The Sabbath World (19 page)

If you had to reduce Paul’s magnificently worded and carefully hedged theological edifice to one crude assertion, it would be that Jesus erased all distinctions between Jew and non-Jew, holy and unholy, at least insofar as those distinctions dictated who would be saved and who would not at the end of time. In other words, Paul invented a kind of universalism—you could call it end-time universalism. Confined as it was to the postapocalyptic moment, this universalism still represented an erosion of ancient boundaries, and from this erosion of boundaries flows much of what is radical in Paul’s thought. For if there is to be no difference, at the end of days, between Jew and non-Jew, then there will no longer be any need for the Law; and if there is to be no need for the Law, then there will be no means of differentiating between the sacred and the profane; and if there is no longer to be any way to distinguish the holy from the unholy, then everything will have been made holy through Jesus’ death and through his grace.
And if all will have been made holy, then ultimately all hierarchical systems of social valuation will become meaningless. That, at least, is how I read the verse from Paul’s epistle to his followers in Galatia: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

From Paul’s desire to clarify the status of Gentile converts comes the revolutionary inclusiveness that endows Christianity with its irrepressible buoyancy. And what Paul’s Christianity liberated Gentile Christians from is, among other things, the Sabbath. For, in Paul’s opinion, only Christ could sanctify time. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul chides them for observing “days, and months, and times, and years.” He writes: “After that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” By “elements,” Paul meant the movements of the heavenly bodies, by which both pagans and Jews determined their holy times. Christ, he was saying, mooted such earthbound ways of determining holiness, at least for Gentiles. He had freed his followers from the sclerotic Sabbath laws like a Moses of the overregulated soul, facing down Pharisees and priests much as the son of Hebrews confronted Pharaoh. (It doesn’t hurt that
Pharisees
sounds a lot like
Pharaoh.)

I
T WAS
I
GNATIUS
, the bishop of Antioch under the Roman emperor Trajan at the very beginning of the second century
C.E.
, who came up with the term “Sabbatizing.” It echoed another term, “Judaizing.” Both terms gave voice to the feeling that it was absurd to adhere to Jewish law in a post-Jewish age. The second-century Roman defender of the faith, Justin Martyr, told a Jew named Trypho, with whom he supposedly debated, that God gave the Jews the Sabbath to punish them—“because of your sins and your hardness of heart.” Justin reasoned from Scripture: Since God loved Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and none of
them
kept the Sabbath, God must have imposed the burden of the Sabbath to make the Jews pay for the
sin of worshipping the golden calf. Or, as Justin tells Trypho, “you Jews” demonstrated your innate nature as “a ruthless, stupid, blind, and lame people, children in whom there is no faith.” In much the same way, God gave circumcision to the Israelites to set them apart from the other nations of the earth. The purpose of these unwholesome customs, Justin declared, “was that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your lands be desolate, and your cities ruined by fire; that the fruits of your land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes.”

The Alexandrian Barnabas, also writing in the second century, thought that Jewish rituals, including the Sabbath, were simple misinterpretations of God’s intent. The physical commandments, Barnabas maintained, were allegories. The most vivid illustration of Barnabas’s spiritualizing hermeneutics can be seen in his discussion of kashruth. Why, asked Barnabas, did Moses say, “‘Thou shall eat neither swine, nor eagle, nor hawk, nor crow, nor any fish that has no scales on it’”? Barnabas explained: When Moses prohibited eating swine, he
really
meant to tell the Jews to avoid consorting with people who are swinelike, in that their urge to satisfy their hunger drives out every nobler sentiment. The eagle, the hawk, and the raven are predators; likewise, said Barnabas, one should avoid not the flesh of those birds but the company of men like them, “such people as do not know how to obtain their food by sweat and labor, but, in their disregard for law, plunder other people’s property.” And on Barnabas went, a Christian Aesop, reinterpreting every animal whose flesh is prohibited by Jewish law as a miniature moral fable.

As for the Sabbath, Barnabas said it should not be seen as the seventh day of the week; rather, it should be seen as the seventh day of Creation, and also as the seventh millennium, that end of time in which God’s son—Jesus, of course—would arrive and destroy a wicked age.

Why did the Jews fail to understand their own prophet’s metaphors? It was not given to them to understand. As Barnabas put it, the Jews circumcised their bodies, not their ears.

I
F THE
C
HRISTIANS OBJECTED
to the Sabbath, how did they fix on Sunday? We don’t really know. The New Testament gives no answer. It furnishes no evidence of a regular Sunday gathering other than a handful of references to the day that
can
be interpreted as indicating that it had been singled out in some fashion—though only if you’re willing to ignore alternate readings that suggest that Sunday was just one day among others. Not until the second century do we find Sunday described as a day when Christians gather to worship. Ignatius, Barnabas, and Justin all allude to it. Justin writes:

The order of the Sunday service evolved sometime between the ministry of Christ in the early thirties of the first century and the middle of the second, when Justin would have been writing. The Christian world at that point consisted of small groups scattered across Asia Minor and Europe, some buried deep within cities, some little more than house churches, many cut off from the others, and each with its own idiosyncratic syncretism—its mix of Jewishness, paganness, and “Christianness.” Each community’s rituals reflected the backgrounds of its members and the personalities of its founders. Jewish Christians may have gone to synagogues on the Sabbath and worshipped on Sunday, too, while pagan Christians may have stopped observing the Sabbath, or at least stayed away from synagogues, but they may not have singled out Sunday, either.

