The Jewish War
If you have ever read through Gospels and the Book of Acts, you will have noticed that the day on which the Sabbath occurs is not an issue of debate. In fact, the writers of the Gospels and Acts go to great pains to show us how all the action happens on the Shabbat, how Yeshua is in the synagogue or healing or teaching on the Shabbat and doing his father's redemptive work on the Shabbat. The Book of Acts depicts us (i.e. the believers) congregating in synagogues on the Shabbat. Even Paul is always shown ministering on and teaching on Shabbat. Of all the things Yeshua is accused of (not to mention of all the things Steven and Paul are accused of) in the various trials that they stand, they are never accused of breaking Shabbat. It is true that Yeshua and the Sages had a lot of arguments about how to keep Sabbath and what was permissible to do on Sabbath (i.e. carrying your mat, making mud, healing, etc.), but no one suspected him of doing away with Sabbath, declaring the Sabbath void or changing the Sabbath to a different day. Not even Paul is accused of violating the Sabbath.

At the end of the book of Acts we are left with a picture of Christianity still in the cradle of Judaism, still a part of Judaism, still a sect within it. The narrative of Acts leaves Paul as a prisoner in the city of Rome ministering to the believers in Rome. It is about the year 62 AD. Within two years, Paul went to meet the Master when he was beheaded by Emperor Nero. A short time later, Peter too found martyrdom in Rome when Nero had him crucified. Nero then added to his infamy by launching a massive military campaign against the Jewish state. He sent the dreaded 10th legion under the famous general Vespasian to put down Judea.

After Nero died and Vespasian was made Emperor, his son Titus carried on the war by bringing the Roman army against Jerusalem. During the Jewish War, our brothers and sisters in Jerusalem heeded the words of the Master. Remember what he told them. He had said, "When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city."

And concerning those days he told them, "Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath."

Why not on the Sabbath? What's wrong with fleeing on the Sabbath? If the Sabbath is not to be observed by believers, why should we have cared? But the Master assumed we would care, so he told us, "Pray that your flight will not take place on the Sabbath."

The armies came and the believers fled. The city of Jerusalem was destroyed. The Temple was burned and the Jewish believers in Judea and Jerusalem either fled to Transjordan or were carried off in captivity and sold as slaves along with their Jewish brothers and sisters.

Who's in charge around here?
After the siege of Jerusalem, the Church that was the Assembly of the Book of Acts, the Assembly of the Apostles, under James the Righteous ceased to be. The authority of those Apostles to whom the Master had said, "I give you the power to bind and loose" (that is to make legal decisions regarding Torah) was gone.

Previously, when questions of law and practice or disputes of theology had arisen, we sent to Jerusalem to find a decision from the Apostles, the disciples and the elders at Jerusalem. After 70 there was no Jerusalem. There was no Jerusalem church. There was no authority. No one was there to answer our questions, and as First Century Gentile believers, we had lots of questions.

Remember, there was still no New Testament for us to turn to. The Gospels had just been or were still being written. Paul's letters had not been compiled yet. John's epistles were not even written yet. Imagine our situation! What do we do? Who is in charge of this thing? Who can answer my questions about faith and observance? Without the Jerusalem Assembly, where should we look for leadership and guidance… unless it is to the church in the capital city of the world, the city where Paul and Peter, most famous of the apostles served and were martyred? Thus the Roman Church became our new authority by default.

What do we know about this Roman Church? We know they were troublemakers! Twenty years earlier, when Claudius was Emperor, there was such a disturbance raised by the believers in Rome that he exiled all the Jews from the city. All the Jews were exiled, not just the believers. Pricilla and Aquilla were among those exiled. Consider the impact of such an exile. If all the Jews were exiled from the church at Rome, including those identified with the Jewish people by virtue of observance (i.e. Sabbath observance, dietary laws, etc.) then who was left? Only Gentiles, specifically non-practicing Gentiles. Thus the Roman church had become a Gentile dominated church.

The Politics of Anti-Semitism
Suppose you are a Gentile believer living in the Roman colony of Philippi, attending a Jewish worship service on the Jewish day of worship and keeping Jewish rituals when all of a sudden your country is at war with the Jews. Previously you might have been labeled Jimmy the Believer from Philippi. Subsequent to the revolt, your friends and neighbors would have called you Jimmy-Jew-lover-enemy-of-the-state from Philipi, or just Jimmy the Jew. The Jewish War gave rise to the politics of anti-Semitism.

