# The Week (Colson)/Chapter 6

The New Testament shews little sign of the great astrological movement of those times. It is true that at the very outset of the Gospels we find a story in which Chaldaean astrologers have learnt by a star that a King of the Jews has been born, but the details added, namely that the star accompanies them and finally indicates the house in which the Child lay, have no relation to the regular creed of astrology. In fact the story, though, as far as it goes, it regards astrological divination with a favour which caused considerable searchings of heart among some of the Fathers, does not suggest that the writer knew anything more than that Chaldaean sages were credited with a power of interpreting the stars. In the Acts the absence of allusions to astrology is very marked. We are apt to forget that this book, or at least the latter part of it, is an authority of the first importance not only for the history of the primitive Church but for some aspects of general social life in the provinces of the Empire. There is in fact no parallel to it in what we call the secular literature of the time—nothing, that is, which gives us a similar ​picture by a man of the people of the life of the people.
In the Acts we hear a good deal about magic: we have two sorcerers, Simon and Elymas. But the most remarkable example is the curious story in the 19th chapter. Here we first find some Jews acting as 'exorcists,' practising, that is, a comparatively innocent and beneficent form of magic against evil demons, and attempting to use the name of Jesus with disastrous results to themselves. And this so impresses the inhabitants of Ephesus, that they determine in large numbers to give up magical practices, and bring their magical books to be burnt, the writer adding the curious fact that their value was definitely estimated at over £1700 of our money. An interesting touch is added by the statement that many of the converts to Christianity were fain to confess that they had been dabbling in magic, shewing, what indeed we might expect, that the ordinary convert did not at once throw off his original superstitions. In all this there is no word of astrology. It is possible indeed that as 'mage' was a term used indifferently for sorcerer and astrologer, we may be intended to understand that Simon and Elymas combined both arts, and the Ephesian books may have included astrological spells, like those mentioned at the end of the last section. But this is a very different thing from formal or scientific astrology, and the complete absence of this in the Acts goes ​a good way to confirm me in the view that astrology in the proper sense had not gone down to the bed-rock of life. Nor, except possibly in two passages which will require separate discussion, does Paul shew either favour or hostility to astrology, though he, too, denounces magic in the Epistle to the Galatians as one of the works of the flesh, just as the author of the Revelation classes the sorcerer with fornicators and idolaters. Paul's talk about 'principalities and powers,' 'world-rulers of darkness,' the 'prince of the power of the air' and the like does indeed seem to shew that he conceived of the sky as peopled by a host of demons, and he may possibly have conceived of them as identical with or located in the stars and planets, but there is nothing to shew that this is so. An attempt indeed has been made in the great passage of Romans viii, where he enumerates the powers which can never 'separate him from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,' to take the words 'height' and 'depth' to mean ​respectively the 'ascension' and 'declination' of the stars. The Greek words can be used in this astronomical sense, but the ordinary interpretation is philologically just as likely, and most of us will feel it incongruous to introduce this rather bizarre idea into what is perhaps the grandest flight of eloquence in the whole of the Pauline writings.
The only book of the New Testament in which it is at all possible to trace any familiarity with astrology is the Revelation, and, while many critics like Dr Charles wholly deny its presence there, others, like the German professors Lepsius and Boll, contend that the book is saturated in astrological ideas. The former, for instance, suggested that the seven angels of the seven churches in the first three chapters symbolize the seven planets, though not in weekorder, while the four horsemen of chapter vi become the four planets Moon, Mars, Mercury and Jupiter. Venus and Saturn follow somehow and we finally come to the angel standing in the Sun. Boll, on the other hand, appealing to the fact that there was a chronocratory of the Zodiac as well as of the planets and that thus there were cycles of twelve years, in each of which a sign of the Zodiac presided, identifies the four horse​men with the constellations of the Lion, Virgin, Scales and Scorpion. He certainly adduces some curious similarities between the properties which were supposed by the astrologers to belong to these four signs and those which are shewn by the horsemen. In the same way he interprets the mysterious woman of chapter xii, who, clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet and crowned with the twelve stars, gives birth to a child, as the central sign of the Virgin, and suggests that one form of interpretation of Isaiah's words 'Behold the Virgin shall conceive, etc.' was that this great constellation, thought of, of course, as a divine or angelic being, would be the mother of the Messiah. Those who are interested in these speculations will certainly find Boll suggestive. I do not say that they will find him convincing.
