Home » The Churches Confess: Sabbath Change
The Day That Was Forgotten: The Change of the Sabbath to Sunday
Spoken in different ways, amongst different church affiliations and people, but the testimony leads to the same conclusion: There is no command to observe Sunday, the first day of the week; but only to observe the seventh-day Sabbath.
From Sabbath to Sunday- Methodist
“…the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, and enforced by the prophets, He [Christ] did not take away…. The moral law stands on an entirely different foundation from the ceremonial or ritual law. …Every part of this law must remain in force upon all mankind and in all ages.” -JOHN WESLEY, “Sermons on Several Occasions,” 2-Vol. Edition, Vol. I, pages 221, 222.
“No Christian whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.”-“Methodist Church Discipline,” (I904), page 23.
“The Sabbath was made for MAN; not for the Hebrews, but for all men.”-E.O. HAVEN, “Pillars of Truth,” page 88.
“The reason we observe the first day instead of the seventh is based on no positive command. One will search the Scriptures in vain for authority for changing from the seventh day to the first. The early Christians began to worship on the first day of the week because Jesus rose from the dead on that day. By and by, this day of worship was made also a day of rest, a legal holiday. This took place in the year 321.
“The reason we observe the first day instead of the seventh is based on no positive command. One will search the Scriptures in vain for authority for changing from the seventh day to the first… Our Christian Sabbath, therefore, is not a matter of positive command. It is a gift of the church… “-CLOVIS G. CHAPPELL, “Ten Rules for Living,” page 61.
“Sabbath in the Hebrew language signifies rest, and is the seventh day of the week… and it must be confessed that there is no law in the New Testament concerning the first day.” Charles Buck, A Theological Dictionary, “Sabbath”
“In the days of very long ago the people of the world began to give names to everything, and they turned the sounds of the lips into words, so that the lips could speak a thought. In those days the people worshiped the sun because many words were made to tell of many thoughts about many things. The people became Christians and were ruled by an emperor whose name was Constantine. This emperor made Sunday the Christian Sabbath, because of the blessing of light and heat which came from the sun. So our Sunday is a sun-day, isn’t it?”-Sunday School Advocate, Dec. 31, 1921.
“The moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, and enforced by the prophets, He [Christ] did not take away. It was not the design of His coming to revoke any part of this. This is a law which never can be broken… Every part of this law must remain in force upon all mankind and in all ages; as not depending either on time or place, or any other circumstances liable to change, but on the nature of God and the nature of man, and their unchangeable relation to each other.”-JOHN WESLEY, “Sermons on Several Occasions,” Vol. I, Sermon XXV.
“The Sabbath instituted in the beginning, and confirmed again and again by Moses and the prophets, has never been abrogated. A part of the moral law, not a jot or a tittle of its sanctity has been taken away.” New York Herald 1874, on the Methodist Episcopal Bishops Pastoral 1874
From Sabbath to Sunday- Baptist
“There was and is a command to keep holy the Sabbath day, but that Sabbath day was not Sunday. It will however be readily said, and with some show of triumph, that the Sabbath was transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week, with all its duties, privileges and sanctions. Earnestly desiring information on this subject, which I have studied for many years, I ask, where can the record of such a transaction be found: Not in the New Testament– absolutely not. There is no scriptural evidence of the change of the Sabbath institution from the seventh to the first day of the week.” Dr. E. T. Hiscox, author of the ‘Baptist Manual’.
“To me it seems unaccountable that Jesus, during three years’ discussion with His disciples, often conversing with them upon the Sabbath question, discussing it in some of its various aspects, freeing it from its false [Jewish traditional] glosses, never alluded to any transference of the day; also, that during the forty days of His resurrection life, no such thing was intimated. Nor, so far as we know, did the Spirit, which was given to bring to their remembrance all things whatsoever that He had said unto them, deal with this question. Nor yet did the inspired apostles, in preaching the gospel, founding churches, counseling and instructing those founded, discuss or approach the subject.
Of course I quite well know that Sunday did come into use in early Christian history as a religious day as we learn from the Christian Fathers and other sources. But what a pity that it comes branded with the mark of Paganism, and christened with the name of the sun-god, then adopted and sanctified by the Papal apostasy, and bequeathed as a sacred legacy to Protestantism.” Dr. E. T. Hiscox, report of his sermon at the Baptist Minister’s Convention, in ‘New York Examiner,’ November 16, 1893
“The Scriptures nowhere call the first day of the week the Sabbath. . .There is no Scriptural authority for so doing, nor of course, any Scriptural obligation.” The Watchman
“There was never any formal or authoritative change from the Jewish seventh-day Sabbath to the Christian first-day observance.” -WILLIAM OWEN CARVER, ” The Lord’s Day in Our Day,” page 49.
“There is nothing in Scripture that requires us to keep Sunday rather than Saturday as a holy day.” Harold Lindsell (editor), Christianity Today, Nov. 5, 1976
“The sacred name of the Seventh day is Sabbath. This fact is too clear to require argument [Exodus 20:10quoted]… on this point the plain teaching of the Word has been admitted in all ages… Not once did the disciples apply the Sabbath law to the first day of the week, — that folly was left for a later age, nor did they pretend that the first day supplanted the seventh.” Joseph Hudson Taylor, ‘The Sabbatic Question’, p. 14-17, 41.
“The first four commandments set forth man’s obligations directly toward God…. But when we keep the first four commandments, we are likely to keep the other six. . . . The fourth commandment sets forth God’s claim on man’s time and thought…. The six days of labour and the rest on the Sabbath are to be maintained as a witness to God’s toil and rest in the creation. . . . No one of the ten words is of merely racial significance…. The Sabbath was established originally (long before Moses) in no special connection with the Hebrews, but as an institution for all mankind, in commemoration of God’s rest after the six days of creation. It was designed for all the descendants of Adam.”-Adult Quarterly, Southern Baptist Convention series, Aug. 15, 1937.
