“SUNDAY IS THE ONLY CHRISTIAN SABBATH THE NEW TESTAMENT RECOGNIZES.”
By A. H. Lewis
Such is the title of the second part of the “Wonderful Discovery” on the Sabbath question, which Rev. S. W. Gamble has announced in the Chicago Tribune, and in the Christian Endeavorer of that city. This second paper opens as follows:— By way of introduction, and in order to connect this paper correctly with the article in the January issue of the Christian Endeavorer, it may be well to state that there are three views of the creation Sabbath:— - That there was no Sabbath in the time between the creation and the Exodus.
- That the creation Sabbath occurred on Saturday and remained on Saturday until after the resurrection.
- That the creation Sabbath was on Sunday—was lost—and Saturday established at the Exodus, for the Jews only. And that Sunday was reinstated at the resurrection of Christ.
Great scholars have spent much time and research upon these conflicting views, and volume after volume has been written in their support. I will simply state that, in my opinion, there was a Sabbath instituted at the end of the creation week, which was observed by the patriarchs. And I incline to the opinion that it was on Sunday. Accept for the sake of the argument this opinion of Mr. Gamble, as the best that learned men have formulated, and analyze it a little. If Sunday was the original Sabbath there was an original week which was measured by Sunday. This definite and regular week thus measured, ran on in good order from the time of “Creation” to the time of the Exodus from Egypt. Then, all at once and with no record or hint in the Bible or in any other history and in face of fully recorded facts in Biblical and non-Biblical history, this orderly primeval week disappears by the magic of Mr. Gamble’s discovery, and the never-resting, sliding-scale week which he calls “Jewish,” comes on the scene and continues a hop-skip-and-jump existence through the centuries down to the time of Christ. By that time this cog-slipping machinery of Mr. Gamble’s week had become so worn and demoralized that no sort of dependence could be put upon it. Like the logic of this new discovery, it began in an undefined somewhere, and ended so many times in an undiscovered nowhere, that confusion became worse confounded. Hence the following picture which Mr. Gamble gives:— In the “discovery” announced in the January issue I stated that the Sabbath in the fourth commandment, written with the finger of God in the two tables of stone and recorded in Deuteronomy 5, and explained in Leviticus 23, required the observance to fall on fixed dates, which would change the day of the week upon which it fell as many times as there were years in the period during which it was kept, showing that while Christ kept the true Sabbath of the law the New Testament records the word “Sabbath” twenty-eight times in the Gospels when the day was not on Saturday, but more probably on Thursday. Once the word “Sabbath” is used when the day was Friday, and a number of times on Saturday, that is, the Sabbath mentioned during the last year of his public teaching. This shows that no one, either Jew or Christian, now keeps the Sabbath in the manner in which Christ kept it. This is a sad state for the machinery of this new discovery to get into. Up to the last year of the earth-life of Christ, the week had a regular existence, for at least one year at a time. But in order to make the jumble confused enough for a new leap in the dark which the average reader will not so clearly detect, our discoverer announces that the Sabbath falls into worse disorder than ever during this last year. Sometimes it was on “Thursday,” sometimes on “Friday,” “and a number of times on Saturday.” One must wonder whether the weeks of this last year were of equal length, or whether the Sabbath had become so loosened from the week that it fell about in a manner thus promiscuous. Note, however, that even Mr. Gamble acknowledges that it fell “a number of times on Saturday,” indicating that the habit of the centuries was still strong. The crowning wonder of this discovery comes now, in the assertion that somehow the death of Christ straightened out the disorder so that the week settled down to regular business again with Sunday and “Saturday” in the old and regular order. Of course the thoughtful student of the Bible and of history will raise the question why there is no record of all this, and why Christ, or the Holy Spirit, or the apostles did not discover what Mr. Gamble declares is so plain; and it231would not be strange if some one should inquire why the Bible was not written as our discoverer thinks it ought to have been. But the purpose which all this array of new discoveries seeks would be destroyed by allowing the week to go on with the first and last days in the same relation as now, unless something were done to make Sunday the “Sabbath.” What Mr. Gamble attempts in this direction is a full confession that all his efforts to destroy the week have failed. In spite of all the confusion he has tried to create, the week will not actually yield to his demands, and some other attempt must be made to evade the truth which can not be smothered by this pretended confusion. This new and final effort to remove the Sabbath is announced in the following modest manner:— Wrong Translation in Matthew.