Hitherto even the little evidence we have found has been mainly concerned with astrology itself and not with that popular and loosely connected product of astrology, the planetary week. The ordinary student of the New Testament, who is not likely to discover for himself the subtleties of Boll and Lepsius, would probably say that there is no trace to be found in it of any knowledge of the planetary cycle. Yet, apart from these possibilities and some others which I shall suggest from the Epistles to the Galatians and Colossians, there is one momentous fact in the history of the Church which deserves at any ​rate serious consideration in this connexion. I mean the change by which the Church adopted as its day of meeting the first instead of the seventh in the Jewish week—the Sun's day instead of Saturn's day in the planetary system.
We have, of course, glimpses of this change in the New Testament itself. In the Acts we are told that the Christians of Troas met on the first day of the week for the 'breaking of bread.' Paul himself bids the Corinthians lay aside their contributions for the relief of the Church at Jerusalem on that day, and though he does not expressly mention a meeting, it is reasonable to conclude that they were collected at a meeting. The writer of the Apocalypse sees his vision on 'the Lord's day,' and though many sober critics have thought that this means the day on which the Lord appeared to the seer, or the day of Judgment which he saw in vision, it does not seem to me reasonable to doubt that he means Sunday, in face of the fact that this name for Sunday is undoubtedly found some thirty years later and remained afterwards in universal use.
The meagre Christian literature which bridges over the gap between the writings of the New Testament and Justin contains several allusions to the festival or meeting-day on the first day of the week. Ignatius in one of the famous letters which he addressed to various Churches as he ​was brought to martyrdom from Antioch to Rome speaks of his Jewish converts 'as no longer observing Sabbaths, but living in accordance with the Lord's day, on which also our life rose through him and his death.' The so-called Epistle of Barnabas ends a long and fantastic disquisition about Sabbaths (to which I shall recur) by saying 'that for this reason' (1.e. that which he has just mentioned) 'we observe the eighth day for joy, on which also Jesus rose from the dead and, after manifesting Himself, ascended to heaven.' The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles bids the Church meet on the 'Lord's day of the Lord' to break bread or hold the Eucharist. I need not go into the date of these documents further than to say that probably everyone would reckon them as earlier than Justin. His statement, which is by far the clearest, I have already quoted. We cannot in fact doubt for a moment that the Church from a very early date adopted the practice of meeting on what to the Jews was the first day of the week, to the general public the Sun's day, and to the Christians themselves the Lord's day; and it is hardly less clear that the predominant reason they assigned for this at any rate in the second century was that it commemorated the Resurrection.
​At the same time it is obvious that the reason which was assigned in the second century for the observance of Sunday may not have been the original reason, or at any rate the sole original reason. It is probable enough that the infant Church, entirely composed of Jews, may have been led by some motive of convenience, which we cannot now discover, to its choice of a day. It was natural at any rate that they should choose some other day than the Sabbath and leave that free for the worship of the Synagogue. When the Church spread it is quite conceivable that the practice might have been changed, but that the day had already acquired a certain sanctity, and one of the causes of this sanctity I cannot doubt was the feeling that it commemorated the Resurrection. But was there another cause, namely, that it was the Sun's day?
The French 'modernist' Loisy has adopted ​this view unhesitatingly. He seems indeed to go further and hold that the story that the Resurrection took place on the first day of the week was an afterthought. He does not, I imagine, doubt that the Church from the first believed that her risen Master had appeared to his disciples, or that this belief was the foundation of the Gospel. But he thinks that the story of the tomb being found empty on the first day of the week, and the placing of the first appearances on the same day arose from an a priori conviction that the Resurrection must have happened on what had become the Lord's day, whereas in reality it had become the Lord's day, because, as being the 'principal day' of the week and the day of the chief of the great Seven, it seemed to be especially suited for the service of the Lord of Glory.
