Texts in Conversation
In the Didache, an early church manual, readers gather on a Lord's Day to break bread. In Revelation, John also mentions a Lord's Day without tying it to worship, and Ignatius, an early bishop, sets living by it against keeping the Sabbath.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Didache 14:1
Early Christian
1 On the Lord's Day, gather together, break bread, and hold the Eucharist, after confessing your sins, so that your offering may be pure. 2 But let no one who is in conflict with another person join your gathering until they are reconciled, so that your sacrifice is not tainted. 3 For this is what the Lord said: 'In every place and time, offer me a pure sacrifice, for I am a great king, and my name is held in awe among the nations.'
Revelation 1:10
New Testament
9 I, John, your brother and the one who shares with you in the persecution, kingdom, and endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony about Jesus. 10 I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day when I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, 11 saying: “Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches—to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.”
Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 9.1
Early Christian
9 If, therefore, those who were brought up in the ancient order of things have come to the possession of a newhope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord's Day, on which also our life has sprung up again by Him and by His death-whom some deny, by which mystery we have obtained faith, and therefore endure, that we may be found the disciples of Jesus Christ, our only Master-how shall we be able to live apart from Him, whose disciples the prophets themselves in the Spirit did wait for Him as their Teacher? And therefore He whom they rightly waited for, being come, raised them from the dead.
Date: 160-180 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
“... At Didache 14.1 we have the redundant expression “on the Lord’s day of the Lord” (kyriakēn de kyriou), which suggests that by the time this document was written the phrase “Lord’s day” was conventional. The idea of a Lord’s day is found in Revelation 1:10, but there it is not specified as a day of Christian worship or identified as being the first day of the week. There is, however, a contrast between the Lord’s day and the Jewish sabbath in Ignatius’s writings (Ign. Magn. 9.1), where it is said that Christians no longer live for the sabbath ...”
Martin, Ralph P.
Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments
(p. 988) InterVarsity Press, 1997
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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