Sabbath in Christianity
Many Christians observe a weekly day set apart for rest and worship called a Sabbath in obedience to Gods commandment to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, usually on Sunday, the Lord's Day.
Early Christians, at first mainly Jewish, observed the seventh-day (Saturday) Sabbath with prayer and rest. At the beginning of the second century the Church Father Ignatius of Antioch approved non-observance of the Sabbath.[1] The now majority practice of Christians is to observe Sunday, called the Lord's Day, rather than the Jewish seventh-day Sabbath as a day of rest and worship.[1]
Possibly because of a movement initiated in the early 14th century by Ewostatewos, which gained approval under Emperor Zara Yaqob, Ethiopian Christians observe a two-day Sabbath covering both Saturday and Sunday.[2][3]
In line with ideas of the 16th and 17th-century Puritans, the Presbyterian and Congregationalist, as well as Methodist and Baptist Churches, enshrined first-day (Sunday) Sabbatarian views in their confessions of faith, observing the Lord's Day as the Christian Sabbath.[4] While practices differ among Christian denominations, common First-day Sabbatarian (Sunday Sabbatarian) practices include attending morning and evening church services on Sundays, receiving catechesis in Sunday School on the Lord's Day, taking the Lord's Day off from servile labour, not eating at restaurants on Sundays, not Sunday shopping, not using public transportation on the Lord's Day, as well as not participating in sporting events that are held on Sundays; Christians who are Sunday Sabbatarians often engage in works of mercy on the Lord's Day, such as evangelism, as well as visiting prisoners at jails and the sick at hospitals and nursing homes.[5][6][7][8]
Beginning about the 17th century, a few groups of Restorationist Christians, mostly Seventh-day Sabbatarians, formed communities that practiced the keeping of the Sabbath on Saturdays.
History[edit]
Sabbath timing[edit]
The Hebrew Shabbat, the seventh day of the week, is "Saturday" but in the Hebrew calendar a new day begins at sunset (or, by custom, about 20 minutes earlier) and not at midnight. The Shabbat therefore coincides with what is now commonly identified as Friday sunset to Saturday night when three stars are first visible in the night sky. The Sabbath continued to be observed on the seventh day in the early Christian church.[note 1] To this day, the liturgical day continues to be observed in line with the Hebrew reckoning in the church calendars in Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy.[9] In the Latin Church, "the liturgical day runs from midnight to midnight. However, the celebration of Sundays and of Solemnities begins already on the evening of the previous day".[10]
In non-liturgical matters, the canon law of the Latin Church defines a day as beginning at midnight.[11]
Early Christianity[edit]
Jewish Christians continued to observe Shabbat but met together at the end of the day, on a Saturday evening. In the gospels, the women are described as coming to the empty tomb Greek: εις μια των σαββατων, lit. 'toward the first [day] of the Sabbath',[12] although it is often translated "on the first day of the week". This is made clear in Acts 20:7 when Paul continued his message "until midnight" and a young man went to sleep and fell out of the window. Christians celebrate on Sunday because it is the day on which Jesus had risen from the dead and on which the Holy Spirit had come to the apostles.[13][14] Although Christians meeting for worship on the first day of the week (Sunday for Gentiles) dates back to Acts and is historically mentioned around 115 AD, Constantine's edict was the start of many more Christians observing only Sunday and not the Sabbath.[13] Patristic writings attest that by the second century, it had become commonplace to celebrate the Eucharist in a corporate day of worship on the first day.[15] A Church Father, Eusebius, who became the bishop of Caesarea Maritima about AD 314, stated that for Christians, "the sabbath had been transferred to Sunday".[16]
According to Socrates of Constantinople and Sozomen, most of the early Church (excluding Rome and Alexandria) observed the seventh day Sabbath in Easter.[17][18]
Corporate worship[edit]
While the Lord's Day observance of the Eucharist was established separately from the Jewish Shabbat, the centrality of the Eucharist itself made it the commonest early observance whenever Christians gathered for worship. In many places and times as late as the 4th century, they did continue to gather weekly on the Sabbath, often in addition to the Lord's Day, celebrating the Eucharist on both days.[19][20][21] No disapproval of Sabbath observance of the Christian festival was expressed at the early church councils that dealt with Judaizing. The Council of Laodicea (363-364), for example, mandated only that Sabbath Eucharists must be observed in the same manner as those on the first day.[21] Neander has suggested that Sabbath Eucharists in many places were kept "as a feast in commemoration of the Creation."[21]
