THE EARLY CHRISTIAN SABBATH - Friends of the Sabbath Australia

The Early Christian Sabbath
us to be neither good scholarship nor good Biblical exegesis. Yet there have been
scholars who have attempted this very thing. To us this is an unworthy procedure.
While we are speaking of the successors to the apostles, let us point this out. A
thorough search of the writings of all Christians prior to AD 300 reveals a striking fact:
In no case do these Christian writers-all of them, as it happens, Sunday keepers-use any
of the New Testament texts which we have just considered, as authority for Sunday
keeping. They recognize that Jesus rose on the first day of the week. They frankly say
that they are keeping
Sunday because He rose then. They use the texts from the Gospels which show
that He did rise on the first day of the week; but in no case do they claim that Jesus ever
authorized the keeping of Sunday, nor that the Apostles did so. The texts in John
20:19,26; Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2; and Revelation 1:10, which are nowadays
quoted so emphatically as authorizing Sunday keeping, are never used by the writers of
the Christian church before A. D. 300 to establish authority for the Sunday observance
which they themselves had already come to practice. They frankly say that it was
something that had grown up in the church by tradition. In short, the keeping of Sunday
is entirely a matter of custom and has absolutely no basis in Scripture.
5. The Early “Lord's Day”
IT has frequently been said that there is an unbroken chain of references in the Fathers
showing the early observance of Sunday, and connecting Revelation 1:10 with the
Sunday “Lord's day” references Of AD 200 and later. We shall now briefly examine
every reference in the Fathers between John the revelator and Clement of Alexandria,
who died about AD 200, which might in any way be supposed to refer to Sunday or its
observance. These references will be considered in an order as nearly chronological as
the dating of obscure sources like these permits.
The first early reference put forth by Sunday keepers is a statement by Pliny the
Younger, a pagan Roman governor, in a letter to his emperor, Trajan, to be dated about A
D 110- 112. The ninety-sixth letter in Pliny's tenth book of Letters states that the
Christians he was persecuting met for the worship of Christ early in the morning of a
“stated” or “fixed” day. See The Loeb Classical Library, Pliny, volume 2, Pages 402,403.
Pliny gives no hint as to which day of the week he understands this to be, probably
because there was as yet in his day no official system of weeks of days among the
Romans. The identification of this “stated day' can therefore be made only from reliable
Christian documents of about this same time. The only Christian materials we have to use
for thi s purpose, extant at this date, are the books of the New Testament. It has been
demonstrated beyond question in chapters two and three that the only day of worship
known to New Testament Christians is the seventh-day Sabbath of the Bible, observed by
Christ, the disciples, and the apostle Paul. The “stated” day of Pliny is therefore the
seventh-day Sabbath.
The second earliest reference used to bolster Sunday observance is one that is
quoted so frequently that every student of the question is under ethical compulsion to
examine it thoroughly and without bias. The statement referred to is in a letter by a man
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