From Sabbath to Sunday- Historical
“During this indefinite time a considerable amount of a sort of theokrasia seems to have gone on between the Christian cult and the almost equally popular and widely diffused Mithraic cult, and the cult of Serapis-Isis-Horus. From the former it would seem the Christians adopted Sunday as their chief day of worship in- stead of the Jewish Sabbath.” H. G. WELLS, “The Outline of History” (New and Revised), page 543.
“The first who ever used it [the Sabbath to denote the Lord’s day (the first that I have met with in all this search) is one Petrus Alfonsus-he lived about the time that Repurtus did (which was the beginning of the twelfth century)-who calls the Lord’s day by the name of Christian Sabbath.” PETER HEYLYN, “History of the Sabbath,” Part 2, Chap. 2, Sec. 12.
“Bear in mind that the substitution [of the first for the seventh day] was not a coerced happening; it could not be a sudden, but only a very slow development, probably never anticipated, never even designed or put into shape by those chiefly interested, but creeping almost unconsciously into being.” WILLIAM B. DANA, “A Day of Rest and Worship,” page 174.
The first direct reference to Sunday as a day of rest from physical toil we find in Tertullian, in about A.D. 200 in his Liber de Oratione, chapter 23. “We, however ( just as we have received ), only on the day of the Lord’s resurrection ought to guard not only against kneeling, but every posture and office of solicitude; deferring even our businesses lest we give any place to the devil.” TERTULLIAN, “Ante-Nicene Fathers,” Vol. 111, page 689.
“The early Christians had at first adopted the Jewish seven- day week with its numbered week days, but by the close of the third century A.D. this began to give way to the planetary week; and in the fourth and fifth centuries the pagan designations became generally accepted in the western half of Christendom. The use of the planetary names by Christians attests the growing influence of astrological speculations introduced by converts from paganism. … During these same centuries the spread of Oriental solar worships, especially that of Mithra (Persian sun worship) in the Roman world, had already led to the substitution by pagans of dies Solis for dies Saturni, as the first day of the planetary week…. Thus gradually a pagan institution was ingrafted on Christianity.” HUTTON WEBSTER, Ph.D., Rest Days, pages 220, 221.
Eusebius, fourth-century bishop and friend of the wicked Emperor Constantine, whose Sunday law is the first on record, flatly says: “All things, whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord’s day [as they had begun to call Sunday].” –“Commentary on the Psalms.”
“Opposition to Judaism introduced the particular festival of Sunday very early, indeed, into the place of the Sabbath…. The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect, far from them, and from the early apostolic church, to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday. Perhaps, at the end of the second century a false application of this kind had begun to take place; for men appear by that time to have considered laboring on Sunday as a sin.” AUGUSTUS NEANDER, General history of the Christian Religion and Church” (Rose’s translation), Vol. 1, page 186.
From Sabbath to Sunday- Lutheran
“The observance of the Lord’s Day (Sunday) is founded not on any command of God, but on the authority of the Church.” Augsburg Confession of Faith.
“They [the Catholics] allege the Sabbath changed into Sunday, the Lord’s day, contrary to the Decalogue, as it appears, neither is there any example more boasted of than the changing of the Sabbath day. Great, say they, is the power and authority of the church, since it dispensed with one of theTen Commandments.” -Augsburg Confession of Faith, Art. 28, par. 9.
“They [Roman Catholics] allege the change of the Sabbath into the Lord’s day, as it seemeth, to the Decalogue [the ten commandments]; and they have no example more in their mouths than they change of the Sabbath. They will needs have the Church’s power to be very great, because it hath dispensed with the precept of the Decalogue.” The Augsburg Confession, 1530 A.D. (Lutheran), part 2, art 7, in Philip Schaff, the Creeds of Christiandom, 4th Edition, vol 3, p64 [this important statement was made by the Lutherans and written by Melanchthon, only thirteen years after Luther nailed his theses to the door and began the Reformation].
“For up to this day mankind has absolutely trifled with the original and most special revelation of the Holy God, the ten words written upon the tables of the Law from Sinai.”-“Crown Theological Library,” page I78.
“The Christians in the ancient church very soon distinguished the first day of the week, Sunday; however, not as a Sabbath, but as an assembly day of the church, to study the Word of God together, and to celebrate the ordinances one with another: without a shadow of doubt, this took place as early as the first part of the second century.”-Bishop GRIMELUND, “History of the Sabbath,” page 60.
“The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance.”- AUGUSTUS NEANDER, “History of the Christian Religion and Church,” Vol. 1, page 186.
“I wonder exceedingly how it came to be imputed to me that I should reject the law of Ten Commandments…Whosoever abrogates the law must of necessity abrogate sin also.”-MARTIN LUTHER, Spiritual Antichrist,” pages 71, 72.
“We have seen how gradually the impression of the Jewish Sabbath faded from the mind of the Christian church, and how completely the newer thought underlying the observance of the first day took possession of the church. We have seen that the Christian of the first three centuries never confused one with the other, but for a time celebrated both.” The Sunday Problem, a study book by the Lutheran Church (1923) p.36
“But they err in teaching that Sunday has taken the place of the Old Testament Sabbath and therefore must be kept as the seventh day had to be kept by the children of Israel …. These churches err in their teaching, for scripture has in no way ordained the first day of the week in place of the Sabbath. There is simply no law in the New Testament to that effect” John Theodore Mueller, Sabbath or Sunday, pp.15, 16
“For when there could not be produced one solitary place in the Holy Scriptures which testified that either the Lord Himself or the apostles had ordered such a transfer of the Sabbath to Sunday, then it was not easy to answer the question: Who has transferred the Sabbath, and who has the right to do it?” George Sverdrup, ‘A New Day.’
