The Evolution of the Sunday Sabbath

By Robin Phillips

April 2^nd, 2005

In Britain today, as in most parts of the world, Christians observe their Sabbath on Sunday rather than the original Saturday Sabbath. But it was not always so. One of the interesting things about being an historian is that you find that customs and ways of thinking which we just take for granted have often arisen from a very questionable pedigree. The institution of a Sunday Sabbath in Britain is no exception to this principle.

There is no need to go into any detail concerning the Biblical origins of a Saturday Sabbath, as they are familiar, being rooted in the creation week when God rested from His labour on the 7^th day. In numerous other places in the Old Testament, particularly the Ten Commandments, God reaffirms the importance of resting on the last day of the week. While the New Testament does not offer a lot of additional teaching on the Sabbath, it does clearly show that Jesus and His disciples acknowledged a Saturday Sabbath and not a Sunday Sabbath. One example is when Jesus claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath. Whatever Jesus may have meant when He claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath, it is clear that He could not have been referring to a Sunday Sabbath!

No Illusions about Apostolic Age

Although the New Testament does not specify that the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday, Catholics will argue that the early church fathers had the authority to make this change, since they were the intimate successors of the first apostles. For example, one catholic told me that because St. Ignatius advocated gathering together on Sunday, and because he was a disciple of Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John who was a disciple of Jesus, the tradition of Sunday assembling must have a divine precedent. However, we should be cautious of giving too much credence to a doctrine merely because it originated during the apostolic age, or even from people instructed by the first apostles. In Acts 20:29-30, Paul is quoted as saying that

I know this, that after my departing grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also, men shall arise from your own selves and speak perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.

Paul’s insistence that there would be false teachers who would spring out of the very flock that he had instructed, should caution us against thinking a doctrine can be authenticated merely by tracing it back to first century believers, even by tracing it back to believers who were instructed by the apostles. As Andrews has said, commenting on Paul’s similar words in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-8,

The great antichristian body may indeed find its claim to an origin in apostolic times vindicated, but its apostolic character is most emphatically denied. And herein is found a striking illustration of the fact that an evil thing is not rendered good by the accidental circumstance of its originating in the days of the apostles.[1]

The Sabbath in the Early Church

Domville writes that “Not any ecclesiastical writer of the first three centuries attributed the origin of Sunday observance either to Christ or to his apostles.”[2] On the contrary, there is historical evidence that the Christians in the first century continued to keep a Saturday Sabbath, sometimes also gathering together on the Sunday. As Gieseler writes,

While the Jewish Christians of Palestine retained the entire Mosaic law, and consequently the Jewish festivals, the Gentile Christians observed also the Sabbath and the Passover (Corinthians 5:6-8), with reference to the last scenes of Jesus’ life, but without Jewish superstition. In addition to these, Sunday, as the day of Christ’s resurrection, was devoted to religious services.

Morer likewise testifies that “The primitive Christians had a great veneration for the Sabbath, and spent the day in devotion and sermons.”[3] Similarly, Coleman writes that

Down even to the fifth century the observance of the Jewish Sabbath was continued in the Christian church, but with a rigor and solemnity gradually diminishing until it was wholly discontinued.[4]

There was an overlap period when some Christians celebrated Sunday and others Saturday, or they celebrated both. In the mid 2^nd century, Justin Martyr wrote an “Apology” or defense of Christians for the heathen emperor at Rome. In this work, Justin tells the emperor that Christians held their assemblies on Sunday. This is the first reference we find to Christians gathering together on Sunday. However, Justin never refers to Sunday as a sacred day or “the day of the Lord.” Nor does he refer to Sunday as a replacement to the Sabbatical institution. He would hardly have been likely to advocate a Sunday Sabbath since he was a staunch opponent of the Sabbath. In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin says to the Jew,

It was because of your iniquities, and the iniquities of your lathers, that God appointed you to observe the Sabbath…. You see that the heavens are not idle, nor do they observe the Sabbath. Continue as ye were born. For if before Abraham there was no need of circumcision, nor of the sabbaths, nor of feasts, nor of offerings before Moses; so now in like manner there is no need of them, since Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was by the determinate counsel of God, born of a virgin of the seed of Abraham without sin.

Thus we see that although many Christians gathered together on Sunday, the idea of observing Sunday as “the Sabbath” or “the day of the Lord” has not yet occurred to anyone, though there was an acknowledgement that the day was special because of Christ’s resurrection on Sunday.

