In a book of lectures by Dr. French E. Oliver there is this statement: “It is impossible for me to understand how any person who knows anything about the Greek language should translate ‘sabbaton’ first day of the week. It in no wise indicates first day of the week. . . . The proper rendering of Matt. 28:1, as the Greek word for the Sabbath is plural and not singular, would read substantially as follows: ‘In the end of the Sabbath, fulfilling the prophecy of Hosea 2:11, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the sabbaths, came Mary Magdalena and the other Mary to see the sepulcher.’” Is this correct?
INQUIRER. The gentleman has taken upon himself a tremendous task in placing his little stock of Greek knowledge against all the scholarship of the world, practically. It ought to be sufficient answer to every reasonable mind to simply take the standard versions of the Bible. The translations of these versions were made by men who observed the first day of the week,—men who would have been only too glad to find something more definite to prove the sacredness of the first day than anything which they possess; but men who, the observers of the first day of the week, felt that in their scholarship they must be true to the very best that they had, and consequently they have rendered as they have, practically uniformly. The Douay Version, or Roman Catholic translation, the Common, or so-called King James Version, the English Revised Version, the American Standard Revised Version, all are agreed; and the names of preeminent scholars connected with these assure us that the translation is correct. Then, too, we have Hinds’s interlinear Greek translation word for word, which renders the same; the Syriac Testament (Murdock’s translation), the same. Rotherham’s emphatic translation renders, “And late in the week when it was on the point of dawning into the first of the week,” the term “sabbath” there being used for the week, a use which it had in those times, as shown by Luke 18:12, where the old Pharisee in the pride of his heart boasted that he fasted twice in the week. The word there is “sabbaton.” It would be nonsense for a man to boast of fasting twice in the Sabbath. He had his weekly fasts, and of this he boasted. For further information upon this, showing the correct translation from the very best authorities, and the utter baselessness of the statement made by the gentleman above quoted, see Bible Students’ Library, No. 154, entitled “The Sabbath in the Greek.” By mail one cent.