From Sabbath to Sunday- Moody Bible Institute
“The Sabbath was binding in Eden, and it has been in force ever since. This fourth commandment begins with the word ‘remember,’ showing that the Sabbath already existed when God wrote the law on the tables of stone at Sinai. How can men claim that this one commandment has been done away with when they will admit that the other nine are still binding?” – D.L. MOODY, “Weighed and Wanting,” page 47.
“I honestly believe that this commandment [the fourth, or Sabbath commandment] is just as binding today as it ever was. I have talked with men who have said that it has been abrogated, but they have never been able to point to any place in the Bible where God repealed it. When Christ was on earth, He did nothing to set it aside; He freed it from the traces under which the scribes and Pharisees had put it, and gave it its true place. ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.’ It is just as practicable and as necessary for men today as it ever was-in fact, more than ever, because we live in such an intense age.’ – Id., page 46.
“This Fourth is not a commandment for one place, or one time, but for all places and times.” D.L. Moody, at San Francisco, Jan. 1st, 1881.
From Sabbath to Sunday: Protestantism
“All of us believe many things in regard to religion that we do not find in the Bible. For example, nowhere in the Bible do we find that Christ or the Apostles changed [the day of worship] from Saturday to Sunday. We have the commandment of God given to Moses to keep holy the Sabbath Day, that is the 7th day of the week, Saturday. Today most Christians keep Sunday because it has been revealed to us by the Church outside the Bible,” (Article, “To Tell You The Truth,” The Catholic Virginian, October 3, 1947, p. 9)
From Sabbath to Sunday- Miscellaneous
“You will tell me that Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, but that the Christian Sabbath has been changed to Sunday. Changed! But by whom? Who has authority to change an express commandment of Almighty God? When God has spoken and said, ‘Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day,’ who shall dare to say, ‘Nay, thou mayest work and do all manner of business on the seventh day; but thou shalt keep holy the first day in its stead’? This is a most important question, which I know not how you can answer.”
“You are a Protestant, and you profess to go by the Bible and the Bible only; and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded. The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the Ten Commandments; you believe that the other nine are still binding; who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered.”-“The Library of Christian Doctrine,” pages 3, 4.
“The first precept in the Bible is that of sanctifying the seventh day: ‘God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.’ Genesis 2:3. This precept was confirmed by God in the Ten Commandments: ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep It holy. …The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.’ Exodus 20: 8, 10. On the other hand, Christ declares that He is not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. (Matthew 5: 17.) He Himself observed the Sabbath: ‘And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.’ Luke 4: r6. His disciples likewise observed it after His death: ‘They . . . rested the Sabbath day, according to the commandment.’ Luke 23: 56. Yet with all this weight of Scripture authority for keeping the Sabbath or seventh day holy, Protestants of all denominations make this a profane day and transfer the obligation of it to the first day of the week, or the Sunday. Now what authority have they for doing this? None at all but the unwritten word, or tradition of the Catholic Church, which declares that the apostle made the change in honour of Christ’s resurrection, and the descent of the Holy Ghost on that day of the week.”-JOHN MILNER, “The End of Religious Controversy,” page 71.
“Sabbath means, of course, Saturday, the seventh day of the week, but the early Christians changed the observance to Sunday, to honour the day on which Christ arose from the dead.”-FULTON OURSLER. Cosmopolitan, Sept. 1951, pages 34, 35.
“I do not pretend to be even an amateur scholar of the Scriptures. I read the Decalogue merely as an average man searching for guidance, and in the immortal ‘Ten Words’ I find a blueprint for the good life.”-Id., page 33.
“Most certainly the Commandments are needed today, perhaps more than ever before. Their divine message confronts us with a profound moral challenge in an epidemic of evil; a unifying message acceptable alike to Jew, Moslem, and Christian. Who, reading the Ten in the light of history and of current events, can doubt their identity with the eternal law of nature?”-Id., page 124.
“The Sabbath is commanded to be kept on the seventh day. It could not be kept on any other day. To observe the first day of the week or the fourth is not to observe the Sabbath. . . . It was the last day of the week, after six days of work, that was to be kept holy. The observance of no other day would fulfil the law.”-H. J. FLOWERS, B.A., B.D., “The Permanent Value of the Ten Commandments,” page 13.
“The evaluation of Sunday, the traditionally accepted day of the resurrection of Christ, has varied greatly throughout the centuries of the Christian Era. From time to time it has been confused with the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath. English speaking peoples have been the most consistent in perpetuating the erroneous assumption that the obligation of the fourth commandment has passed over to Sunday. In popular speech, Sunday is frequently, but erroneously, spoken of as the Sabbath.”-F. M. SETZLER, Head Curator, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institute, from a letter dated Sept. 1, 1949.
“He that observes the Sabbath aright holds the history of that which it celebrates to be authentic, and therefore believes in the creation of the first man; in the creation of a fair abode for man in the space of six days; in the primeval and absolute creation of the heavens and the earth, and, as a necessary antecedent to all this, in the Creator, who at the close of His latest creative effort, rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath thus becomes a sign by which the believers in a historical revelation are distinguished from those who have allowed these great facts to fade from their remembrance.’ – JAMES G. MURPHY, “Commentary on the Book of Exodus,” comments on Exodus 20: 8-11.
“As the Sabbath is of divine institution, so it is to be kept holy unto the Lord. Numerous have been the days appointed by men for religious services; but these are not binding, because of human institution. Not so the Sabbath. Hence the fourth commandment is ushered in with a peculiar emphasis-‘Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.’ … The abolition of it would be unreasonable.” CHARLES BUCK A Theological Dictionary,” 1830 Edition, page 537.