My readers will probably agree with me that this extreme theory is as improbable as it is arbitrary. The belief that Jesus rose on the day after the Sabbath belongs to the earliest form of the Gospel narrative. For though Mark breaks off without relating any appearances, and quite possibly in the lost conclusion did not record any as happening till the disciples returned to Galilee, he clearly states that the Resurrection had taken place when the women arrived at the tomb. Further an earlier witness than Mark, namely Paul, practically says the same thing, ​when he tells the Corinthians that the Lord 'rose again on the third day.' But without going so far or nearly so far as Loisy, we may reasonably think that the planetary associations of the day may, perhaps almost must, have contributed to its sanctity and do something to account for an institution, the origin of which is in fact somewhat obscure, or at any rate requires rather more consideration than it usually receives.
For in the first place we may ask whether a weekly commemoration of any event is a natural proceeding. The instinct of men in these matters is as I have said intensive. We prefer to keep yearly commemorations. Friday, it is true, is a fast-day, but otherwise the Church does not commemorate the Crucifixion every week. No one wishes for a weekly Christmas. In secular matters no one proposes to celebrate weekly the detection of the Gunpowder Plot or Armistice Day or his own birthday. Asa matter of fact the day of the week on which these events occurred is known to no one (unless he takes the trouble to investigate it) in the case of the first, to few in the case of the second and almost as few in the case of the third. But a more important consideration is that, though the predominant reason assigned in the second century is the Resurrection, it is not the only one. Justin, in the passage quoted above, couples with the Resurrection the beginning of creation, and elsewhere, thinking of Sunday as the eighth day, he ​connects it with the law by which the circumcision of the child took place on the eighth day from birth. Barnabas, though he speaks of it as the day on which also Christ rose, and, he adds, ascended, gives as the primary reason a theory, which is found also in the 'Slavonic' Enoch, that there have been six millenniums in the world's history, that in the seventh the old world will be destroyed, while in the eighth, the true Lord's day, the new life will begin. Ignatius' language, too, is somewhat obscure. When he speaks of the Lord's day as the day on which 'also our life rose through him and his death,' he uses a verb which is regularly applied to the rising of the heavenly bodies and not that which is commonly used of resurrection from the dead. And it is certainly not impossible that he has at the back of his mind the conception of Christ as the true Sun, the 'day-spring from on high,' as much as of the Resurrection itself. Now if we believe, as I think we must, that Christianity and the observance of the planetary week spread more or less contemporaneously and over the same areas, and also that this new time-cycle could not establish itself without some ​strong belief in planetary influences, however vague, it is impossible that Gentile converts should have thrown off the associations which had gathered round the Sun's day. We have seen how the Acts testifies to the difficulty which they found in abjuring magical practices. And while magic was clearly anti-Christian, the same could hardly be said of the planetary week. Some indeed might hold, as in later days many undoubtedly did, that the employment of the planetary names implied worship of the deities to which they were assigned and was therefore idolatrous, but others might put on it a more innocent construction; and a very natural view was that the coincidence of Lord's day and Sun's day was a proof that in this pagan institution the Divine Spirit had been preparing the world for something better. In fact, the devout convert might well rejoice to be able to put a Christian construction on what had been a treasured association of his pagan past. Indeed at a later time we find direct evidence of such a feeling. Eusebius in his Life of Constantine, written very shortly after the death of the Emperor in 337, speaks of 'the day of salvation which coincides with that of light and the sun.' A commentary on the Psalms, which appears in Jerome's works, though it is generally believed to be spurious, on the verse in the 118th Psalm, 'this is the day which the Lord hath made,' has ​the following comment: 'The Lord's day, the day of the Resurrection, the day of Christians, our day. Why is it called the Lord's day? Because on it he ascended victoriously to his Father. But if the Gentiles call it the Sun's day, we gladly admit it. For in this day the light of the world rose, on this day the sun of righteousness rose.' In the fifth century Maximus of Turin in a homily on Pentecost says: 'The Lord's day is reverenced by us because on it the Saviour of the world like the rising sun, dispelling the darkness of hell, shone with the light of resurrection, and therefore is the day called by the men of the world the Sun's day, because Christ the sun of righteousness illumines it.' These quotations belong, as I have said, to a later day. But the fact on which they are based, the coincidence of the Christian Lord's day with the pagan Sun's day, was the same for the men of the first and second centuries as for those of the fourth and fifth: and what the Christians of the later epoch wrote may well have been said and thought by them of the earlier, even if it was not written; though indeed it is possible that we have glimpses of the association in the writings of these earlier times. I have already noted the thought that may lie behind the words of Ignatius, and it is perhaps worth noting also that the divine figure which appears to the seer of the Apocalypse on the ​Sun's-day and who holds in his hand the seven stars has his face 'like the Sun shining in his strength.' And this brings me to the consideration of two passages in St Paul's letters, the discussion of which I postponed some pages back.