Saturday and Sunday Among the Gentiles

Before we can move onto the next stage of this study, we must stop and consider the situation amongst the Gentile nations. Originally, the ancient pagan world had observed the seventh day and not the first day as their special day of rest. As Archbishop Usher tells us,

The very Gentiles, both civil and barbarous, both ancient and of later days, as it were by universal kind of tradition, retained the distinction of the seventh day of the week.[5]

This fact has been confirmed by archaeological discoveries in ancient Nineveh, where certain tablets confirm that the ancient Babylonians, who kept the Sabbath with considerable strictness, believed this tradition originated at creation. Even the ancient Arabs, arch-enemies of the Jews, kept a seventh day Sabbath, as did the ancient Chinese, Phoenicians, Grecians, Greeks and Romans. Josephus, wrote

There is not any city of the Grecians, nor any of the barbarians, nor any nation whatsoever, whither our custom of resting on the seventh day has not come.[6]

The historian Gilfillan writes that

The Greeks and Romans, according to Aretius, consecrated Saturday to rest, conceiving it unfit for civil actions and warlike affairs, but suited for contemplation.[7]

Numerous other sources might be brought forward in support of this point. Homer, for example, says, “Then cometh the seventh day, that is sacred.” Hesoid similarly writes, “The seventh day is sacred.”

Now although Saturday was acknowledged by the ancient world as being set apart from the rest of the week, those who worshiped the sun treated the first day, not the seventh day, as consecrated. Thus it was that gradually the first day of the week began to take precedent, so that by the time of the Romans, it had become the norm among the sun-worshiping nations. In his Antiquities, the historian Verstegan tells us that “The most ancient Germans being pagans, [have] appropriated their first day of the week to the peculiar adoration of the sun…”[8] Speaking of the our Saxon ancestors, the same author writes,

Unto the day dedicated unto the special adoration of the idol of the sun, they gave the name of Sunday, as much as to say the sun’s day, or the day of the sun. This idol was placed in a temple, and there adored and sacrificed unto, for that they believed that the sun in the firmament did with or in this idol correspond and cooperate.[9]

Jennings similarly testifies that

The day which the heathens in general consecrated to the worship and honor of their chief god, the sun, which, according to our computation, was the first day of the week.[10]

Along with keeping the Sunday festival, sun-worshipers also made a point of facing the east when they worshiped. This comes across in Ezekiel 8:16 where Ezekiel saw the priests of God with “their faces toward the east, and they were worshiping the sun toward the east.”

While I don’t know the origins of facing the east to worship the sun, I can guess why sun-worshipers were attracted to Sunday. As the sun rises at the beginning of each day, so it must have seemed fitting to honour the sun at the beginning of each week. However, this does go against the instincts of our God given nature, which was made to rest at the end of something not at the beginning. Just as you rest at the end of each day, so we ought to rest at the end of each week (Saturday). Sunday, as the first day of a new work-week, is a day for new beginnings, the day of resurrection, not a day for resting.

Blending In

The original reason why Christians in the 2^nd century began to hold their assemblies on Sunday was probably the same reason why they began, around this time, to pray facing the east (a tradition still preserved in English churches, where the alter is always facing east). It was because they wanted to better blend in with the pagans around them. Tertullian had to write in response to the accusation that the sun was God of the Christians. He answered that though Christians faced the east when they worshiped, like the heathen, and though they devoted Sunday to rejoicing, like the heathen, they did not do these things to worship the sun. In another work, again defending his brethren from the charge of sun-worship, Tertullian acknowledged that praying toward the east and making Sunday a day of festivity, did give men a chance to think the sun was the God of the Christians, but replies that Christians have as good a right to do these things as the pagans. It is interesting that he never claims that the Christians were following any divine precept or apostolic example, nor do we find anything about resting from labour on this day. Though they may have met together on this day, and though it may have been set aside in remembrance of Christ’s resurrection, Sunday still had nothing to do with the command of the Decalogue, and we do not find any prohibition against labouring on this day.

The real grounds behind the introduction of this heathen festival into the Christian church was probably that of expediency. This has been suggested more recently by The North British Review in their defense of the, so called, “Sunday Sabbath.”