The issues about Hebrew practices that continued into the 2nd century tended to relate mostly to the Sabbath. Justin Martyr, who attended worship on the first day,[22] wrote about the cessation of Hebrew Sabbath observance and stated that the Sabbath was enjoined as a temporary sign to Israel to teach it of human sinfulness,[23][24] no longer needed after Christ came without sin.[25] He rejected the need to keep a literal seventh-day Sabbath, arguing instead that "the new law requires you to keep the sabbath constantly."[26] However, Justin Martyr believe the Sabbath has only attributed to Moses and the Israelites. According to J.N Andrews, a historian, and theologian, he mentions, "In his (Justin) estimation, the Sabbath was a Jewish institution, absolutely unknown to good men before the time of Moses, and of no authority whatever since the death of Christ." He identifies this through Justin's writings: "Do you see that the elements are not idle, and keep no Sabbaths? Remain as you were born. For if there was no need of circumcision before Abraham, or of the observance of Sabbaths, of feasts and sacrifices, before Moses; no more need of them is there now, after that, according to the will of God, Jesus Christ the Son of God has been born without sin, of a virgin sprung from the stock of Abraham."[27] With more clarification, Andrews also states: "Not only does he (Justin) declare that the Jews were commanded to keep the sabbath because of their wickedness, but in chapter nineteen he denies that any Sabbath existed before Moses. Thus, after naming Adam, Abel, Enoch, Lot, and Melchizedek, he says: "Moreover, all those righteous men already mentioned, though they kept no Sabbaths were pleasing to God." But though he thus denies the Sabbatic institution before the time of Moses he presently makes this statement concerning the Jews: “And you were commanded to keep Sabbaths, that you might retain the memorial of God. For his word makes this announcement, saying. ‘That ye may know that I am God who redeemed you.’”[Eze.20:12.].[28][29] On these statements from Justin Martyr, J.N Andrews concludes "The Sabbath is indeed the memorial of the God that made the heavens and the earth. And what an absurdity to deny that that memorial was set up when the creative work was done, and to affirm that twenty-five hundred years intervened between the work and the memorial!"[30][31]
Day of rest[edit]
A common theme in criticism Hebrew Shabbat rest was idleness, found not to be in the Christian spirit of rest. Irenaeus (late 2nd century), also citing continuous Sabbath observance, wrote that the Christian "will not be commanded to leave idle one day of rest, who is constantly keeping sabbath",[32] and Tertullian (early 3rd century) argued "that we still more ought to observe a sabbath from all servile work always, and not only every seventh-day, but through all time".[33] This early metaphorical interpretation of Sabbath applied it to the entire Christian life.[34]
Ignatius, cautioning against "Judaizing" in the Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians,[35] contrasts the Jewish Shabbat practices with the Christian life which includes the Lord's Day:
Related terms[edit]
By synecdoche the term "Sabbath" in the New Testament may also mean simply a "se'nnight"[122] or seven-day week, namely, the interval between two Sabbaths. Jesus's parable of the Pharisee and the Publican describes the Pharisee as fasting "twice a week" (Greek dis tou sabbatou, literally, "twice of the Sabbath").
Seven annual Biblical festivals, called by the name miqra ("called assembly") in Hebrew and "High Sabbath" in English, serve as supplemental testimonies to Sabbath. These are recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy and do not necessarily occur on the Sabbath. They are observed by Jews and a minority of Christians. Three of them occur in spring: the first and seventh days of Passover, and Pentecost. Four occur in fall, in the seventh month, and are also called Shabbaton: the Christian Feast of Trumpets; Yom Kippur, "Sabbath of Sabbaths"; and the first and eighth days of Tabernacles.
The year of Shmita (Hebrew שמיטה, literally, "release"), also called Sabbatical Year, is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel. During Shmita, the land is to be left to lie fallow. A second aspect of Shmita concerns debts and loans: when the year ends, personal debts are considered nullified and forgiven.
Jewish Shabbat is a weekly day of rest cognate to Christian Sabbath, observed from sundown on Friday until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night; it is also observed by a minority of Christians. Customarily, Shabbat is ushered in by lighting candles shortly before sunset, at halakhically calculated times that change from week to week and from place to place.
The new moon, occurring every 29 or 30 days, is an important separately sanctioned occasion in Judaism and some other faiths. It is not widely regarded as Sabbath, but some Hebrew Roots and Pentecostal churches, such as the native New Israelites of Peru and the Creation Seventh Day Adventist Church, do keep the day of the new moon as Sabbath or rest day, from evening to evening. New-moon services can last all day.
In South Africa, Christian Boers have celebrated December 16, the Day of the Vow (now called the Day of Reconciliation, as annual Sabbath (holy day of thanksgiving) since 1838, commemorating a famous Boer victory over the Zulu Kingdom.
Many early Christian writers from the 2nd century, such as pseudo-Barnabas, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr and Hippolytus of Rome followed rabbinic Judaism (the Mishna) in interpreting Sabbath not as a literal day of rest but as a thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ, which would follow six millennia of world history.[34]
Secular use of "Sabbath" for "rest day", while it usually refers to Sunday, is often stated in North America to refer to different purposes for the rest day than those of Christendom. In McGowan v. Maryland (1961), the Supreme Court of the United States held that contemporary Maryland blue laws (typically, Sunday rest laws) were intended to promote the secular values of "health, safety, recreation, and general well-being" through a common day of rest, and that this day coinciding with majority Christian Sabbath neither reduces its effectiveness for secular purposes nor prevents adherents of other religions from observing their own holy days.