“But although it [Sunday] was in the primitive times indifferently called the Lord’s day, or Sunday, yet it was never denominated the Sabbath; a name constantly appropriate to Saturday, or the seventh day, both by sacred and ecclesiastical writers.”-Id., page 572.
“The notion of a formal substitution by apostolic authority of the Lord’s day [meaning Sunday] for the Jewish Sabbath [or the first for the seventh day]… and the transference to it, perhaps in a spiritualized form, of the sabbatical obligation established by the promulgation of the fourth commandment, has no basis whatever, either in Holy Scripture or in Christian antiquity.” SIR WILLIAM SMITH AND SAMUEL CHEETHAM, A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,” Vol. II, page I82, Article “Sabbath.”
“Sunday was a name given by the heathens to the first day of the week, because it was the day on which they worshipped the sun, … the seventh day was blessed and hallowed by God Himself, and … He requires His creatures to keep it holy to Him. This commandment is of universal and perpetual obligation. … The Creator ‘blessed the seventh day’ declared it to be a day above all days, a day on which His favor should assuredly rest. … So long, then, as man exists, and the world around him endures, does the law of the early Sabbath remain. It cannot be set aside, so long as its foundations last…. It is not the Jewish Sabbath, properly so-called, which is ordained in the fourth commandment. In the whole of that injunction there is no Jewish element, any more than there is in the third commandment, or the sixth.” Eadie’s Biblical Cyclopedia, 1872 Edition, page 561.
“Thus we learn from Socrates (HE., vi.c.8) that in his time public worship was held in the churches of Constantinople on both days. The view that the Christian’s Lord’s day or Sunday is but the Christian Sabbath deliberately transferred, from the seventh to the first day of the week does not indeed, find categorical expression till a much later period…. The earliest recognition of the observance of Sunday as a legal duty is a constitution of Constantine in A.D. 32l, enacting that all courts of justice, inhabitants of towns, and workshops were to be at rest on. Sunday (venerabili die Solis), with an exception in favor of those engaged in agricultural labor…. The Council of Laodicea (363) …,forbids Christians from Judaizing and resting on the Sabbath day. preferring the Lord’s day, and so far as possible resting as Christians. ” Encyclopedia Britannica l899 Edition, Vol. XXIII, page 654.
“Unquestionably the first law, either ecclesiastical or civil, by which the sabbatical observance of Sunday is known to have been ordained is the sabbatical edict of Constantine, A.D. 321. Chambers’ Encyclopedia, Article “Sunday.
“It must be confessed that there is no law in the New Testament concerning the, first day. ” M’CLINTOCK AND STRONG Cyclopedia of Biblical, Thedogical, and Ecclesiastical literature, Vol. IX page 196.
“Sunday (Dies Sotis, of the Roman calendar, ‘day of the sun,’ because dedicated to the sun), the, first day of the week, was adopted by the early Christians as a day of worship. The ‘sun’ of Latin adoration they interpreted as the ‘Sun of Righteousness.’… No regulations, for its observance are laid down in the New Testament, nor, indeed, is its observance even enjoined. ” SCHAFF HERZOG, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1891 Edition, Vol. IV, Art. “Sunday.”
From Sabbath to Sunday- Episcopalian
“We have made the change from the seventh day to the first day, from Saturday to Sunday, on the authority of the one holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church of Christ.” Bishop Symour, Why We keep Sunday.
“The Bible commandment says on the seventh-day thou shalt rest. That is Saturday. Nowhere in the Bible is it laid down that worship should be done on Sunday.” Phillip Carrington, quoted in Toronto Daily Star, Oct 26, 1949 [Carrington (1892-), Anglican archbishop of Quebec, spoke the above in a message on this subject delivered to a packed assembly of clergymen. It was widely reported at the time in the news media].
“The Bible commandment says on the seventh day thou shalt rest. That is Saturday. Nowhere in the Bible is it laid down that worship should be done on Sunday.” Philip Carrington, Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 26, 1949.
“Where are we told in Scripture that we are to keep the first day at all? We are commanded to keep the seventh; but we are nowhere commanded to keep the first day…… The reason why we keep the first day of the week holy instead of the seventh is for the same reason that we observe many other things, not because the Bible, but because the church has enjoined it.” Isaac Williams, D. D., Plain Sermons on the Catechism, Vol. 1, pp. 334-336.
“Sunday (Dies Solis, of the Roman calendar, ‘day of the sun,’ because dedicated to the sun), the first day of the week, was adopted by the early Christians as a day of worship. The ‘sun’ of Latin adoration they interpreted as the ‘Sun of Righteousness.. No regulations for its observance are laid down in the New Testament, nor, indeed, is its observance even enjoined.” Schaff Herzog, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1891 Edition, Vol.4, art: ‘Sunday’
“The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect, far from them and from the early apostolic church to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday.” Neander, History of the Christian Religion and Church, p.186
“The day is now changed from the seventh to the first day … but as we meet with no Scriptural direction for the change, we may conclude it was done by the authority of the church.” ‘Explanation of Catechism’
From Sabbath to Sunday- Jehovah’s Witnesses
“Therefore God gave his law through Moses to the Israelites and which applies to all who want to do right, and the first in order and first in importance of his commandments or fundamental law is this, to wit.’ Exodus 20:1-6,”..”which is the first part of the Ten Commandment law…’The law of God never changes, because God never changes. (Malachi 3:6). His law points out the way to everlasting life. No creature will ever be given life everlasting who willfully, that is, intentionally, violates God’s law….For a man to violate the fundamental law of God means that that man puts himself on the side of the devil, who therefore leads him to destruction.” Enemies, Watchtower publications, 1937, pg. 94.
The Day That Was Forgotten: The Change of the Sabbath to Sunday
Spoken in different ways, amongst different church affiliations and people, but the testimony leads to the same conclusion: There is no command to observe Sunday, the first day of the week; but only to observe the seventh-day Sabbath.