In Galatians iv, 3, St Paul (referring apparently in the word 'we' to both Jews and Gentiles) says, 'we, when we were babes, were enslaved under the elements of the world.' A few verses later he goes on:
Howbeit at that time, not knowing God, ye were in bondage to them which by nature are no gods: but now that ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God, how turn ye back again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again? Ye observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you, lest by any means I have bestowed labour upon you in vain.
Again, in Colossians ii, 8:
Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world, and not after Christ.…(v. 16) Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day, which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ's. Let no man rob you of your prize by a voluntary humility and worshipping of the angels.…(v. 20) If ye died with Christ from the elements of the world, why, as though living in the world, do ye subject yourselves to ordinances?
The point which concerns us in these passages is the phrase the 'elements' or the 'elements of ​the world.' The word which I have translated thus is frequently used both for the alphabet (or rudiments of knowledge) and also in a physical sense, sometimes for what we call the 'elements,' but still more for the heavenly bodies, particularly the signs of the Zodiac or the planets. There has always been much questioning as to which of these two meanings the word bears in our passages, but whichever is right must be right for all four occasions on which it recurs. Both interpretations can claim high authority both in ancient and modern times. Our Revised Version has definitely committed itself to the first, by translating the word as 'rudiments' in the body of the text, and relegating the ambiguous 'elements' of the old Version to the margin. The main objection to this, to my mind, is the addition of 'the world' in three out of the four cases. 'Rudiments of the world' is a strange expression for an elementary degree of knowledge or enlightenment. But it is perhaps no stranger than many others in the Pauline epistles, and I am far from feeling certain that this first interpretation is wrong. But the second at any rate deserves careful consideration.
Those who adopt this second explanation have, I think, generally supposed that Paul denounces the observation of days, months and years as bondage to the heavenly bodies, because we measure time by them. This has always ​seemed to me a very inadequate reason. In this sense we are all 'in bondage to the elements.' They bring us winter and summer; they send us to bed at night and call us up in the morning. But the interpretation will gain far more force if we suppose that Paul is thinking mainly of the planetary week and perhaps also of the other 'chronocratories' by which a planet was lord of the month or of the year. The devotee of these planetary chronocratories was really under a 'bondage to the elements' from which those who held aloof from such observances were free. The prima facie objection to this hypothesis is that the errors of the Galatians throughout the epistle are represented as Judaistic in character. To justify the suggestion it would be necessary to suppose that the Galatian Judaism was of a semipagan character and in particular that their Sabbath was partly a Jewish Sabbath and partly a Saturn's day. But I am not sure that such a hypothesis is altogether arbitrary. As I have said above, it is almost a necessity that Jewish proselytes and indeed Hellenistic Jews should import into their conceptions of the Sabbath ​some planetary ideas. Indeed, whatever view we take of the doubtful phrase, it is clear that St Paul does regard the Judaism of the Galatians as being to a great extent a return to paganism.
An important link between these two may perhaps be found in the phrase which appears in the parallel passage of the Colossians, where 'worshipping of angels' is one of the errors associated with the bondage to the 'elements of the world.' We not infrequently find hints of the identification of the angels with the stars or planets. In later times we find the seven archangels, whose names were current among the Jews before our era, identified with the seven planets. The analogy indeed is asserted as early as Clement of Alexandria when he says that the first-born and mightiest of the angels are seven, ​and seven also the astrologers say are the planets by sympathy with which all mortal things are brought about. And when in the Apocalypse we find in almost the same context seven stars who are angels of the Churches, seven spirits who may or may not be, but were at any rate thought by early fathers to be, the seven archangels, seven candlesticks which are the Churches, and in Josephus and Philo assertions that the seven arms of the great candlestick signified or represented the seven planets, we are in touch with an association of ideas, which, however vague and undigested, must in minds, where the ferment of Jewish mysticism and that of planetary observance were working side by side, have led inevitably to a confusion or syncretism of the two. Thus, while I feel by no means certain that in either epistle the phrase 'elements of the world' indicates the planets rather than 'rudimentary teaching,' I do think that we may feel fairly confident that Paul found himself in contact with large bodies of converts with whom angelology was coloured by astrological ideas, and in particular the planetary conception of the week was not felt to be incompatible with the Jewish or Christian conception.
