144 Hutton Webster 



priest. " And he shall wave the sheaf before Jehovah, to be accepted for 

 you : on the day after the Sabbath he shall wave it." The reference was 

 to the beginning of the fifty days' period from Passover to Pentecost. 

 Among the Jews the orthodox view was that " Sabbath " in this passage 

 meant the first day of Passover, whereas the heretical Jewish sects, in- 

 cluding the Samaritans, took the word literally to mean Sunday ; according 

 to their view Pentecost always fell on a Sunday. The early Christians 

 adopted the heterodox view, and when the Council of Nicea definitely 

 established the observance of a weekly " Lord's Day " that day was fixed 

 as Sunday — " the day after the Sabbath." But as has recently been shown, 

 the term Sabbath in this passage described the fifteenth day of Nisan not 

 as a festival day but merely as the middle of the month.'** 



There is no evidence that Sunday at first was marked by sabbatic ob- 

 servances; on the contrary, in one of the Epistles of Ignatius, we find the 

 exhortation not to " sabbatize " which was afterwards expanded into a 

 vv^arning against keeping the Sabbath, after the Jewish fashion, " as if 

 delighting in idleness."" In the fourth century a Church Council ex- 

 pressly enacted that "the Christians ought not to judaise and rest on the 

 Sabbath, but ought to work on that day.'"*" That the earliest Sunday law, 

 the edict issued by Constantine in 321, had probably no relation to Chris- 

 tianity has already been indicated {supra). As Professor Westermarck has 

 pointed out, though the obligatory Sunday rest in no case was a continu- 

 ance of the Jewish Sabbath, it gradually was confounded with it, owing 

 to its injunction of a weekly day of rest, as the code of divine morality. 

 But in southern European lands, the restraints connected with the day seem 

 never to have become so burdensome as elsewhere ; people habitually work 

 hard on the Sabbath. After Protestantism modelled on the Old Testament 

 gained the upper hand in north Europe the Sabbath ordinances were 

 revived to an extraordinary degree.^^ 



'^ The foregoing statements are based on Prof. Morris Jastrow's sum- 

 mary of the papers presented at the recent meeting of the Society of 

 Biblical Literature. See the Nation, 191 1, xcii. 8 sq. 



''^ Epistola ad Magnesias, 9. 



*" Concilium Laodicenum, can. 29. 



"C/. Alice M. Earle, Sabbath in Puritan Nezu England, New York, 

 1891, pp. 245-58. 



144 