From Sabbath to Sunday- Methodist
“…the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, and enforced by the prophets, He [Christ] did not take away…. The moral law stands on an entirely different foundation from the ceremonial or ritual law. …Every part of this law must remain in force upon all mankind and in all ages.” -JOHN WESLEY, “Sermons on Several Occasions,” 2-Vol. Edition, Vol. I, pages 221, 222.
“No Christian whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.”-“Methodist Church Discipline,” (I904), page 23.
“The Sabbath was made for MAN; not for the Hebrews, but for all men.”-E.O. HAVEN, “Pillars of Truth,” page 88.
“The reason we observe the first day instead of the seventh is based on no positive command. One will search the Scriptures in vain for authority for changing from the seventh day to the first. The early Christians began to worship on the first day of the week because Jesus rose from the dead on that day. By and by, this day of worship was made also a day of rest, a legal holiday. This took place in the year 321.
“The reason we observe the first day instead of the seventh is based on no positive command. One will search the Scriptures in vain for authority for changing from the seventh day to the first… Our Christian Sabbath, therefore, is not a matter of positive command. It is a gift of the church… “-CLOVIS G. CHAPPELL, “Ten Rules for Living,” page 61.
“Sabbath in the Hebrew language signifies rest, and is the seventh day of the week… and it must be confessed that there is no law in the New Testament concerning the first day.” Charles Buck, A Theological Dictionary, “Sabbath”
“In the days of very long ago the people of the world began to give names to everything, and they turned the sounds of the lips into words, so that the lips could speak a thought. In those days the people worshiped the sun because many words were made to tell of many thoughts about many things. The people became Christians and were ruled by an emperor whose name was Constantine. This emperor made Sunday the Christian Sabbath, because of the blessing of light and heat which came from the sun. So our Sunday is a sun-day, isn’t it?”-Sunday School Advocate, Dec. 31, 1921.
“The moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, and enforced by the prophets, He [Christ] did not take away. It was not the design of His coming to revoke any part of this. This is a law which never can be broken… Every part of this law must remain in force upon all mankind and in all ages; as not depending either on time or place, or any other circumstances liable to change, but on the nature of God and the nature of man, and their unchangeable relation to each other.”-JOHN WESLEY, “Sermons on Several Occasions,” Vol. I, Sermon XXV.
“The Sabbath instituted in the beginning, and confirmed again and again by Moses and the prophets, has never been abrogated. A part of the moral law, not a jot or a tittle of its sanctity has been taken away.” New York Herald 1874, on the Methodist Episcopal Bishops Pastoral 1874
From Sabbath to Sunday- Baptist
“There was and is a command to keep holy the Sabbath day, but that Sabbath day was not Sunday. It will however be readily said, and with some show of triumph, that the Sabbath was transferred from the seventh to the first day of the week, with all its duties, privileges and sanctions. Earnestly desiring information on this subject, which I have studied for many years, I ask, where can the record of such a transaction be found: Not in the New Testament– absolutely not. There is no scriptural evidence of the change of the Sabbath institution from the seventh to the first day of the week.” Dr. E. T. Hiscox, author of the ‘Baptist Manual’.
“To me it seems unaccountable that Jesus, during three years’ discussion with His disciples, often conversing with them upon the Sabbath question, discussing it in some of its various aspects, freeing it from its false [Jewish traditional] glosses, never alluded to any transference of the day; also, that during the forty days of His resurrection life, no such thing was intimated. Nor, so far as we know, did the Spirit, which was given to bring to their remembrance all things whatsoever that He had said unto them, deal with this question. Nor yet did the inspired apostles, in preaching the gospel, founding churches, counseling and instructing those founded, discuss or approach the subject.
Of course I quite well know that Sunday did come into use in early Christian history as a religious day as we learn from the Christian Fathers and other sources. But what a pity that it comes branded with the mark of Paganism, and christened with the name of the sun-god, then adopted and sanctified by the Papal apostasy, and bequeathed as a sacred legacy to Protestantism.” Dr. E. T. Hiscox, report of his sermon at the Baptist Minister’s Convention, in ‘New York Examiner,’ November 16, 1893
“The Scriptures nowhere call the first day of the week the Sabbath. . .There is no Scriptural authority for so doing, nor of course, any Scriptural obligation.” The Watchman
“There was never any formal or authoritative change from the Jewish seventh-day Sabbath to the Christian first-day observance.” -WILLIAM OWEN CARVER, ” The Lord’s Day in Our Day,” page 49.
“There is nothing in Scripture that requires us to keep Sunday rather than Saturday as a holy day.” Harold Lindsell (editor), Christianity Today, Nov. 5, 1976
“The sacred name of the Seventh day is Sabbath. This fact is too clear to require argument [Exodus 20:10quoted]… on this point the plain teaching of the Word has been admitted in all ages… Not once did the disciples apply the Sabbath law to the first day of the week, — that folly was left for a later age, nor did they pretend that the first day supplanted the seventh.” Joseph Hudson Taylor, ‘The Sabbatic Question’, p. 14-17, 41.
“The first four commandments set forth man’s obligations directly toward God…. But when we keep the first four commandments, we are likely to keep the other six. . . . The fourth commandment sets forth God’s claim on man’s time and thought…. The six days of labour and the rest on the Sabbath are to be maintained as a witness to God’s toil and rest in the creation. . . . No one of the ten words is of merely racial significance…. The Sabbath was established originally (long before Moses) in no special connection with the Hebrews, but as an institution for all mankind, in commemoration of God’s rest after the six days of creation. It was designed for all the descendants of Adam.”-Adult Quarterly, Southern Baptist Convention series, Aug. 15, 1937.