So, as I have said, it was inevitable that belief in the Sun's day should contribute to stereotype the sanctity of the Lord's day. And if we look ​further we shall see that the process of exhaustion would in itself, by a combination of Jewish and planetary prejudices, have almost settled the choice of this day for the Christian Eucharist, even if there were not, as undoubtedly there were, other considerations. Saturday was impossible not only, as suggested above, through the wish of the Jewish Christian to avoid clashing with the Sabbath, but also through the profound prejudices of the planetist. It might be all very well for the Jew to use Saturn's day for a holy-day, which to the Gentile mind was not the 'Princess Sabbath' as Heine painted it, but served mainly to enforce taboos. It would be a very different matter to celebrate the Eucharist of joy and thanksgiving on a day with such sinister associations. Jupiter is a beneficent planet and Thursday, as being according to the narrative in Acts the day of the Ascension and according to western reckoning of the Last Supper, might have appealed to Christians, but Thursday is a Jewish fast-day, as also is Monday. Mars is like Saturn a sinister planet and this would rule out Tuesday. Mercury, whose day for some reason or other became at an early date a Christian fast-day, is a neutral planet. In fact, the only real competitor of Sunday was Friday.
I have often wondered whether the Church had any feeling of the planetary significance of Friday. On the face of it indeed it might seem that the day of Venus could have little but evil ​or the Christian, and we have seen that it has been seriously suggested that Justin purposely avoids using such a name in connexion with the day of the Crucifixion. But apart from the fact that Venus is not always the goddess of impure love or of sexual love in general—many will remember the glorious hymn with which Lucretius opens his great poem and in which he hails her as the all-generating power of nature and love—Friday is not, properly speaking, the day of Venus but of the star of Venus—that most beautiful and in astrological lore most beneficent of the planets, in eastern countries said to be visible all day, often ranked with sun and moon as forming the great triad of the heavens, the star in fact which is both evening and morning star. Though it is probably true that the attributes of the planets came to be coloured by the attributes assigned to their patron deities in other spheres, strict thought and indeed strict language did not confuse them. Cicero, for instance, regularly uses 'stella Mercurii,' 'stella Martis,' not Mercurius or Mars. All five, indeed, had in early Greek usage non-divine names. Mercury was Stilbon or the 'twinkler,' Mars Pyroeis or the 'fiery' one, Jupiter Phaethon or the shining one, Saturn Phaenon meaning perhaps the revealer, and Venus was, of course, Phosphorus the light-bringer or Hesperus the evening star. The first four of these alternative names though not entirely lost were largely ​superseded by the divine names familiar to us, the creation, no doubt, of international astrology, which aimed at giving in each nation the nearest equivalent for the (presumably) Chaldaean originals. But Hesper-Phosphor was never superseded. Lists of the planets may be found, where, while the other divine names are given, there is no Venus, but Hesperus or Phosphorus. Now it was on the day of the Evening and Morning Star that Jesus had, as the Church believed, accomplished His redeeming sacrifice, and indeed according to the form of reckoning which began the day at sunset, it was on this day also that He had instituted the rite which Christians met weekly to celebrate. Was the Christian imagination stirred by this association of their Master with the day of the Morning and Evening Star, as it certainly was to some extent by His association with the Sun's day? Not a single line survives, so far as I know, to shew that it was so, and yet it is difficult to think that its significance was altogether missed. For we may remember that while Jesus is never called the Sun in the New Testament He is called the Morning Star. In what are almost the closing words of the Revelation comes the announcement 'I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright, the Morning Star.' Perhaps, too, we may couple with this the mysterious phrase in the message to the Church of Thyatira in the second chapter: 'to him that overcometh and keepeth my words ​to the end, I will give him the Morning Star.' Commentators from early times have often taken these words to mean 'I will give him myself,' and though this interpretation seems to me rather unnatural, it is clear that the 'Morning Star' here is something very closely connected with Christ.