One student of Sunday, Willy Rordorf, thinks that the earliest Christians in Jerusalem began the tradition of gathering on Sunday in honor of Christ’s Resurrection, which happened on the first day of the week. Another scholar of Sunday, Samuele Bacchiocchi, argues that the shift from Saturday to Sunday happened a century later, in Rome, where Gentiles predominated, and where Jews had become a vilified enemy after the Jewish Revolt against Roman rule, quashed in 132
C.E.
Bacchiocchi (a Seventh-Day Adventist, which means that he objects to the switch from Saturday to Sunday) points out that around the time Justin was writing, a new custom arose in Christian Rome: the Saturday fast. Nothing could be less like a Jewish Sabbath celebration than a fast, so, Bacchiocchi reasons, the fast must have been intended to heighten the contrast between Jews and Christians and to make Sunday look more appealing.

One thing we do know is what Sunday was not. It was not a day of rest. The realities of everyday existence precluded taking the day off. For one thing, the early Christians did not come from the upper classes, at least not at first, and slaves and common people worked on Sunday. For another thing, the much-persecuted Christians were afraid to expose themselves by conspicuously not working when everyone else did.

Early in the second century, Pliny the Younger, the governor of a
region in Anatolia (now Turkey), wrote a letter to the Roman emperor Trajan asking him what he should do about people who had been denounced as Christians. So far, he explained, he had interrogated each of them several times, and executed only those who refused to renounce their faith. But even that approach, tolerant as it was, made him queasy, because, he said, some of them had been guilty of little more than meeting before dawn on a “fixed day”—the assumption of many scholars is that the day was Sunday—where they would sing responsively a hymn to Christ “as if to a god,” then “bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery, to commit no breach of trust and not to deny a deposit when called upon to restore it.” After that, they’d leave and assemble again later to eat—“food of an ordinary, harmless kind,” Pliny added, as if to assure Trajan that the Christians were not eating the human flesh they were sometimes accused of sacrificing. And they had stopped holding even those meetings, Pliny said, “since my edict, issued on your instructions, which banned all political societies.” (Worried that his prisoners may have lied to him, Pliny went on to clarify, he had tortured two female slaves known to their comrades as “deaconesses,” but had not extracted from them any contradicting evidence.)

By the fourth century, however, everything had changed. In 321, the Roman emperor Constantine, the most important Christian convert in history, banned official business and manufacturing on Sunday; the day was clearly already holy to Christians throughout his empire. (Constantine exempted farmers, who urgently needed to bring their crops in, a move that shows how far Christianity had come from Judaism; Jewish Sabbath law specifically targets most forms of agricultural labor.) A decade earlier, on the eve of the battle in which he would conquer Rome and secure the title of emperor, Constantine granted his Christian soldiers Sunday leave so that they could worship in church, and required his pagan soldiers to recite a prayer on Sunday in which they praised the Supreme Deity without being forced to name him.

Constantine’s knack for blending Christian faith and pagan syncretism
was one of his great weapons as emperor. He became the first Christian ruler of Rome by sussing out points of convergence between paganism and Christianity. He took every opportunity to remind Romans that monotheism was not foreign to them, since they had already embraced monotheism—solar monotheism, the cult of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun. This deity, imported from the East in the middle of the third century and merged with the Greek figures Apollo and Helios, had become the chief object of the imperial religion. Before his conversion, Constantine had taken Sol Invictus as his divine patron; years after his conversion, his mints still struck coins featuring Sol Invictus as his patron. Constantine must have found it a most fortuitous coincidence that the Christians had settled on Sunday as the day of their Lord, since it was also the day set aside for worshipping the sun.

I
N
A
NTIOCH
, a big, multicultural city in northern Syria, an up-and-coming preacher named John was also enraged by Sabbatizing. John would later come to be known as Chrysostom, or “golden mouthed,” for the force of his oratory, and his attacks on the Sabbath would stick.

In a book titled
John Chrysostom and the Jews
, the historian Robert Wilken vividly reconstructs the scene. The year is 386
C.E.
It is six decades since Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and declared Sunday a day of rest. Six years earlier, in 380
C.E.
, the Roman Empire declared Christianity its official religion. Christian Europe is in its infancy but has definitely been born.

Chrysostom, however, doesn’t realize this. Christianity, to him, looks fragile, riven with squabbling and heresies and beset by enemies. In his youth, he lived through the brief reign of an anti-Christian emperor named Julian, who wrote a dyspeptic tract called “Against the Galileans.” Chrysostom has no way of knowing whether this latest uptick in Christian-Roman relations will last. Paganism still shapes the public life of the Greek-speaking city. Its paintings, decorative mosaics, architecture, literature, and festivals all honor the glorious
deeds of the Greek gods, not the redemptive powers of Jesus Christ. Antioch’s ancient Jewish community also thrives. Though an anti-Jewish tone has crept into the language of Roman legislators whenever they address the rights of Jews in a Christian empire, few Jewish rights have actually been taken away, aside from the right to proselytize or to punish Jews who convert to Christianity.