From Sabbath to Sunday- Historical
“During this indefinite time a considerable amount of a sort of theokrasia seems to have gone on between the Christian cult and the almost equally popular and widely diffused Mithraic cult, and the cult of Serapis-Isis-Horus. From the former it would seem the Christians adopted Sunday as their chief day of worship in- stead of the Jewish Sabbath.” H. G. WELLS, “The Outline of History” (New and Revised), page 543.
“The first who ever used it [the Sabbath to denote the Lord’s day (the first that I have met with in all this search) is one Petrus Alfonsus-he lived about the time that Repurtus did (which was the beginning of the twelfth century)-who calls the Lord’s day by the name of Christian Sabbath.” PETER HEYLYN, “History of the Sabbath,” Part 2, Chap. 2, Sec. 12.
“Bear in mind that the substitution [of the first for the seventh day] was not a coerced happening; it could not be a sudden, but only a very slow development, probably never anticipated, never even designed or put into shape by those chiefly interested, but creeping almost unconsciously into being.” WILLIAM B. DANA, “A Day of Rest and Worship,” page 174.
The first direct reference to Sunday as a day of rest from physical toil we find in Tertullian, in about A.D. 200 in his Liber de Oratione, chapter 23. “We, however ( just as we have received ), only on the day of the Lord’s resurrection ought to guard not only against kneeling, but every posture and office of solicitude; deferring even our businesses lest we give any place to the devil.” TERTULLIAN, “Ante-Nicene Fathers,” Vol. 111, page 689.
“The early Christians had at first adopted the Jewish seven- day week with its numbered week days, but by the close of the third century A.D. this began to give way to the planetary week; and in the fourth and fifth centuries the pagan designations became generally accepted in the western half of Christendom. The use of the planetary names by Christians attests the growing influence of astrological speculations introduced by converts from paganism. … During these same centuries the spread of Oriental solar worships, especially that of Mithra (Persian sun worship) in the Roman world, had already led to the substitution by pagans of dies Solis for dies Saturni, as the first day of the planetary week…. Thus gradually a pagan institution was ingrafted on Christianity.” HUTTON WEBSTER, Ph.D., Rest Days, pages 220, 221.
Eusebius, fourth-century bishop and friend of the wicked Emperor Constantine, whose Sunday law is the first on record, flatly says: “All things, whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord’s day [as they had begun to call Sunday].” –“Commentary on the Psalms.”
“Opposition to Judaism introduced the particular festival of Sunday very early, indeed, into the place of the Sabbath…. The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect, far from them, and from the early apostolic church, to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday. Perhaps, at the end of the second century a false application of this kind had begun to take place; for men appear by that time to have considered laboring on Sunday as a sin.” AUGUSTUS NEANDER, General history of the Christian Religion and Church” (Rose’s translation), Vol. 1, page 186.
From Sabbath to Sunday- Lutheran
“The observance of the Lord’s Day (Sunday) is founded not on any command of God, but on the authority of the Church.” Augsburg Confession of Faith.
“They [the Catholics] allege the Sabbath changed into Sunday, the Lord’s day, contrary to the Decalogue, as it appears, neither is there any example more boasted of than the changing of the Sabbath day. Great, say they, is the power and authority of the church, since it dispensed with one of theTen Commandments.” -Augsburg Confession of Faith, Art. 28, par. 9.
“They [Roman Catholics] allege the change of the Sabbath into the Lord’s day, as it seemeth, to the Decalogue [the ten commandments]; and they have no example more in their mouths than they change of the Sabbath. They will needs have the Church’s power to be very great, because it hath dispensed with the precept of the Decalogue.” The Augsburg Confession, 1530 A.D. (Lutheran), part 2, art 7, in Philip Schaff, the Creeds of Christiandom, 4th Edition, vol 3, p64 [this important statement was made by the Lutherans and written by Melanchthon, only thirteen years after Luther nailed his theses to the door and began the Reformation].
“For up to this day mankind has absolutely trifled with the original and most special revelation of the Holy God, the ten words written upon the tables of the Law from Sinai.”-“Crown Theological Library,” page I78.
“The Christians in the ancient church very soon distinguished the first day of the week, Sunday; however, not as a Sabbath, but as an assembly day of the church, to study the Word of God together, and to celebrate the ordinances one with another: without a shadow of doubt, this took place as early as the first part of the second century.”-Bishop GRIMELUND, “History of the Sabbath,” page 60.
“The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance.”- AUGUSTUS NEANDER, “History of the Christian Religion and Church,” Vol. 1, page 186.
“I wonder exceedingly how it came to be imputed to me that I should reject the law of Ten Commandments…Whosoever abrogates the law must of necessity abrogate sin also.”-MARTIN LUTHER, Spiritual Antichrist,” pages 71, 72.
“We have seen how gradually the impression of the Jewish Sabbath faded from the mind of the Christian church, and how completely the newer thought underlying the observance of the first day took possession of the church. We have seen that the Christian of the first three centuries never confused one with the other, but for a time celebrated both.” The Sunday Problem, a study book by the Lutheran Church (1923) p.36
“But they err in teaching that Sunday has taken the place of the Old Testament Sabbath and therefore must be kept as the seventh day had to be kept by the children of Israel …. These churches err in their teaching, for scripture has in no way ordained the first day of the week in place of the Sabbath. There is simply no law in the New Testament to that effect” John Theodore Mueller, Sabbath or Sunday, pp.15, 16
“For when there could not be produced one solitary place in the Holy Scriptures which testified that either the Lord Himself or the apostles had ordered such a transfer of the Sabbath to Sunday, then it was not easy to answer the question: Who has transferred the Sabbath, and who has the right to do it?” George Sverdrup, ‘A New Day.’
From Sabbath to Sunday- Moody Bible Institute
“The Sabbath was binding in Eden, and it has been in force ever since. This fourth commandment begins with the word ‘remember,’ showing that the Sabbath already existed when God wrote the law on the tables of stone at Sinai. How can men claim that this one commandment has been done away with when they will admit that the other nine are still binding?” – D.L. MOODY, “Weighed and Wanting,” page 47.
