With the Peace of Constantine in the fourth century came a significant change in the character of the Christian Sunday, because on 3 March in the year 321 the emperor promulgated a law requiring rest from work for everyone except farmers ‘on the most honourable day of the Sun’. It is unclear whether in so doing he was responding to the wishes of Christians or acting on his own initiative. As we saw earlier, Christians had previously condemned as idleness the Jewish observance of the Sabbath by resting and had reinterpreted the biblical Sabbath rest as an eschatological event awaiting fulfilment in the age to come. There are no signs of a desire to anticipate that by a regular weekly day of rest on Sundays prior to the fourth century. The first known explicit example of regarding Sunday as the Christian equivalent of the biblical Sabbath comes from Eusebius of Caesarea writing after 330 CE – that is, after the promulgation of Constantine’s law – and his emphasis is not on resting on that day but on devoting it to the priestly service of God. Through the prophets God had rebuked those who had spent the Sabbath day in feasting and drinking and disorder:
That is why, rejecting those Sabbaths, the Word by the new covenant has changed and transferred the feast of the Sabbath to the rising of the light. He has given us an image of the true rest, the day of salvation, the Lord’s day and the first day of light, on which the Saviour of the world, after all his deeds among men, and victorious over death, opened the gates of heaven, passing beyond the creation of the six days, and receiving the divine Sabbath and the blessed rest, when the Father said to him, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’ On that day of light, the first day and the day of the true sun, we also gather after the interval of six days, when we celebrate the holy and spiritual Sabbaths – we who have been redeemed through him from the nations throughout the world – and what the law ordained for the priests to do on the Sabbath we fulfil according to the spiritual law. For we offer spiritual sacrifices and oblations …1
Nevertheless, it is still possible that church leaders had played a part in bringing about Constantine’s legislation out of a desire to make church attendance easier for Christians and to give them an equivalent of the Roman pagan festival holidays. On the other hand, there are very few signs of Christian attempts to prohibit work until the sixth century – Canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea and Apostolic Constitutions 8.33.1–2 seem to be the only exceptions in the fourth century. Officially at least, Sunday was still generally viewed as the day of worship rather than a day of rest. Nor can it have been Constantine’s intention to create a Christian version of the Jewish Sabbath, since the form that his legislation took, including the exemption of farmers from its requirements because their opportunity to work was so heavily dependent upon the weather, followed the precedent of existing Roman legislation with regard to pagan holidays and not the prescriptions of the Old Testament, which did not permit any such exemptions.2
Interestingly, the issue of whether one should refrain from kneeling to pray on Sundays, clearly described as an established custom at least in North Africa by Tertullian at the beginning of the third century,3 was apparently still a matter for dispute in some places in the early fourth century, as the Council of Nicaea, referring to the existence of some who knelt both on the Lord’s day and during the season of Pentecost, found itself having to legislate for prayer to be made standing on those occasions (Canon 20).
By this time, however, the celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday mornings does seem to have been adopted universally and was not a matter of controversy. In addition to this, the day came to be marked from the fourth century onwards in a number of places by another rite linked specially to it, which we may call a vigil of the resurrection, since at its heart was the reading of a Gospel account of the Passion and resurrection of Christ. It appears to have originated in Jerusalem, in the very place where the resurrection was believed to have happened. According to the pilgrim Egeria, at cockcrow,
the bishop enters, and goes into the cave in the Anastasis [the Church of the Resurrection]. The doors are all opened, and all the people come into the Anastasis, which is already ablaze with lamps. When they are inside, a psalm is said by one of the presbyters, with everyone responding, and it is followed by a prayer; then a psalm is said by one of the deacons, and another prayer; then a third psalm is said by one of the clergy, a third prayer, and the Commemoration of All. After these three psalms and prayers they take censers into the cave of the Anastasis so that the whole Anastasis basilica is filled with the smell. Then the bishop, standing in the sanctuary, takes the Gospel book and goes to the door, where he himself reads the account of the Lord’s resurrection. At the beginning of the reading the whole assembly groans and laments at all that the Lord underwent for us, and the way they weep would move even the hardest heart to tears. When the Gospel is finished, the bishop comes out, and is taken with singing to the Cross, and they all go with him. They have one psalm there and a prayer, then he blesses the people, and that is the dismissal. As the bishop goes out, everyone comes to have his hand laid on them.4
That the Gospel reading must have included the Passion as well as the resurrection seems to be indicated by the groaning and weeping of the people while it was being read. This is the very first occasion on which the use of incense in Christian worship is recorded, and it is often thought that it had been introduced in order to represent the spices that the women took with them to the tomb on Easter Day. However, this interpretation may well be a later rationalization.5 There is no mention of incense in the briefer account given of what is seemingly a derivation of this Jerusalem innovation included among the Sunday observances in Apostolic Constitutions 2.59:
And on the day of our Lord’s resurrection, which is the Lord’s day, meet more diligently, sending praise to God that made the universe by Jesus, and sent Him to us, and condescended to let Him suffer, and raised Him from the dead. Otherwise what apology will he make to God who does not assemble on that day to hear the saving word concerning the resurrection, on which we pray thrice standing in memory of him who arose in three days, in which is performed the reading of the prophets, the preaching of the Gospel, the oblation of the sacrifice, the gift of the holy food?6
A similar office forms a part of the regular Sunday services in later Eastern rites, and although it was not preserved in full in the West, traces of it can be seen in some traditions, suggesting that it once had a more prominent place there too. All this seems to be the result of the influence that pilgrims to Jerusalem had in bringing about the imitation in their home communities of rites that they had experienced in the Holy City.7
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1 Eusebius of Caesarea, Commentary on Ps. 91, quoted from Richard Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church’ in D. Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1982), pp. 283–4.
2 A point made by Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘The Reception of the Jewish Sabbath in Early Christianity’ in P. Post, G. Rouwhorst, L. van Tongeren and A. Scheer (eds), Christian Feast and Festival (Louvain: Peeters 2001), p. 262.
3 See above, p. 17. The fifth-century Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Quaestiones et responsiones ad orthodoxos 115, claims that Irenaeus in the second century had affirmed standing for prayer on Sundays was an Apostolic custom (ET in Cantalamessa, p. 51).
4 Egeria, Itinerarium 24.9–11; ET from John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (3rd edn, Warminster: Aris & Phillips 1999), pp. 144–5.
5 See Clemens Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2006), p. 297, n. 482.
6 ET from ANF 7, p. 423.
7 See Juan Mateos, ‘La vigile cathédrale chez Egérie’, OCP 27 (1961), pp. 281–312, here at pp. 302–10; and Rolf Zerfass, Die Schriftlesung im Kathedraloffizium Jerusalems, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 48 (Münster: Aschendorff 1968), pp. 121–7.