Emperor Vespasian followed up the Jewish war by imposing a heavy, punitive annual tax upon all Jewish households in the Empire. He determined Jewish households as those who worshipped after the Jewish manner. With the addition of the Fiscus Judaicus tax, we Gentile believers had financial, political and a cultural incentives to distance ourselves from Judaism.

Shortly after the Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem, the synagogues throughout the world introduced a 19th blessing into the 18 blessings of the daily prayer the Amidah. The 19th blessing was actually a curse on believers. Along with the introduction of the 19th blessing came the ruling that anyone in the synagogue that did not pray the 19th blessing was to be put out of the synagogue. Thus the believers were expelled from Jewish assembly.

Not only did our Gentile pals resent us because we were essentially Jewish, but our Jewish pals resented us because we were believers. The excommunication from the synagogue felt deeply offensive and created sharp animosity towards Jews (even among Jewish believers) who were already none too popular through the Empire. What is worse, we were left with no place to assemble on Shabbat, or to assemble at all.

Years went by as the now largely Gentile dominated Church struggled to identify herself. She was plagued by heresies and persecutions. Around the turn of the century, the new Emperor, Domitian the son of Vespasian, was afraid of another Jewish revolt. He unleashed a series of new persecutions against the believers, again because of their Jewish association. In that wave of persecutions, John, the last apostle, was exiled to Patmos.

Try to understand what it was like. On the one hand, you and your family were thrown out of the synagogue because you were offensive to Judaism, and on the other hand you are seeing your friends and family imprisoned, even tortured and killed because they were being identified with the Jewish religion. You were guilty by association with a religion that did not want you associating with them.

The Second Century
By the time the Second Century began, anti-Jewish sentiment was so high in the church (and especially the Roman church) that we Gentiles no longer wanted to be associated with Jews at all. Theologically, we decided that we had replaced the Jews as the true Israel. We decided that we were now the true people of God, and that Jews were consigned to damnation and everlasting cursedness from God. The First Century believers were long dead and gone. A new generation had been raised to view Jews and even Jewishness as the absolute antithesis of Christianity. It is not unlike the bitter hostility we find many Protestants hold for Catholics (or Hebrew Roots adherents hold for mainstream Christians for that matter) today. It fills some deep psychological need to define ourselves against something.

The new generation (Second Century) was the generation that lived through the Second Jewish revolt. The Jews of Judea revolted against Rome again, this time during the days of Emperor Hadrian. They banded together under the leadership of Shimon Bar Kozbah. Rabbi Akiva renamed him the Zealot general Bar Kokbah and declared him to be King-Messiah. All of Bar Kokbah's men were told that they must swear allegiance to his messiahship, even proving their allegiance by maiming themselves for him. The last Jewish believers among the Jews of Israel were surely alienated by their refusal to declare Bar Kokbah as the Messiah. It was the last break between the believers and Judaism.

Bar Kokbah was not Messiah. His rebellion was quickly crushed, Jerusalem, never completely rebuilt, was again destroyed, and the Jews again faced Imperial persecution. In those days a Temple to Zeus was raised on the Temple Mount, fulfilling the Master's words about an Abomination that Causes Desolation in the Holy Place. Hadrian's persecutions are remembered in the Talmud as the Age of the Persecution. In those days Emperor Hadrian made a law declaring it illegal to keep the Sabbath. Illegal, as in against the law of Rome! In those days, believers could be arrested for keeping Sabbath on Saturday.

The Church Fathers
We call the generation of Gentile believers who lived through the second Jewish revolt the Church Fathers. Men like Ignatius wrote an epistle to the congregations of Asia (where John had lived and served just three decades before) and said to them:

Let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish manner, and rejoice in days of idleness . . . But let every one of you keep the Sabbath in a spiritual manner . . . not in relaxation, not in eating things prepared the day before, not in finding delight in dancing and clapping which have no sense in them." (Epistle to the Magnesians)

What did he mean? Why did he have to prohibit Second Century believers from keeping the Sabbath? Because they were still keeping Sabbath. Despite all the adversity, they were still keeping Sabbath in John's and Paul's congregations.