“I honestly believe that this commandment [the fourth, or Sabbath commandment] is just as binding today as it ever was. I have talked with men who have said that it has been abrogated, but they have never been able to point to any place in the Bible where God repealed it. When Christ was on earth, He did nothing to set it aside; He freed it from the traces under which the scribes and Pharisees had put it, and gave it its true place. ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.’ It is just as practicable and as necessary for men today as it ever was-in fact, more than ever, because we live in such an intense age.’ – Id., page 46.
“This Fourth is not a commandment for one place, or one time, but for all places and times.” D.L. Moody, at San Francisco, Jan. 1st, 1881.
From Sabbath to Sunday: Protestantism
“All of us believe many things in regard to religion that we do not find in the Bible. For example, nowhere in the Bible do we find that Christ or the Apostles changed [the day of worship] from Saturday to Sunday. We have the commandment of God given to Moses to keep holy the Sabbath Day, that is the 7th day of the week, Saturday. Today most Christians keep Sunday because it has been revealed to us by the Church outside the Bible,” (Article, “To Tell You The Truth,” The Catholic Virginian, October 3, 1947, p. 9)
From Sabbath to Sunday- Miscellaneous
“You will tell me that Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, but that the Christian Sabbath has been changed to Sunday. Changed! But by whom? Who has authority to change an express commandment of Almighty God? When God has spoken and said, ‘Thou shalt keep holy the seventh day,’ who shall dare to say, ‘Nay, thou mayest work and do all manner of business on the seventh day; but thou shalt keep holy the first day in its stead’? This is a most important question, which I know not how you can answer.”
“You are a Protestant, and you profess to go by the Bible and the Bible only; and yet in so important a matter as the observance of one day in seven as a holy day, you go against the plain letter of the Bible, and put another day in the place of that day which the Bible has commanded. The command to keep holy the seventh day is one of the Ten Commandments; you believe that the other nine are still binding; who gave you authority to tamper with the fourth? If you are consistent with your own principles, if you really follow the Bible and the Bible only, you ought to be able to produce some portion of the New Testament in which this fourth commandment is expressly altered.”-“The Library of Christian Doctrine,” pages 3, 4.
“The first precept in the Bible is that of sanctifying the seventh day: ‘God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.’ Genesis 2:3. This precept was confirmed by God in the Ten Commandments: ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep It holy. …The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.’ Exodus 20: 8, 10. On the other hand, Christ declares that He is not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. (Matthew 5: 17.) He Himself observed the Sabbath: ‘And, as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.’ Luke 4: r6. His disciples likewise observed it after His death: ‘They . . . rested the Sabbath day, according to the commandment.’ Luke 23: 56. Yet with all this weight of Scripture authority for keeping the Sabbath or seventh day holy, Protestants of all denominations make this a profane day and transfer the obligation of it to the first day of the week, or the Sunday. Now what authority have they for doing this? None at all but the unwritten word, or tradition of the Catholic Church, which declares that the apostle made the change in honour of Christ’s resurrection, and the descent of the Holy Ghost on that day of the week.”-JOHN MILNER, “The End of Religious Controversy,” page 71.
“Sabbath means, of course, Saturday, the seventh day of the week, but the early Christians changed the observance to Sunday, to honour the day on which Christ arose from the dead.”-FULTON OURSLER. Cosmopolitan, Sept. 1951, pages 34, 35.
“I do not pretend to be even an amateur scholar of the Scriptures. I read the Decalogue merely as an average man searching for guidance, and in the immortal ‘Ten Words’ I find a blueprint for the good life.”-Id., page 33.
“Most certainly the Commandments are needed today, perhaps more than ever before. Their divine message confronts us with a profound moral challenge in an epidemic of evil; a unifying message acceptable alike to Jew, Moslem, and Christian. Who, reading the Ten in the light of history and of current events, can doubt their identity with the eternal law of nature?”-Id., page 124.
“The Sabbath is commanded to be kept on the seventh day. It could not be kept on any other day. To observe the first day of the week or the fourth is not to observe the Sabbath. . . . It was the last day of the week, after six days of work, that was to be kept holy. The observance of no other day would fulfil the law.”-H. J. FLOWERS, B.A., B.D., “The Permanent Value of the Ten Commandments,” page 13.
“The evaluation of Sunday, the traditionally accepted day of the resurrection of Christ, has varied greatly throughout the centuries of the Christian Era. From time to time it has been confused with the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath. English speaking peoples have been the most consistent in perpetuating the erroneous assumption that the obligation of the fourth commandment has passed over to Sunday. In popular speech, Sunday is frequently, but erroneously, spoken of as the Sabbath.”-F. M. SETZLER, Head Curator, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institute, from a letter dated Sept. 1, 1949.
“He that observes the Sabbath aright holds the history of that which it celebrates to be authentic, and therefore believes in the creation of the first man; in the creation of a fair abode for man in the space of six days; in the primeval and absolute creation of the heavens and the earth, and, as a necessary antecedent to all this, in the Creator, who at the close of His latest creative effort, rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath thus becomes a sign by which the believers in a historical revelation are distinguished from those who have allowed these great facts to fade from their remembrance.’ – JAMES G. MURPHY, “Commentary on the Book of Exodus,” comments on Exodus 20: 8-11.
“As the Sabbath is of divine institution, so it is to be kept holy unto the Lord. Numerous have been the days appointed by men for religious services; but these are not binding, because of human institution. Not so the Sabbath. Hence the fourth commandment is ushered in with a peculiar emphasis-‘Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.’ … The abolition of it would be unreasonable.” CHARLES BUCK A Theological Dictionary,” 1830 Edition, page 537.