We now call attention to a fact overlooked by our English revisers and the translators of our Authorized Version—i. e., each one of the Gospels speaks of the resurrection day as the “Sabbath.” They overlooked another fact—i. e., that once in every year after the Exodus there were two Sabbaths coming together. This oversight was probably the greatest reason for not translating Matt. 28:1, in harmony with the Greek original. The passage reads, or should read, “In the end of the Sabbaths, as it began to dawn toward one of the Sabbaths.” Luther so rendered it. See also Beardsley on the Sabbath, Robert Young, G. W. Hughey, and other good Greek scholars, who thus render it and the parallel passages. The Greek word for “week” does not occur in the Greek New Testament anywhere. The Greek word for “day” does not occur in any passage in which the English renders the expression “day of the week.” For these and other sufficient reasons it is safe to say that the expression “the first day of the week,” can not be found in the Greek Testament, and therefore does not belong in the English translation of it. The resurrection day is known in the Gospels by no name but the “Sabbath.” Then why not use the name Inspiration gives us? But does not John call it “the Lord’s day” in Rev. 1:10?—Yes. But the Gospel of John was written late, or, according to Young and others, his Gospel was the last one of the New Testament writings. He twice calls the Sunday on which Christ arose “Sabbath.” Luke in the Acts, and Paul in a letter, call it “Sabbath.” It is called “Sabbath” eight times in the New Testament, and “the Lord’s day” once, and is known by no other names in the New Testament. Hence it should be called by one or the other of those names, and never called “the first day of the week.” As Mr. Gamble confesses, this bold arraignment of the translators of our English Bible is not original with him. A few others, whose knowledge of Greek seems to consist in obtaining the superficial definition of words from the lexicon without entering into the deeper knowledge of the genius of the language, or the nature of the passages translated, have attempted this method of escaping from the facts in the case. Every Greek scholar will smile at the assurance, born of imperfect knowledge, which Mr. Gamble’s announcement of the ignorance of the translators and revisers of the New Testament evinces. The English reader can see the fallacy of this part of the new discovery by noting the following facts:— The Hebrews named no day of the week except the Sabbath; this was both named and numbered. It was so prominent a feature of the week that it was made the starting point from which the other days were numbered. Out of this conception grew the idioms which numbered each day as “first,” “second,” “third,” etc., from the Sabbath and in its progress toward the next Sabbath. This conception carried the idea of ownership of the days by the Sabbaths between which they came and went. This thought and the idiomatic expression growing from it, is yet found in Hebrew references to the days of the week. To aid Mr. Gamble in future discoveries we refer him to the Hebrew prayer-book, in which the order of the lessons is indicated as we have explained. There he will find the Hebrew: Hayom yom rishon bashabbath. (“This day is” one towards, or of, the Sabbath-day) translated in the heading of the lesson so described: “Psalm for the first day of the week.” Examples may be found on page eighty of the prayer-book by Singer, London, and published for use in the United States under the sanction of the late Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler. The Greek writers of the New Testament followed the idea and the idiom of the Hebrew as nearly as the language would permit. Adopting the Greek “genitive” (possessive) construction, they wrote: Mia toon Sabbatoon, which our (careless and ignorant translators, according to Mr. Gamble) render in the exactly equivalent English, “First day of the week.” Mr. Gamble’s discovery is the product of ignorance and not of even ordinary scholarship. When this wonderful discovery is summed up it amounts to this. Annoyed by the persistency and clearness with which the Sabbath appears and endures in all history, Biblical and ecclesiastical, Mr. Gamble has prepared this medley of contradictions, illogicalness and ignorance, in hope of obscuring the simple fact that the seventh and not the first day of the week is the Sabbath. He sees, as all the world does, that until the Sabbath and the week, which are inseparable, are gotten out of the way there can be no ground for Sunday. The lately established Christian Endeavour, of Chicago, having noted the failure of the efforts to sustain Sunday on theories advanced hitherto, has hailed Mr. Gamble and his discovery as the era-making discoverer of the Sunday Sabbath, and the providential defender of Sunday along this new line. The futility of this discovery, and the prominence of its failure at birth, is seen in the fact that altho it has been before the public for some weeks, not a single religious or theological journal of note or scholarship has noticed it, much less indorsed it. Similar discoveries come and go, but the Bible, the week, and the Sabbath of Jehovah hold the even tenor of their way, waiting the time when repeated and destructive failures, heaped on the ruins of each other, will at last compel the Christian world to return to the Sabbath and follow the teachings and example of Christ and the New Testament church by keeping it holy.—A. H. Lewis, D.D., in Sabbath Recorder.