In the same era men like the author of the epistle of Barnabas arose. The Epistle of Barnabas is a certain forgery allegedly written by Barnabas, Paul's traveling companion. It is actually a flagrantly anti-Semitic, anti-Torah, anti-Jewish piece of replacement theology literature. He describes the Jews as wretched men deluded by an evil angel (i.e. the God of the OT) and abandoned by God. In the Epistle of Barnabas the Sabbath was seen only an allegory to point to the resurrection of Christ which occurs on the 8th day.

It is in this era that we had the first record of Gentile Christians proselytizing Jews. There was a famous Christian-Jewish dialogue in the form of a polemical debate between a Jew called Trypho and Justin Martyr. The record of the debate reveals to us how far the Roman believers had already divorced themselves from Judaism and even from the Scriptures. Justin Martyr explained to Trypho (and all the Jews) that the Torah was given to Jews as a punishment for their exceptional wickedness and because of God's special hatred for Jewish people. He said, "We, too, would observe your circumcision of the flesh, your Sabbath days and in a word all your festivals, if we were not aware of the reason why they were imposed upon you, namely, because of your sins and your hardness of heart." Surprisingly, Justin didn't win too many Jewish converts!

At the same time that these men were holding their sway over the developing church, the developing church saw the rise of the great heretic Marcion. He came sweeping through the church with his refined doctrine that the Jesus of the New Testament had defeated and unseated the evil god of the Jews, and therefore the Hebrew Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) and any Jewish relics in the Christian faith needed to be expelled. He compiled the very first New Testament. He was wildly popular, stunningly influential, and his teachings remained rooted even after he was denounced for his heresies. If you are a Nazi or anti-Semite, perhaps the best repository of anti-Jewish rhetoric and just downright hateful literature you could hope to find is in the writings of the Second Century Church.

Resurrection Sunday
Meanwhile an annual remembrance of the resurrection of Messiah had emerged in Christian practice. It occurred every year on the Sunday that followed Passover. The Torah calls it the Feast of the Barley Omer, but the Christians called it Easter because of its proximity to the pagan fertility festival of the same name. The Roman church, in fact, ordered believers to quit keeping Passover and to only keep this annual resurrection festival. It was a great controversy among the believers because once again, the churches of Asia (the congregations of Paul and John) did not want to play ball with Roman authority. They wanted to keep Passover as they always had, but in the end the authority of Rome prevailed.

Part of the fallout of the controversy was that Sunday was elevated while all Jewish elements, festivals and days, were eliminated. It became a Christian innovation to fast on the Sabbath and rejoice on Sunday as a weekly celebration of the annual Sunday resurrection festival. Sunday came to be celebrated as a weekly, mini-Roman Easter.

Add to all of this the Roman believer's association of Messiah with the Sun. They placed his birthday at the winter equinox, the pagan world's birthday of the Sun-god. All Roman churches were oriented to face the sunrise rather than Jerusalem. Once the sun had been made symbolic for Jesus, the association with "Sun-Day" was natural.

Conclusions
The real reason for the early churches abandonment of the Sabbath and all things Jewish can be attributed to two impulses. On the one hand there was intense persecution both from Jews and Romans, and on the other hand there was a rising anti-Torah, anti-Jewish bias in Christian theology. The transition from Sabbath to Sunday seems to have been completed before the middle of the Second Century. The popular belief that Constantine introduced Sunday worship is overstated. Constantine only institutionalized Sunday worship with his famous, "Let us have nothing to do with the detestable Jews" speech at Nicea. By the time of Constantine, almost 2 centuries later, the Church barely remembered her association with Judaism.

It is also true that there were syncristic tendencies and pagan influence. Sunday was the Roman day of Sun worship. Early Roman churches are all oriented to face the sunrise. December 25th was the annual celebration of the rebirth of the sun god, but those are just vestigial influences, not the major causes or sources of what happened. Believers were not worshipping the sun on Sundays any more than they were worshipping the birth of the sun god on December 25th. They were using Sunday to remember the resurrection of Messiah, which is actually a fine and wonderful thing to do. There is nothing wrong with worshipping on Sunday. It is no sin to keep Sunday as a day to the LORD. There is nothing wrong with going to church on Sunday.

But Sunday is not the Sabbath, and Sabbath is a commandment. It is wrong to use Sunday to replace the Sabbath.

Kehilat Sar Shalom