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Attitudes to the Sabbath in Three Apostolic Fathers: Did Ache, Ignatius, and Barnabas

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Attitudes to the Sabbath in Three Apostolic Fathers: Did Ache, Ignatius, and Barnabas ATTITUDES TO THE SABBATH IN THREE APOSTOLIC FATHERS: DID ACHE, IGNATIUS, AND BARNABAS Pierluigi Lanfranchi On the 6th of February 2006, 1 on the occasion of the 431 st dies nata/is of Leiden University, Prof. Henk Jan de Jonge gave a lecture in Leiden's austere Pieterskerk, entitled "Sunday and Sabbath. On the birth of Christian Sunday ." 2 In his lecture, Prof. De Jonge dealt with the complicated question of how it is that, since the first half of the first century CE, members of Christian communities have chosen Sunday as the day on which to gather and partake of a common meal. According to De Jonge, the choice for Sunday was dictated by prac­ tical reasons. The Jews who joined the movement of Jesus-believers were led to institute a new common meal on Sunday evening, in ad­ dition to their traditional Sabbath evening meal, because they felt the need to affirm and consolidate their specifically Christian identity. Sunday, the first day of the Jewish week, was the first possibility available to Jewish-Christians for their weekly gatherings. A certain competition arose between the traditional familiar gathering on Sab­ bath and the common meal on Sunday evening, which would even­ tually become more important than the seventh day in the Christian liturgical calendar. While listening to Prof. De Jonge's lecture, I thought of several passages against the observance of the Sabbath in the Early Christian anti-Jewish literature which I was at that time studying. Several questions sprang to mind: how long did Christians continue observing the Sabbath? How far back does the polemic against the Sabbath go? What role did this polemic play in the sepa­ ration of Christianity from Judaism? By inviting me to contribute to this Festschrift, the editors gave me the chance to work out these questions and to provide some answers. But, above all, they offered 1 The research for this article is subsidized by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). ' H.J. de Jonge, Zondag en sabbat Over her ontsraan van de christelijke :.ondag, Leiden 2006. 244 PIERLUIGI LANfRANCHI the occasion to pay a modest homage to Prof. De Jonge, to whom I am very grateful for directing my PhD thesis. 1. Discussions about Sabbath in the First Century CE The calendar is a fundamental element of identity for every religious community.3 In Judaism, the Sabbath is a hugely important institu­ tion because it organizes human time by ritual repetition and gives it a symbolic value. The fact that the Sabbath commandment is in­ cluded in the Decalogue assures its privileged position in the Jewish religious system. It has a commemorative function because it remem­ bers God's rest after creating the world: by weekly observing the Sabbath rest, Jews remember the creation, structure their time, and order their lives in harmony with God's activity.4 In antiquity, the Sabbath was one of the main Jewish identity markers together with Abrahamic descent, circumcision, feasts, dietary laws and purity rules. Because Jews, on the Sabbath, acted dinerently from all their neighbours in the cities of the Roman Empire, Gentiles also per­ ceived the seventh day as a social boundary marker of Judaism. 5 In the ftrst century CE, all the groups related to Judaism kept the Sab­ bath, but their attitudes varied concerning how to keep it. Disagree­ ments arose because the Torah gives only a few details about Sabbath observance. Hence the large number of halachic discussions on the Sabbath, in which more rigid attitudes to the prohibition of work on the Sabbath coexisted with more flexible positions that admitted exceptions to the rule. Jesus-believers were also involved in this debate, evidence of which can be found in the Gospels and in other New Testament writings. Nevertheless, the fact that there were these discussions about the Sabbath halacha does not mean that the validity or observance of the Sabbath were questioned by the different Jewish groups in the first century CE. 1 On the significance of the calendar in constructing religious identity, see G.F. Sproul, "Sacred Time," in: M. Eliade (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion 12, London 1987, pp. 535-544. 4 II. Weiss, A Day of Gladness. The Sabbath among Jews and Christians in Antiquity, Columbia 2003, pp. 1-2. 'See, for instance, Persius, Sat. V 184. .
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