Did the Early Church Change the Sabbath?

Question: When and why did the early Church change the Sabbath, the seventh day designated in the Ten Commandments as being for mandatory rest, to Sunday? 

Answer: Technically, the Church has not changed the Sabbath day. The Sabbath is still on Saturday (or, more accurately, from sundown on Friday till Saturday night when three stars are visible in the night sky), marking the fact that God rested from creation on the seventh day. But the Church changed its observance of the Sabbath.

In other words, the Church made Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the primary day for worship and rest. In the earliest days of Christianity, the followers of Christ — who at the time were still mainly Jewish — observed the seventh-day Sabbath with prayer and rest; but very quickly (as Colossians 2:16 shows) Christians began to see this as no more obligatory than Jewish dietary rules.

The Christians gathered instead to break the bread of the Eucharist on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7) — the day which Jesus, completing the New Covenant, had made sacred by rising from the dead.

By the 2nd century, the Church Father Ignatius of Antioch approved the non-observance of the Sabbath, with Sunday designated as the day of worship and rest, albeit without the severe restrictions which orthodox Jews apply to their Sabbath even today.

In the 2nd century, St Justin Martyr (c100-c165) suggested that the Sabbath had been a temporary sign by God to teach the Hebrews about human sinfulness; that was no longer needed because Christ was without sin.

St Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, officially stated in 330 that for Christians, “the Sabbath had been transferred to Sunday”.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains the relationship between Sunday and the Sabbath: “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the Sabbath which it follows chronologically every week; for

Christians its ceremonial observance replaces that of the Sabbath. In Christ’s Passover, Sunday fulfils the spiritual truth of the Jewish Sabbath and announces man’s eternal rest in God” (2175).

The catechism’s next section goes on to say that “the celebration of Sunday observes the moral commandment inscribed by nature in the human heart to render to God an outward, visible, public and regular worship” (2176).

Published in the September 2024 issue of The Southern Cross magazine