What You Were Never Told About the Sabbath
We are not hearing the whole story. The common assumption of many Christians is that the Sabbath is done away. Once the church began moving into the Roman Empire, it sought to disassociate with its Jewish heritage. As the church became more Gentile, it made efforts to replace the Sabbath with meeting on the first day of the week.
My goal is to show you that this story is missing a lot of the facts. While some parts of the church in the past rejected Sabbath, attempting to avoid association with Jewish belief and practice, this is not universally true. Sabbath was not an aberration of Christian practice, but a core part of the belief for many Christians for the last two thousand years. Only some of the church (mainly the church in the west) lost sight of the Sabbath.
If we went to the east, to ancient Asia-Minor (modern day Türkiye) we discover a fuller picture. Take Sozemen for example. His full name was Salminius Hermias Sozomenus and was a Roman lawyer living in the 5th century. He was born in Gaza in the year 400AD. Eventually relocating to Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) to practice law, Sozomen went on to create a history of the Christian Church. His work "Ecclesiastical History" includes sources that makes his histories unique to other histories which tend to focus only on the western Roman church of Europe.
Let me show you the most illuminating statement regarding Christian habits of worship and gathering on Sabbath. Sozomen observes that the Christian Church does things differently across the world. On the outskirts of Christianity, Sabbath is not observed. Yet these were not the most prominent nor most influential parts of the church. When he talks about the prominent and central parts of Christianity, he writes:
“Assemblies are not held in all churches on the same time or manner. The people of Constantinople and almost everywhere assemble together on the Sabbath, as well as on the first day of the week, which custom is never observed at Rome or at Alexandria. There are several cities and villages in Egypt where, contrary to the usage established elsewhere, the people meet together on Sabbath evenings, and... partake of the mysteries.” (The Ecclesiastical history of Sozomen, Book 7, Chapter 19).
Sozomen highlights the Sabbath practices of Constantinople, "and almost everywhere" which likely refers to the church throughout the Middle East and Asia. It is different to what you've heard about Sabbath, isn't it? The largest and most influential part of the church was found in the Middle East and Asian region. This is likely why many of the ecumenical councils that have shaped Christian theology since occurred in places like Constantinople and Nicaea.
I want to point out a few things that are worth noticing. Firstly, Sozomen makes a distinction between the seventh-day Sabbath and the first day of the week in his terminology. Christians meet together on both days of the week, but only one is the Sabbath. A specific day, which occurs on the seventh day of the week, is labelled the Sabbath. Secondly, and more significantly, Christians are still observing Sabbath and meeting together on that day. Sozomen describes diversity in the church, but also unity of mission.
The belief that Christians distanced themselves from the Sabbath in the first century and left it behind is just not true. Here we have the historian Sozomen describing the church in the largest and most influential portion of the universal church 400 years after Christ. They are still worshipping God on the Sabbath. Yes, their worship is not limited to Sabbath, but this highlights the expansion of the Sabbath's mission to other days of the week.
Christians kept the seventh-day Sabbath and they worshipped Jesus on this day. It was not considered anti-Christian, nor was it viewed as legalistic. Sabbath was a time to assemble with other Christians. It was even common to celebrate the communion (what Sozomen calls the "Mysteries") on Sabbath evening.
If you haven't had the chance to explore my other blog post regarding Sabbath throughout history the link is below. In that article you will discover a trend in the early church continuing to use Jewish calendar conventions with Sabbath as central. It also highlights Sabbath practice as still part of the church's rhythms in an early Christian manual called "Teaching of the Apostles" from the Syriac church (Middle East).
Jacob Ugljesa
