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Didache

About this book

Confession and Reconciliation on the Lord’s Day

Chapter 14

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.'

Texts in conversation

Compare Didache 14:1 and Revelation 1:10 and Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 9:1

Early Christian · New Testament

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Summary

In the Didache, an early church manual, readers are taught to gather on the Lord's Day, and Revelation also mentions the Lord's Day but without any connection to worship. The Christian theologian Ignatius interprets this as a day distinct from Sabbath.

Passages

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.'
90–120 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Didache

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.”
92–96 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in Revelation

Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 9:1

Early Christian
1 If, then, those who had lived by ancient practices came to a new hope, no longer keeping the Sabbath but shaping their lives by the Lord's Day, on which our life also rose through Him and through His death, which some deny, a mystery through which we came to believe, and for this reason we endure patiently, so that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher—
107–117 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians

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 ...”
Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids, eds., Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), 988.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Didache 14:1 and Revelation 1:10 and Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 9:1

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