That very day was the Sunday of their heathen neighbors and respective countrymen; and patriotism gladly united with expediency in making it at once their Lord’s day and their Sabbath. ….opportunity and common expediency are surely argument enough for so ceremonial a change as the mere day of the week for the observance of the rest and holy convocation of the Jewish’ Sabbath. … it was no irreverent nor undelightful thing to adopt it, inasmuch as the first day of the week was their own high day at any rate: so that their compliance and civility were rewarded by the redoubled sanctity of their quiet festival.[11]

In 1652, the English clergyman, Chafie, wrote a work in which he argued that it would not have worked for Christians to celebrate any other day because to do so would have been to invite the scorn and derision of the non-Christians around. “How Grievous”, writes Chafie, “would be their taunts and reproaches against the poor Christians living with them and under their power for their new set sacred day, had the Christians chosen any other than the Sunday….” Furthermore, he points out, Christians could never have brought to pass any alteration on a tradition so pervasive as that of the Sunday celebration.[12] Morer, on the other hand, argued that the reason Christians joined with their pagan neighbours in celebrating the day of the sun was so they would not “appear causelessly peevish, and by that means hinder the conversion of the Gentiles, and bring a greater prejudice than might be otherwise taken against the gospel.”[13]

Constantine and Sunday

One hundred and twenty-one years after Tertullian, Constantine put forth his famous edict in behalf of the heathen festival of the sun. This was before Constantine’s, so called, conversion to Christianity, when he was an enthusiastic worshiper of the Sun or Apollo, the sun god. At this time, Constantine pronounced Sunday to be “venerable” and made it a law that throughout the Roman empire the day should be celebrated. When Constantine became a Christian, the day of Sunday remained set apart from the rest of the week. Furthermore, Constantine made the observance of Sunday a civil duty. The following command of his is found in the Roman code (and note that Sunday is still very much associated with the sun):

Let all judges and people of the town rest, and the trades of various kinds be suspended on the venerable day of the sun. Those who live in the country may, however, freely and without fault apply to agriculture, because it often happens that this day is the most favourable for sowing wheat and planting the vine, lest an opportunity offered by divine liberality be lost with the favorable moment.”[14]

It is hardly surprising that after this the significance of the seventh day dwindled into insignificance. Constantine also expended enormous energy to force Christians throughout the world not to celebrate Passover on Saturday, as the Eastern church had done. This had been an issue of contention ever since 196 AD when the bishop of Rome issue AN EDICT IN BEHALF OF SUNDAY, demanding that Passover be celebrated on Sunday. The Eastern church had been observing Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month, no matter what day of the week this might be, while the Western church kept it upon the Sunday following that day, or rather, upon the Sunday following Good Friday. This issue was one of the primary reasons why Constantine called the council of Nicaea. After that, by the laws of Theodosius, capital punishment was inflicted upon any who were found celebrating Passover on any day other than Sunday.

Constantine’s insistence that Passover be kept on Sunday and not Saturday, and his insistence that Sunday be universally acknowledged as the day for Christian gathering, was largely the result of his paranoia against anything Jewish. As Constantine wrote, “Let us, then, have nothing in common with the most hostile rabble of the Jews.” Constantine would rather have had something in common with the sun-worshiping pagans than the Jews. I am told that at this time many Christians fasted on Saturday in a self-conscious attempt to render it despicable before men and, therefore, to repress the ancient Sabbatical institution of the Jews.

It was around this same time that the first evidence appears that Sunday should be considered the Sabbath. Though Christians had been observing Sunday for many years, there is no evidence that they ever thought to apply to Sunday the original commandment of the Decalogue. It is in the writings of Eusebius, who was a friend of Constantine, that we first come across this notion.

“Wherefore as they [the Jews] rejected it [the Sabbath law], the Word [Christ], by the new covenant, TRANSLATED and TRANSFERRED the feast of the Sabbath to the morning light, and gave us the symbol of true rest, viz., the saving Lord’s day, the first [‘day] of the light, in which the Savior of the world, after all his labors among men, obtained the victory over death, and passed the portals of heaven, having achieved a work superior to the six-days’ creation.”

“On this day, which is the first [day] of light and of the true Sun, we assemble, after an interval of six days, and celebrate holy and spiritual Sabbaths, even all nations redeemed by him throughout the world, and do those things according to the spiritual law, which were decreed for the priests to do on the Sabbath.”

