax upon all Jewish households in the Empire. Jewish households are determined as households who worship after the Jewish manner. Now we have a financial, a political and a cultural incentive to distance ourselves from Judaism.
Shortly after the Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem, the synagogues throughout the world introduced a 19th blessing into the 18 blessings of the Amidah(Hebrew) literally, "standing"; a central and very ancient prayer in traditional Jewish liturgy. The 19th blessing was actually a curse on believers. Along with the introduction of the 19th blessing came the ruling that anyone in the synagogue that did not say the 19th blessing was to be put out of the synagogue. Thus the believers were expelled from Jewish assembly.
Not only did our Gentile pals resent us because we were essentially Jewish, but our Jewish pals resented us because we were believers. This excommunication was deeply offensive and created deep animosity towards Jews (even among Jewish believers) who are already none too popular through the Empire. What is worse, we were left with no place to assemble on Shabbat, or to assemble at all.
Years went by as the now largely Gentile dominated Church struggled to identify herself. She was plagued by heresies and persecutions. Around the turn of the century, the new Emperor, Domitian, the son of Vespasian, was afraid of another Jewish revolt. He unleashed a series of persecutions against the believers. In that wave of persecutions, John, the last apostle, was exiled to Patmos.
Understand what was happening. On the one hand, you and your family have been thrown out of the synagogue because you are offensive to Judaism, and on the other hand you are seeing your friends and family imprisoned, even tortured and killed because they are being identified with the Jewish religion. You are guilty by association with a religion that doesn't want you associating with them.
The Second Century
By the time the second century began, anti-Jewish sentiment was so high in the church and especially the Roman church that we Gentiles no longer want to be associated with Jews at all. Theologically, we decided that had replaced the Jews as the true Israel. We decided that we were now the true people of God, and that Jews are consigned to damnation and everlasting cursedness from God.
The first century believers are long dead and gone. A new generation has been raised to view Jews and even Jewishness as the absolute antithesis of Christianity. It is not unlike the bitter hostility I find many Protestants hold for Catholics. It fills some deep psychological need to define ourselves against something.
The new generation (2nd century) was the generation that lived through the Second Jewish revolt. That's right, the Jews revolted against Rome again, this time during the days of emperor Hadrian. They banded together under the leadership of Shimon Bar Kozbah. Rabbi Akiva renamed him Bar Kokbah and declared him to be Messiah. All of Bar Kokbah's men were told that they must swear allegiance to his messiahship, even proving their allegiance by maiming themselves for him. The last Jewish believers among the Jews of Israel were alienated by their refusal to declare Bar Kokbah as the Messiah. It was the last break between the believers and Judaism.
Bar Kokbah was not Messiah. His rebellion was quickly crushed, Jerusalem, never completely rebuilt, was again destroyed, and the Jews again faced Imperial persecution. The TalmudA major body of Jewish law composed between 200-500 CE. calls it the Age of the Persecution. In those days Emperor Hadrian made a law declaring it illegal to keep the Sabbath. Illegal, as in against the law of Rome!
The Church Fathers
We call the generation of Gentile believers who lived through the second Jewish revolt the Church Fathers. Men like Ignatius wrote an epistle to the congregations of Asia (where John had lived and served just three decades before) and said to them,
"Let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish manner, and rejoice in days of idleness...But let every one of you keep the Sabbath in a spiritual manner...not in relaxation, not in eating things prepared the day before, not in finding delight in dancing and clapping which have no sense in them." (Epistle to the Magnesians)
What does he mean? Why does he have to prohibit Second Century believers from keeping the Sabbath? Because they were still keeping Sabbath. Despite all the adversity, they were still keeping Sabbath in John's and Paul's congregations.
In the same era men like the author of the epistle of Barnabas arise. The Epistle of Barnabas is a certain forgery that is alleged to be written by Barnabas, Paul's traveling companion. It is actually a flagrantly anti-Semitic, anti-Torah, anti-Jewish piece of replacement theology literature. He describes the Jews as wretched men deluded by an evil angel (i.e. the God of the OT) abandoned by God, and their Sabbath is only an allegory to point to the resurrection of Christ, which occurs on the 8th day.
It is in this era that we have the first record of Christians proselytizing Jews. We have a Christian-Jewish Dialogue in the form of a polemic between Trypho and Justin Martyr, a famous debate that reveals to us how far the Roman believers had already divorced themselves from Judaism and even from the Scriptures. Justin Martyr explained to Trypho (and all the Jews) that the Torah was given to them as a punishment for their exceptional wickedness and because of God's special hatred for Jews. He said, "We, too, would observe your circumcision of the flesh, your Sabbath days and in a word all your festivals, if we were not aware of the reason why they were imposed upon you, namely, because of your sins and your hardness of heart." Surprisingly, Justin didn't win too many Jewish converts!
And at the same time that these men were holding their sway over the developing church, we saw the rise of the great heretic Marcion. He came sweeping through the church with his new doctrine that the Jesus of the New Testament had defeated and unseated the evil god of the Jews, and therefore the Hebrew Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) and any Jewish relics in the Christian faith needed to be expelled. He compiled the very first New Testament. He was wildly popular, stunningly influential and his teachings remained rooted even after he was denounced for his heresies. If you are a Nazi or anti-Semite, perhaps the best repository of anti-Jewish and just downright hateful literature you could find to justify yourself is in the writings of the 2nd Century Church.
Resurrection Sunday
Meanwhile an annual remembrance of the resurrection of Messiah had emerged in Christian practice. It occurred every year on the Sunday that followed Passover. The Torah calls it the Feast of the Barley Omer, but the Christians simply knew it as the day of the Resurrection. The Roman church, in fact, ordered all churches to quit keeping Passover and to only keep this annual resurrection festival. It was a great controversy because once again, the churches of Asia (the congregations of Paul and John) did not want to play ball with Roman authority. They wanted to keep Passover as they always had, but in the end the authority of Rome prevailed.
Part of the fallout of the controversy was that Sunday was elevated while all Jewish elements, festivals and days, were eliminated. It became a Christian innovation to fast on the Sabbath and rejoice on Sunday as a weekly celebration of the annual Sunday resurrection festival. Sunday came to be celebrated as a weekly, mini-Roman Easter.
Conclusions
It is true that there were some pagan influence because Sunday was the day of Sun worship. Early Roman churches are all oriented to face the sunrise. December 25th was the annual celebration of the rebirth of the sun god, but those are just vestigial influences, not the major causes or sources of what happened. Believers were not worshiping the sun on Sundays any more than they were worshiping the birth of the sun god on December 25th. They were using Sunday to remember the resurrection of Messiah, which is actually a fine and wonderful thing to do. There is nothing wrong with worshiping on Sunday. It is no sin to keep Sunday as a day to the LORD. There is nothing wrong with going to church on Sunday.
But Sunday is not the Sabbath.
The real reason for the early churches abandonment of the Sabbath and all things Jewish can be attributed to two impulses. On the one hand there was intense persecution both from Jews and Romans, and on the other hand there was a rising anti-Torah, anti-Jewish bias in Christian theology. The transition from Sabbath to Sunday seems to have been completed before the middle of the Second Century. The popular belief that Constantine introduced Sunday worship is false. Constantine only institutionalized it with his famous, "Let us have nothing to do with the detestable Jews" speech at Nicea. By the time of Constantine, almost two centuries later, the Church barely remembered her association with Judaism.
Copyright © 2002 Emmaus Road. used with permission.
