The Festival of Sunday Not of Divine Origin.
By John Nevins Andrews
THE Bible speaks of the sanctification of the seventh day, but it never speaks of the sanctification of the first day. Gen. 2:2, 3. The Bible commands men to observe the seventh day, but it does not command them to observe the first day. Ex. 20:8–11. There is no passage in the Bible which speaks of the change of the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first day. There is only one passage in the Bible which speaks of a religious assembly on the first day of the week, and this was in the night time. Acts 20:7–11. It is not said that the disciples were accustomed to meet on the first day. We have therefore no reason to suppose that it was an apostolic custom to celebrate the first day as a sacred day. How then has the day arisen to its present eminence and power? Not by divine authority certainly. Nor did it arise by a few efforts, or within a brief period, but it required a long succession of favoring events, and the period of many centuries in order that it should become what we now see it to be. The case of the festival of Sunday may be well illustrated by that of the pope. The sovereign pontiff and the festival of Sunday each arose from an obscure and feeble beginning, and each gained power and influence by slow and almost unnoticed advancement. We have shown that there is no divine authority for the first day of the week. It is not difficult to show that Christ did not ordain Peter to be sovereign pontiff, and that the apostles never recognized Peter as filling such an office. Yet there are many more passages in the New Testament that attach some degree of prominence to Peter than there are which even mention the first day of the week. The existence of the sovereign pontiff with his claim to be infallible, and with his assertion that all the monarchs of the world must submit to his authority, is no proof that Christ ever appointed any man to such an office. Yet the pope asserts that he can trace his predecessors back to the apostle Peter, and this assertion satisfies the multitude that there have always been such priest-kings as the popes of the present century, though this is false. In like manner the general authority possessed at the present day by the festival of Sunday is supposed to prove that the day must have been appointed by Christ, and must have come down to us from the apostles. Of course, as the New Testament contains no such appointment, it is necessary to rest the authority of the day upon tradition, as the faithful Roman Catholic uses tradition to uphold the power of the pope. It is an evil omen with respect to any institution to find that it has been built up by fraud. It shows that it was not ordained of God, but that it comes from men; and it shows also that the men from whom it comes did not fear God. In the ninth century there appeared what were called the Decretals of Isidore, which were a collection of pretended decrees of the early bishops of Rome, showing that they claimed and exercised absolute authority over all men. Every word of this was false, but in the dense darkness of the ninth and tenth centuries the people believed these falsehoods and yielded to the usurpation of the popes. The fraudulent character of these decretals is now acknowledged by the most learned Roman Catholics, but the authority of the pope which they built up has never been surrendered. There is no authentic mention of the first day of the week in the history of the church before the time of Justin Martyr, who wrote at Rome A. D. 140. But if the first day is to be traced back to the apostles by tradition, there must be found or created some earlier witnesses who mention the day. So we are told that Barnabas, who was the companion of St. Paul, bears testimony to the sacredness of the first day, and that his words must be as good as those of St. Paul. Thus in the epistle which bears the name of Barnabas it is said: “We observe the eighth day with gladness in which Jesus arose from the dead.” This is quoted in triumph as positive proof of the sacredness of the day, and of the fact that the tradition in its behalf ascends to the apostles. But this epistle, like the forged Decretals of Isidore, contains in itself the evidence that it is a wicked fraud. Thus in speaking of the hyena this epistle says: “That creature every year changes its kind, and is sometimes male and sometimes female!” And so Eusebius, the earliest of church historians, and Mosheim, and Neander, the most distinguished of German church historians, unite in the testimony that this epistle was never written by Barnabas. The first thing then in the tradition which supports Sunday is a fraud. The letter of Pliny, the Roman Governor of Bythinia, written about A. D. 104, is often quoted as saying that the Christians of that country were “accustomed to meet on the first day of the week.” The letter of Pliny is used as the second witness in behalf of the Sunday festival. But this use of the letter of Pliny is a direct fraud, for he simply says that the Christians met on a “stated day.” Böhmer, a learned German writer, contends that this “stated day” must have been the seventh day. This is every way probable, for there is no ancient writer before the middle of the second century who speaks of religious assemblies on the first day of the week, or who even mentions the day. The third traditional witness for first-day sacredness is Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, about the commencement of the second century. But it is a remarkable fact that of the fifteen epistles ascribed to Ignatius, twelve are by the almost unanimous consent of scholars pronounced forgeries. The three that are supposed to be genuine say not one word concerning the first day. But one of the twelve spurious epistles, viz., the Epistle to the Magnesians, is by a false translation made to support the sacredness of the first day. The epistle speaks of living according to the Lord’s life, katà kuriakàn zôôa zôntes, and this is translated living in the observance of the Lord’s day. But the epistle uses not the word hemeran, day, but the word zoen, life. Thus the third traditional witness for the first day is nothing but the false translation of a fraudulent epistle. Modern historians assert that the Christians of the first century were unanimous in observing the first day of the week. But the only documents which purport to have been written prior to A. D. 140, which can be brought forward to prove the observance of the day, are the three which we have cited, and we have shown that each of these is used by fraud.