A Subterfuge by Raymond F. Cottrell

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 30, 1879

A Subterfuge.

By Raymond F. Cottrell

It is wonderful how professedly learned and pious men will resort to the most flimsy and transparent subterfuges in the support of traditional errors, and to evade the force of the most obvious truth.

Not very long since, a man of learning, it would seem, and a teacher of the people, having seen it asserted in one of our publications that the first day of the week is nowhere called the Sabbath in the New Testament, felt it his duty or privilege to deny the assertion, and to undertake to prove that the first day is called the Sabbath in Matt. 28:1, which says, "In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week."

It is true that the Greek word for Sabbath is in the phrase translated "the first day of the week," but it is used with a numeral signifying the first, and all well-informed persons know that the term Sabbath was used to signify the whole week. The week being bounded by the Sabbath, the intervening days were called the first of the Sabbath, the second of the Sabbath, and so on till they came to the seventh day which was simply called the Sabbath. If our translators were wrong—if they ought to have said, Sabbath, instead of first day, how does our friend know so positively that the term is applied to the first day of the week? If his claim is true, that it is called the Sabbath, then it is not called the first day of the week. He may say, "It was the next day following the Sabbath." Well, that day was always the first day of the week, and therefore our translators were right. According to the special translators of our times, the self-righteous Pharisee said, "I fast twice in the Sabbath." Luke 18:12. If that Sabbath was a single day, he must have taken one meal in the course of the day, if not two.

R. F. COTTRELL.