“And all things whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord’s day, as more appropriately belonging to it, because it has a precedence and is first in rank, and more honorable than the Jewish Sabbath.” [15]

The Triumph of Roman Catholicism

Thus is was that Sunday first began to have attached to it the laws and customs surrounding the Biblical Sabbath. It now gradually begins to be acknowledged as the day on which we obey the commandment to “honour the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” It was not long before the Pope’s formalized this and could claim (to quote from a Catholic catechism), “the church, instructed by Jesus Christ, and directed by the Spirit of God, has substituted Sunday for Saturday; so now we sanctify the first, no the seventh day.”[16] Since then, defenders of Catholicism have habitually latched on to the fact that Protestants keep a Sunday Sabbath as apparent proof that even they implicitly acknowledge the authority of the church as having the power to create and change doctrine. As the Catholic, Mr. W. B. Taylor, writes,

The triumph of the consistent Roman Catholic over all observers of Sunday, calling themselves Protestants, is indeed complete and unanswerable…. It should present a subject of very grave reflection to Christians of the reformed and evangelical denominations, to find that no single argument or suggestion can be offered in favor of Sunday observance that will not apply with equal force and to its fullest extent in sustaining the various other ‘holy days’ appointed by ‘the church.’[17]

James Blake, another Roman Catholic argues similarly:

Christ never wrote, but God the Father did. He wrote the ten commandments on the tables of stone, and the only commandment he emphasized was that to keep the seventh day. “Remember to keep holy the seventh day;” and there is no command so often repeated throughout the Old Testament. If the Bible alone be the [Protestant] gentleman’s rule of faith, he is bound by this commandment; but does he observe it? – No, he does not. Why, then, does he not observe it? – Because the church thought fit to change it. Here the gentleman admits the authority of the church to be superior to the handwriting of God the Father; and yet he will look you in the face, and declare that the Bible, without church authority, is his rule of faith.”[18]

Listen, finally, to the words of one Catholic priest who issues the following challenge to Protestants:

I am not a rich man, but I will give $1,000 to any man who will prove by the Bible alone that Sunday is the day we are bound to keep. No, it cannot be done; it is impossible. The observance of Sunday is solely a law of the Catholic Church, and therefore is not binding upon others. The church changed the Sabbath to Sunday, and all the world bows down and worships upon that day in silent obedience to the mandates of the Catholic Church. Is this not a living miracle – that those who hate us so bitterly, obey and acknowledge our power every week, and do not know it?[19]

The Problem with Britain

The Catholic church was less successful in getting the Christians of the British isles to acknowledge a Sunday Sabbath. Because the British church was established so early after Christ’s resurrection, and because it was geographically cut off from the mainland, it retained a primitive kind of Christianity. Thus it was that when the British Christians were introduced to Catholicism after the arrival of Augustine of Canterbury, they found it difficult to reconcile their more simplistic and primitive approach to faith with the ecclesiastical and theological demands of Pope Gregory. I won’t go into any detail about this since it is the subject of the book we are now writing, except to mention how the issue of the Sabbath became a source of friction.

St. Augustine of Canterbury, representing Pope Gregory, claimed authority over the Celtic church. The Celts, they argued, were guilty of doing things their own way, trusting to their own interpretation of scripture rather than the Pope’s decrees. The British remained fiercely independent for a long time, not least of which in their insistence in keeping a Saturday Sabbath. This is verified by a number of historians. The historian A. C. Flick tells us that the Celtic Church observed the seventh day as the Sabbath.[20] Lewis tells us that

“There is much evidence that the Sabbath prevailed in Wales universally until A.D. 1113, when the first Roman bishop was seated at St. David’s. The old Welsh Sabbathkeeping churches did not even then altogether bow the knee to Rome, but fled to their hiding places…[21]

This Celtic tradition seems to have angered Pope Gregory, who had to issue an official pronouncement against a section of the city of Rome itself because some Christians there rested and worshiped on Saturday.[22] In 602 A.D. Pope Gregory issued a decree saying that “when the anti-christ would come, he would keep Saturday for the Sabbath.”