“But although it [Sunday] was in the primitive times indifferently called the Lord’s day, or Sunday, yet it was never denominated the Sabbath; a name constantly appropriate to Saturday, or the seventh day, both by sacred and ecclesiastical writers.”-Id., page 572.
“The notion of a formal substitution by apostolic authority of the Lord’s day [meaning Sunday] for the Jewish Sabbath [or the first for the seventh day]… and the transference to it, perhaps in a spiritualized form, of the sabbatical obligation established by the promulgation of the fourth commandment, has no basis whatever, either in Holy Scripture or in Christian antiquity.” SIR WILLIAM SMITH AND SAMUEL CHEETHAM, A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,” Vol. II, page I82, Article “Sabbath.”
“Sunday was a name given by the heathens to the first day of the week, because it was the day on which they worshipped the sun, … the seventh day was blessed and hallowed by God Himself, and … He requires His creatures to keep it holy to Him. This commandment is of universal and perpetual obligation. … The Creator ‘blessed the seventh day’ declared it to be a day above all days, a day on which His favor should assuredly rest. … So long, then, as man exists, and the world around him endures, does the law of the early Sabbath remain. It cannot be set aside, so long as its foundations last…. It is not the Jewish Sabbath, properly so-called, which is ordained in the fourth commandment. In the whole of that injunction there is no Jewish element, any more than there is in the third commandment, or the sixth.” Eadie’s Biblical Cyclopedia, 1872 Edition, page 561.
“Thus we learn from Socrates (HE., vi.c.8) that in his time public worship was held in the churches of Constantinople on both days. The view that the Christian’s Lord’s day or Sunday is but the Christian Sabbath deliberately transferred, from the seventh to the first day of the week does not indeed, find categorical expression till a much later period…. The earliest recognition of the observance of Sunday as a legal duty is a constitution of Constantine in A.D. 32l, enacting that all courts of justice, inhabitants of towns, and workshops were to be at rest on. Sunday (venerabili die Solis), with an exception in favor of those engaged in agricultural labor…. The Council of Laodicea (363) …,forbids Christians from Judaizing and resting on the Sabbath day. preferring the Lord’s day, and so far as possible resting as Christians. ” Encyclopedia Britannica l899 Edition, Vol. XXIII, page 654.
“Unquestionably the first law, either ecclesiastical or civil, by which the sabbatical observance of Sunday is known to have been ordained is the sabbatical edict of Constantine, A.D. 321. Chambers’ Encyclopedia, Article “Sunday.
“It must be confessed that there is no law in the New Testament concerning the, first day. ” M’CLINTOCK AND STRONG Cyclopedia of Biblical, Thedogical, and Ecclesiastical literature, Vol. IX page 196.
“Sunday (Dies Sotis, of the Roman calendar, ‘day of the sun,’ because dedicated to the sun), the, first day of the week, was adopted by the early Christians as a day of worship. The ‘sun’ of Latin adoration they interpreted as the ‘Sun of Righteousness.’… No regulations, for its observance are laid down in the New Testament, nor, indeed, is its observance even enjoined. ” SCHAFF HERZOG, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1891 Edition, Vol. IV, Art. “Sunday.”
From Sabbath to Sunday- Episcopalian
“We have made the change from the seventh day to the first day, from Saturday to Sunday, on the authority of the one holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church of Christ.” Bishop Symour, Why We keep Sunday.
“The Bible commandment says on the seventh-day thou shalt rest. That is Saturday. Nowhere in the Bible is it laid down that worship should be done on Sunday.” Phillip Carrington, quoted in Toronto Daily Star, Oct 26, 1949 [Carrington (1892-), Anglican archbishop of Quebec, spoke the above in a message on this subject delivered to a packed assembly of clergymen. It was widely reported at the time in the news media].
“The Bible commandment says on the seventh day thou shalt rest. That is Saturday. Nowhere in the Bible is it laid down that worship should be done on Sunday.” Philip Carrington, Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 26, 1949.
“Where are we told in Scripture that we are to keep the first day at all? We are commanded to keep the seventh; but we are nowhere commanded to keep the first day…… The reason why we keep the first day of the week holy instead of the seventh is for the same reason that we observe many other things, not because the Bible, but because the church has enjoined it.” Isaac Williams, D. D., Plain Sermons on the Catechism, Vol. 1, pp. 334-336.
“Sunday (Dies Solis, of the Roman calendar, ‘day of the sun,’ because dedicated to the sun), the first day of the week, was adopted by the early Christians as a day of worship. The ‘sun’ of Latin adoration they interpreted as the ‘Sun of Righteousness.. No regulations for its observance are laid down in the New Testament, nor, indeed, is its observance even enjoined.” Schaff Herzog, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1891 Edition, Vol.4, art: ‘Sunday’
“The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always only a human ordinance, and it was far from the intentions of the apostles to establish a divine command in this respect, far from them and from the early apostolic church to transfer the laws of the Sabbath to Sunday.” Neander, History of the Christian Religion and Church, p.186
“The day is now changed from the seventh to the first day … but as we meet with no Scriptural direction for the change, we may conclude it was done by the authority of the church.” ‘Explanation of Catechism’
From Sabbath to Sunday- Jehovah’s Witnesses
“Therefore God gave his law through Moses to the Israelites and which applies to all who want to do right, and the first in order and first in importance of his commandments or fundamental law is this, to wit.’ Exodus 20:1-6,”..”which is the first part of the Ten Commandment law…’The law of God never changes, because God never changes. (Malachi 3:6). His law points out the way to everlasting life. No creature will ever be given life everlasting who willfully, that is, intentionally, violates God’s law….For a man to violate the fundamental law of God means that that man puts himself on the side of the devil, who therefore leads him to destruction.” Enemies, Watchtower publications, 1937, pg. 94.
