Why is the Christian Sabbath on Sunday???

When I was a child, I'd ask this in church. I never would get a straight answer.

Sorry. Couldn't help it. Sometimes I crack me up.

In fact, early Christians wanted to distance themselves from the Judaism they sprang from, so they bagan meeting on the first day of the week instead of the last. It's recounted in the Book of Acts.

Seriously: it was Emperor Constantine's idea back in the Roman Empire, to make it the same day as the "day of the Sun".

Constantine is long gone, but people still obey his edict.

on the other five days.

That's one explanation. The other is, to piss off people who like to sleep late once or twice a week.

and God rested on the seventh. How the Church figured out it was a Monday beats me. Besides it's very strange that in the US the week starts on Sundays according calendars. In Europe it always starts on Mondays.

Actually, the first moment of Creation would have been sunset on Saturday, as the liturgical day in Judaism goes from sunset to sunset.

And seriously, even Christians admit that Sunday is the first day of the week. That is the whole point of the "seventh day" movement, to keep the day of worship on the Sabbath.

That never worked for Saturday, so they had to move it

I once had a pledge check returned. Very embarrassing.

...to make Sunday the day of worship in order to bring in Christians who had their own worship day(Fri sundown to Sat sundown). It was purely a case of "if you can't beat them, join them".

I seem to recall from something I heard 40 years ago that Sunday was selected because it was the day that Jesus was said to have risen from the grave: Good Friday, Easter Sunday. This may be a Catholic take on it. Not sure.

Sunday is traditionally the first day of the week, between Saturday and Monday, and the second day of the weekend in some cultures. It is considered a holiday in lands of Christian tradition, the day Christians most commonly attend Church (Saturday is the other day that some consider to be the Sabbath).

In India, Sunday is Ravivar. It is based on Ravi - Vedic God of Sun.

In the Gregorian calendar, no century can start on a Sunday. In the Hebrew calendar, no year can start on a Sunday. Any month beginning on a Sunday will contain a Friday the 13th.

The name Sunday

In ancient Jewish tradition Saturday is the sabbath. Christians in Seventh-day Adventist, 7th day Church of God, and Seventh Day Baptist churches (among others), and many Messianic Jews believe that Saturday remains the Sabbath (Hebrews 4;9).

Many languages lack separate words for "Saturday" and "sabbath". Eastern Orthodox churches distinguish between the sabbath (Saturday) and what they call the Lord's Day (Sunday). Roman Catholics put so little emphasis on that distinction that many among them follow — at least in colloquial language — the Protestant practice of calling Sunday the sabbath, though this is not a universal Protestant practice. Quakers traditionally refer to Sunday as "First Day" eschewing the pagan origin of the name.

The first historical reference to "the day called Sun" by any involved with Christianity was by Justin Martyr around 150 A.D. However, the Christians in Smyrna, still observed the seventh day Sabbath later than that as can be found in the letter known as the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

Sunday was declared the day of worship by the Council of Nicea circa 325 A.D. Groups that accepted the authority of that Council have kept Sunday ever since.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday

So all those Jesus lovin' church goin' Christian are paying homage to Constitine equally as they are to Christ.

Pardon me but all worship does on Sunday is empower further ego inflation.

Saturn's day is much humbler and reverant to both a higher power and the laws of physical reality .

Flame away.

observances on the "first day of the week" and Jesus' disappearance from the tomb was first noted on that day. After Jesus' final departure from his followers, they first went public on Pentecost-- a Sunday that occurs 50 days following Passover. (Note that the "day" began in the evening rather than at midnight.) According to the gospels, Jesus himself was not a keen observer of the Sabbath in the tradition of many of his Jewish contemporaries. He once reputedly stated that the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27) as justification for his followers' and his own activities on the "day of rest.". The Christians' observance of the first day of the week seems to have served to distinguish them from the Judaism out of which their movement sprang. The Christian day did not seem to have the elaborate prohibitions on activity that the Jewish Sabbath had. Similarly Christians abandoned other strict observances common to Judaism such as dietary restrictions and male circumcision.

Most people in the Roman Empire had strong cultural religious attachments to Sunday, at the time, because they worshipped the Sun God or some other Pagan silliness. Basically, Christianity was developed to “convert” ( read culturally destroy) for the Roman Empire. They simply replaced the area’s religious belief systems with “Christian” Characters...It was very insidious and less expensive than all out military action and occupation etc…

remove any Jewish influence from the nascent religion.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/sabbath.htm


The Church Council of Laodicea circa 364 CE ordered that religious observances were to be conducted on Sunday, not Saturday. Sunday became the new Sabbath. They ruled: "Christians shall not Judaize and be idle on Saturday, but shall work on that day." There are many indicators in the historical record that some Christians ignored the Church's ruling. Sabbath observance was noted in Wales as late as 1115 CE. Francis Xavier was concerned about Sabbath worship in Goa, India in 1560 CE; he called for the Inquisition to set up an office there to stamp out what he called "Jewish wickedness". A Catholic Provincial Council suppressed the practice in Norway in 1435 CE.

