THE SABBATH FILES
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IS THE BIBLICAL SABBATH (SATURDAY) FOR CHRISTIANS? |
SABBATH QUOTES
A HISTORY OF QUOTES ABOUT THE SABBATH
(note: (++) = Source is from one who does not observe the 7th day Sabbath (Saturday)
"The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants! Nor is it of any account in the estimation of the genuine Protestant how early a doctrine originated, if it is not found in the Bible...Hence if a doctrine be propounded for his acceptance, he asks, Is it to be found in the inspired Word? Was it taught by the Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles? If they knew nothing of it, no matter to him whether it be discovered in the musty folio of some ancient visionary of the third or fourth century, or whether it spring from the fertile brain of some modern visionary of the nineteenth, if it is not found in the Sacred Scriptures, it presents no valid claim to be received as an article of his religious creed..." (History of Romanism, by Dr. John Dowling, thirteenth edition, pp. 67, 68).
John Snyder, in an article in the St. Louis Globe Democrat, of April 3, 1887, said: "Every instructed man knows that the Catholic Church gave to the Christian world the Sunday . . . And when Protestantism threw off the authority of the Catholic Church, it abandoned the only ecclesiastical foundation upon which Sunday can logically rest." (++)
"The Roman Catholic Church, sixteen centuries after the Nicaean Council, still retains the Sabbath of the Decalogue on its calendar, marking Sunday as the Lord's Day and Saturday as the Sabbath" (Sabbath - The Day of Delight, p. 193, by Abraham E. Millgram, The Jewish Publication Society of America, c. 1944)
"It is certain that the ancient Sabbath did remain and was observed... by the Christians of the East Church, above three hundred years after our Saviour's death." ("A Learned Treatise of the Sabbath," p. 77, Prof. Edward Brerewood, Gresham College, London) (++)
"Down even to the fifth century the observance of the Jewish Sabbath was continued in the Christian church." Lyman Coleman, Ancient Christianity Exemplified, p. 527. (++)
"The seventh day of the week has been deposed from its title to obligatory religious observance, and its prerogative has been carried over to the first under no direct precept of Scripture." --William E. Gladstone, in his Later Gleanings, p. 342 [Gladstone (1809-1898) was a leading British statesman, four times prime minister, and a member of Parliament for 62 years]. (++)
"Ques. --Is there any command in the New Testament to change the day of weekly rest from Saturday to Sunday? Ans.--None." --Manual of Christian Doctrine, p. 127. (Protestant Episcopal) (++)
"The taking over of Sunday by the early Christians is, to my mind, an exceedingly important symptom that the early church was directly influenced by a spirit which does not originate in the gospel, nor in the Old Testament, but in a religious system foreign to it." --Dr. H. Gunkel, Zum Religionsgesch. Verstaendnis des NT., p.76. (Lutheran) (++)
"It is true that there is no positive command for infant baptism. Nor is there any for keeping holy the first day of the week. Many believe that Christ changed the Sabbath. But, from His own words, we see that He came for no such purpose. Those who believe that Jesus changed the Sabbath base it only on a supposition."--Amos Binney, Theological compendium, 1902 edition, pp. 180-181, 171 [Binney (1802-1878), (Methodist) (++)
"Sabbath in the Hebrew language signifies rest, and is the seventh day of the week, . . . and it must be confessed that there is no law in the New Testament concerning the first day." --Charles Buck. A Theological Dictionary, art. "Sabbath," p. 403 (Buck (1771-1815) was a British Independent minister and author) (++)
"God instituted the Sabbath at the creation of man, setting apart the seventh day for that purpose, and imposed its observance as a universal and perpetual moral obligation upon the race." --Dr. Archibald Hodge, Tract No. 175 of the Presbyterian Board of Publication, pp. 3-4. (++)
"Take which you will, either the 'fathers' or the moderns, and we shall find no Lord's Day instituted by any apostolic mandate, no sabbath set on foot by them upon the first day of the week" --Dr.Peter Heylyn quoted in History of the Sabbath, Part 2, chapter 1, page 410. (Church of England) (++)
"The earliest recognition of the observance of Sunday as a legal duty is a constitution of Constantine in 321 A.D., enacting that all courts of justice, inhabitants of towns, and workshops were to be at rest on Sunday (venerable day of the sun), with an exception in favor of those engaged in agricultural labor." Encyclopedia Britannica, art. Sunday, ninth edition, 1887. (++)
"The seventh-day Sabbath was... solemnized by Christ, the apostles, and primitive Christians, till the Laodicean Council did, in a manner, quite abolish the observation of it... The Council of Laodicea [364 A.D.]... first settled the observation of the Lord's day." Dissertation on the Lord's Day Sabbath, page 162, 1633. (by Prynne) (++)
"The current notion that Christ and His apostles authoritatively substituted the first day for the seventh, is absolutely without any authority in the New Testament." Dr. Lyman Abbot, in the "Christian Union," June 26, 1890. (American Congregationalist) (++)
"The sacred name of the Seventh day is Sabbath. This fact is too clear to require argument [Exodus 20:10 quoted]... On this point the plain teaching of the Word has been admitted in all ages... Not once did the disciples apply the Sabbath law to the first day of the week, that folly was left for a later age, nor did they pretend that the first day supplanted the seventh." Joseph Judson Taylor, 'The Sabbatic Question," pp. 14-17, 41. (Baptist) (++)
"And where are we told in the Scriptures that we are to keep the first day at all? We are commanded to keep the seventh; but we are nowhere commanded to keep the first day." Isaac Williams, "Plain Sermons on the Catechism," pp. 334, 336. (Anglican) (++)
"There is no word, no hint in the New Testament about abstaining from work on Sunday. The observance of Ash Wednesday, or Lent, stands exactly on the same footing as the observance of Sunday. Into the rest of Sunday no Divine Law enters." Canon Eyton, in "The Ten Commandments." (Presbyterian) (++)
