Reply #21: Check out Samuel Bacchiocchi's

[Igel]

works, if they're still in print; your local Seventh Day Adventist bookstore may stock them, I haven't seen a copy for 20 years or more. http://www.biblicalperspectives.com/ is his website, but I can't say I've looked at anything else than "From Sabbath to Sunday"; the other things look preachy, FStS was his dissertation, IIRC, and really took a hard look at the extant original sources.

He was SDA, but his research seemed sound. He is relatively condemnation free in how he uses his sources and the conclusions he came to. He may bore you to tears, but that's the risk you take in looking at history and not being content with generalizations and post-hoc rationalizations.

The previous post sums much of it up. Note that the various decrees pushing Sunday wouldn't have been necessary had all of the church been Sunday-observing. It's like grammar texts that go to great pains telling you what *not* to say--if people didn't actually talk that way, the grammars wouldn't mention it, and the more they protest, the more common you know it is.

The Sunday decrees are in keeping with a bunch of other decrees that are generally overlooked as irrelevant, but all of which had the same purpose: reinforce the supremacy of Rome and western Xianity, decrease the influence of Judaism and the Biblical texts on doctrine, and thereby reinforce the importance of church authority. Note that the traditions that were banned were precisely those held most intensely where the apostles were most active, and which had the largest claim to continuing the apostolic traditions. See, for another example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartodeciman. Denigrating the Jews was a nice touch, since they could be seen as the 'enemy' ... think a sort of ecclesiastical populism, one that Islam picked up.

All kinds of justifications were given for it--I've run into people who believed that somehow the Jews altered the day counting, and Sunday was 'original' sabbath; but make no mistakes, Sunday was a sabbath of sorts--no work, long church services, and the like. Reducing worship to 25 minutes between a big breakfast and some recreation was a later innovation. Sunday was ordained to be a day of celebration of God and of worship, with Saturday as a day of mourning. The crucifixion narrative was a handy adjunct to it, since according to the dominant version Jesus was killed on Friday, and everybody mourned on Saturday. Moreover, the church in Rome said that Peter was given authority by Jesus, and the popes had Peter's authority: if Jesus as "Lord of the Sabbath", then Peter and his heirs could alter the Sabbath. A number of later scholars have justified this as Christianity needing to break free from Jewish tradition, something apparently Jesus and the apostles couldn't manage to do.

My religious tradition was with an offshoot of an offshoot of one of the confessions of the Seventh Day Church of God.