Seventh Day Adventists have their services on Saturday.

I was told as a child that the reason most Christian churches have a Sunday sabboth is that it was the day when Jesus rose from the dead.

New Testsament. Keep that in mind. Is there a biblical source indicating which day?

:shrug:

I've heard three reasons, all of which have strong historical evidence.

1) The earliest Christians were still identified as Jews. As Jews, they kept the Sabbath. The dinner that traditionally ended the Sabbath (still observed by Jews as the havdalah), ie Saturday night, was when these Christians got together to read letters being circulated from preachers and share the agape, a meal that commemorated the Last Supper.

2) As Christianity came to be dominated by gentiles who did not observe the Sabbath, the weekly observance was moved to the following day, early in the morning, before working hours (most Christians were from the lower and slave classes, and were expected to put in a full day of work.) Because time was limited, the full meal was reduced to a token commemoration and the service came to be dominated by the readings. The rationale for this change was a celebration of Jesus' resurrection.

3) By the 4th century, the practice of Sunday morning worship had become almost universal throughout Christendom, although there were still factions pushing for observance of the Sabbath. This was one of the controversies that Constantine wanted settled once and for all when he summoned bishops to Nicaea in 325. The theological compromise was that the liturgical day would run from sunset to sunset, as in Judaism, but that the principle day of Christian worship would be Sunday, the first day of the week, and not Saturday, the seventh. After the Council of Nicaea, Constantine issued an edict dedicating this same day as the Romans figured days (sunrise to sunrise) to Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) and making Sunday a day of general rest from work for both Christian and Pagan.

works, if they're still in print; your local Seventh Day Adventist bookstore may stock them, I haven't seen a copy for 20 years or more. http://www.biblicalperspectives.com/ is his website, but I can't say I've looked at anything else than "From Sabbath to Sunday"; the other things look preachy, FStS was his dissertation, IIRC, and really took a hard look at the extant original sources.

He was SDA, but his research seemed sound. He is relatively condemnation free in how he uses his sources and the conclusions he came to. He may bore you to tears, but that's the risk you take in looking at history and not being content with generalizations and post-hoc rationalizations.

The previous post sums much of it up. Note that the various decrees pushing Sunday wouldn't have been necessary had all of the church been Sunday-observing. It's like grammar texts that go to great pains telling you what *not* to say--if people didn't actually talk that way, the grammars wouldn't mention it, and the more they protest, the more common you know it is.

The Sunday decrees are in keeping with a bunch of other decrees that are generally overlooked as irrelevant, but all of which had the same purpose: reinforce the supremacy of Rome and western Xianity, decrease the influence of Judaism and the Biblical texts on doctrine, and thereby reinforce the importance of church authority. Note that the traditions that were banned were precisely those held most intensely where the apostles were most active, and which had the largest claim to continuing the apostolic traditions. See, for another example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartodeciman. Denigrating the Jews was a nice touch, since they could be seen as the 'enemy' ... think a sort of ecclesiastical populism, one that Islam picked up.

All kinds of justifications were given for it--I've run into people who believed that somehow the Jews altered the day counting, and Sunday was 'original' sabbath; but make no mistakes, Sunday was a sabbath of sorts--no work, long church services, and the like. Reducing worship to 25 minutes between a big breakfast and some recreation was a later innovation. Sunday was ordained to be a day of celebration of God and of worship, with Saturday as a day of mourning. The crucifixion narrative was a handy adjunct to it, since according to the dominant version Jesus was killed on Friday, and everybody mourned on Saturday. Moreover, the church in Rome said that Peter was given authority by Jesus, and the popes had Peter's authority: if Jesus as "Lord of the Sabbath", then Peter and his heirs could alter the Sabbath. A number of later scholars have justified this as Christianity needing to break free from Jewish tradition, something apparently Jesus and the apostles couldn't manage to do.

My religious tradition was with an offshoot of an offshoot of one of the confessions of the Seventh Day Church of God.

"Constantine dictated it, and Christians continue to unknowingly worship him because of it! HA HA HA! Christians are so fucking stupid!" or other bullshit that has been spewed here.

No, it was simply that the Christian movement was worshiping at Synagogie on Saturdays, and then started adding Sunday worship because it was the day of resurrection. As the movement was slowly pushed out of the synagogues, Christians slowly stopped the Saturday worship, and ended up with just Sundays.

Sorry folks, there is no gigantic conspiracy of the Roman Empire, or a Pope, or any other body, with which to laugh at the stupid Christians.