"The day is now changed from the seventh to the first day... but as we meet with no Scriptural direction for the change, we may conclude it was done by the authority of the church." "Explanation of Catechism." (Episcopal) (++)
"For when there could not be produced one solitary place in the Holy Scriptures which testified that either the Lord Himself or the apostles had ordered such a transfer of the Sabbath to Sunday, then it was not easy to answer the question: Who has transferred the Sabbath, and who has had the right to do it?" George Sverdrup, "New Day." (Lutheran Free Church) (++)
"Protestants... accept Sunday rather than Saturday as the day for public worship after the Catholic Church made the change... But the Protestant mind does not seem to realize that In accepting the Bible, in observing the Sunday, they are accepting the authority of the spokesman for the church, the Pope." "Our Sunday Visitor," February 5, 1950. (Catholic) (++)
"Reason and common sense demand the acceptance of one or the other of these alternatives: either Protestantism and the keeping holy of Saturday, or Catholicity and the keeping holy of Sunday. Compromise is impossible." "The Catholic Mirror," December 23, 1893. (++)
"It is well to remind the Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and all other Christians, that the Bible does not support them anywhere in their observance of Sunday. Sunday is an institution of the Roman Catholic Church, and those who observe the day observe a commandment of the Catholic Church." Priest Brady, in an address, reported in the Elizabeth, N.J. "News" of March 18, 1903. (Catholic) (++)
"Protestantism, in discarding the authority of the [Roman Catholic] Church, has no good reasons for its Sunday theory, and ought logically to keep Saturday as the Sabbath." John Gilmary Shea, in the American Catholic Quarterly Review," January 1883. (Catholic) (++)
"Sunday is a Catholic institution, and its claims to observance can be defended only on Catholic principles... From beginning to end of scripture there is not a single passage that warrants the transfer of weekly public worship from the last day of the week to the first." Catholic Press, Sydney, Australia, August, 1900. (Catholic) (++)
"All things whatsoever that it was duty to do on the Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord's day." Eusebius's Commentary on the Psalms, quoted in Cox's "Sabbath Literature," Vol. 1, page 361. (++)
"Until well into the second century [a hundred years after Christ] we do not find the slightest indication in our sources that Christians marked Sunday by any kind of abstention from work." W. Rordort, "Sunday," p. 157. (++)
"Modern Christians who talk of keeping Sunday as a 'holy' day, as in the still extant 'Blue Laws,' of colonial America, should know that as a 'holy' day of rest and cessation from labor and amusements Sunday was unknown to Jesus... It formed no tenet [teaching] of the primitive Church and became 'sacred' only in the course of time. Outside the Church its observance was legalized for the Roman Empire through a series of decrees starting with the famous one of Constantine in 321, an edict due to his political and social ideas." W. W. Hyde, "Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire," 1946, p. 257. (++)
"The Church made a sacred day of Sunday... largely because it was the weekly festival of the sun; for it was a definite Christian policy to take over the pagan festivals endeared to the people by tradition, and to give them a Christian significance." Arthur Weigall, "The Paganism in Our Christianity," 1928, p. 145. (++)
"Question - Has the church power to make any alterations in the commandments of God? "Answer - Instead of the seventh day, and other festivals appointed by the old law, the church has prescribed the Sundays and holy days to be set apart for God's worship; and these we are now obliged to keep in consequence of God's commandment, instead of the ancient Sabbath." Catholic Christian Instructed, page 204, ed. Kelly, Piet and Co., Baltimore. (++)
"John Frith, an English reformer of considerable note and a martyr, was converted by the labours of Tyndale about 1525, and assisted him in the translation of the Bible. He was burned at Smithfield, July 4, 1533. He is spoken of in the highest terms by the historians of the English Reformation. His views respecting the Sabbath, and first-day are thus stated by himself (1): ...
"The Jews have the word of God for their Saturday, sith [since] it is the seventh day, and they were commanded to keep the seventh day solemn. And we have not the word of God for us, but rather against us; for we keep not the seventh day, as the Jews do, but the first, which is not commanded by God's law." (2) (++)
(1) M'Clintock and Strong, vol. iii. p. 679; D'Aubigne's Hist. Ref book xviii. pp. 672, 689, 706, 707; book xx. pp. 765, 766; Fox's Acts and Monuments, book viii. pp. 524-527.
(2) Frith's works, p. 69, quoted in Hessey, p. 198.
"Christian History & Biography Ask the Editors:
When did the Christian church switch the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday?
No specific names or dates are associated with the church's shift from observing the holy day on Saturday to observing it on Sunday. At first, especially when many Christians were converted Jews, their holy day was Saturday. However, because the Resurrection and the beginning of Creation had both occurred on the first day of the week (Sunday), the church soon observed that day instead. (More Gentiles were becoming Christians as well, which contributed to a desire to shake off Jewish customs.) By the end of the first century, Sunday worship was the norm...
It's important to note that the Sabbath was not simply moved; Christians altered the observance as well as the day. Hallmarks of the early Christian "Lord's day" celebration, according to Justin Martyr (ca. 100-ca. 165), included readings from Scripture (particularly the Gospels), a sermon, communal prayer, and Communion—very different from Jewish Sabbath observance. By Jewish standards, Christians don't keep the Sabbath at all"... (++)
Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine, 2001
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