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Sunday Is Not the Sabbath

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Sunday Is Not the Sabbath

The common statement that Christians moved the Sabbath to Sunday is inaccurate in a way that matters.

The first Christians, being Jews, kept the seventh-day Sabbath and additionally gathered on the first day of the week to mark the resurrection. The two were distinct occasions and were for a period both observed. As the church became predominantly gentile, the Sabbath obligation was dropped as part of the wider decision that gentile converts were not bound by the Mosaic law, and Sunday remained as a day of assembly with none of the prohibitions attached to it.

Sunday acquired the legal character of a rest day from the state rather than from theology. Constantine decreed rest on the day of the sun in 321, and the Christian rationale for it followed the law rather than preceding it. Sabbath-style prohibitions were then applied to Sunday piecemeal over the following centuries, reaching their strictest form in Reformed practice, so that the Sunday of Puritan England, Scotland and New England was regulated as tightly as any Jewish Sabbath and enforced by statute.

A minority of Christians never accepted the change. Seventh-day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists keep Saturday on the ground that the fourth commandment was never repealed, and their case is exegetical rather than sentimental.

Islam's Friday is a third arrangement and is not a Sabbath at all. The congregational prayer at midday is obligatory for men, but the Quran directs believers to disperse and return to their business afterwards, and no prohibition on work attaches to the day. Assuming a weekly day of rest is a universal religious form, rather than a specifically Jewish institution that Christianity partly inherited, gets all three cases wrong at once.

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