In refusing to be subject to Rome, some historians have referred to the British church as representing a reformation before Luther’s reformation. But it was not, in fact, a reformation, for the British church had never been Catholic to begin with. As Sir William Blackstone wrote in his Laws of England, “The ancient British Church, by whomsoever planted was a stranger to the Bishop of Rome and all his pretended authorities.”[23] Apparently, the stubborn independence of the British church (which, again, we hope to explore further in our upcoming book), was equaled only by the stubborn independence of the Scottish church. “We have found the Scotch bishops worse even than the British” wrote one person about the Scottish Bishop Dagon’s visit to Rome. “Dagon, who lately came here, being a bishop of the Scots, refused so much as to eat at the same table, or sleep one night under the same roof with us."

When faced with Augustine’s demand that the British Christians acknowledge the authority of the Pope, Dionoth, Abbot of Bangor, replied as follows,

“We desire to love all men, but he whom you call ‘Pope’ is not entitled to style himself the ‘father of fathers’ and the only submission we can render him is that which we owe to every Christian.’”[24]

St. Columbanus (c.543 – 615), an Irish saint and scholar, wrote to Pope Gregory, making claims for the purity and independence of the Celtic Church and challenging the doctrine of papal supremacy. Writing to Pope Boniface IV, he wrote,

Your Chair, O Pope, is defiled with heresy. Deadly errors have crept into it; it harbours horrors and impieties. Catholic? The true Catholicism you have lost. The orthodox and the true Catholics are they who have always zealously preserved in the true faith.

Since then the Roman church has calmly annexed Columbanus, as they have the other Celtic fathers, making them into saints and claiming them for their own. Amazingly, this has even included St. Patrick who was considered a heretic by the Catholic church of his day. So complete has this revisionism been that, the other day, one catholic told me that there was no such thing as a pre-catholic community of Christians in Britain. “They were as Catholic as I am,” said this man. In reality, even after the British had officially consented to become catholic at the Synod of Hertford in AD 673[25], their protestant spirit was never entirely suppressed. In AD 705. Adelm wrote to the Britons that

The precepts of your bishops are not in accord with Catholic faith…[26] We adjure you not to persevere in your arrogant contempt of the decrees of St. Peter and the traditions of the of the Roman Church by a proud and tyrannical attachment to the statutes of your ancestors.”[27]

It is hardly surprising that the tradition of keeping a Saturday Sabbath lingered in England long after the British officially acknowledged the Pope. The first English reference to abstaining from labour on Sunday occurs as late as 692 AD. In AD 747 a council of English clergy had to be called, in which a constitution was made to command Sunday to be kept as the Lord’s day. In AD 784 Egbert, archbishop of York, had to write to show exactly what could and could not be done on a Sunday. In AD 876, Alfred the Great made a law to keep Sunday solemn and specifying that punishments for crimes committed on this day should be doubled. Yet for all this, in the year 928, King Athelston had to make a law prohibit marketing and civil proceedings from occurring on Sunday. For all this, it was still necessary for Otho, the archbishop of Canterbury in the year 943, to make a law affirming Sunday to be kept as the Lord’s day. In 967, King Edgar extended the Sunday Sabbath to last from Saturday afternoon to day-break on Monday. In 1009, King Ethelred made a law requiring that all Englishmen should observe Sunday.

Yet despite all these misguided efforts, there have always been dissenters in England, sometimes whole communities in England that have had to be massacred for their observance of a Saturday Sabbath. Writing in 1584, John Stockwood, says that there existed in England, “A great diversity of opinion among the vulgar-people and simple sort, concerning the Sabbath-day and the right use of the same.” Gilfillan states one of the grounds of controversy was “Some maintaining the unchanged and unchangeable obligation of the seventh-day Sabbath.”[28] In the 16^th century, large numbers of English people began observing a Saturday Sabbath. Likewise in the 17^th century, when eleven various churches of Sabbatarians flourished. We could go on and on, with numerous tails of travail and heroism of those who kept a Saturday Sabbath here in England, often enduring extremes of torture for their beliefs. Perhaps that will have to be the subject of another book.

We who have been privileged to understand the importance of the Saturday Sabbath, should be ever thankful that we have the freedom to celebrate this day as God intended. Furthermore, as we reflect on the special place the Sabbath has occupied in British history, we can hope and pray that more Christians throughout our land may yet come to acknowledge the importance of keeping the Sabbath. This importance is not simply because the Sabbath looks back to the time of God’s creation, but because it also points forward, in faith, to the time of God’s re-creation. (Isaiah 58:13-14; Heb. 4)