The Church might also have put a Christian interpretation on the double character of the planet of Friday. Tennyson fell unconsciously into language curiously suggestive of the Apocalypse when he wrote in In Memoriam:
And a still more striking association might have been found. One of the fancies that gathered round the planet was that as morning star it shone upon the living, as evening star went down to shine upon the dead. This thought is expressed in an epigram attributed to Plato, best known, perhaps, because Shelley by setting it at the head of his Adonais applied it to Keats:
The thought might well have been applied to Good Friday. No idea was dearer to the early Church than that the Lord passed on the ninth hour of that day to 'preach to the spirits in prison' and to 'harrow hell,' an idea which has left its mark on the Apostles' creed. That Jesus was in this way evening star to the dead and morning star to the living when lifted up on the cross is a conception which might well have appealed to the convert who came to the Church fresh from the lore of Hesper-Phosphor.
However, the fact remains that the Church instinctively chose Sunday and not Friday for her weekly festival and turned the latter into a fast-day. This seems to us from long association more than natural. I am not sure that it really is so. The work of redemption was accomplished and the victory really won on Good Friday and, apart from the doubtful question whether the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist was to be held to belong to Thursday or Friday, one line of thought might easily have looked upon the latter as a day of triumph ​rather than mourning. In fact the Church has frequently, if not generally, celebrated the festivals of the saints on the days on which they were supposed to have died and entered into Paradise. When she instinctively took a different line in the case of her Master, was she subconsciously influenced by the mystery religions around her, in which the death of the god was treated as an occasion for mourning and his resurrection hailed with joy? Possibly so. But I should rather incline to think that the rival claims of Sunday and Friday were so closely balanced both on planetary and historical grounds, that the question was decided by some early convenience of usage which grew into a permanent institution, because from both points of view it would find adequate, if not overwhelming, grounds to support it.
There is one more consideration which I wish to put before my readers. Not only is it probable that the planetary week contributed to fix the day of the Christian assembly on one particular day of the seven, but we may also fairly ask whether it is not partly responsible for the recurrence of this Lord's day at intervals of seven days, or, in other words, for the fact that we have a week at all. When the Christian Church abrogated the Sabbath, it really ​destroyed the raison d'être of the week. It is true that later Sabbatarianism has developed a doctrine, that though the day has been changed, the obligation to set apart one day in seven for religious observance is of divine institution. Such a doctrine might perhaps be reconciled with the vaguer conception of Sabbatical obligation which we find in Deuteronomy, but hardly with the law as laid down in Genesis ii and Exodus xx, at any rate in the eyes of Jews and Christians, They must have believed that the seventh day's rest had gone on continuously from the beginning, or, in other words, that the number of days which had elapsed between the beginning of the first day of creation and the end of any particular Sabbath was an exact multiple of seven. To assemble on the 7x+1th day instead of on the 7xth is not to keep the Sabbath, and the choice lay between keeping it on the proper day or not at all. Now it would have been perfectly compatible with the Pauline view of the law to take the former alternative. Paul might well have argued, as our Lord argued of the indissolubility of marriage, that the Sabbath was not of Moses' institution, but was from the beginning, and the fact that it alone of the ceremonial ordinances of the law has a place in the Decalogue, a point which no doubt has had great weight in modern feeling, would have confirmed this. But as a matter of fact, though Paul no doubt retained the Sabbath for himself, as ​he did the rest of the law, he repudiated it for his Gentile converts with something like horror to the Galatians and with something like contempt, or at any rate indifference, to the Colossians. And there is not, so far as I know, a syllable in the early Fathers which suggests that the Church refused to follow his lead in this matter. But to the Jew a week is only the interval between two Sabbaths and apart from this no sanctity attaches to it. Why then did the Christian Church continue to hold its meetings weekly, instead of accommodating them to other time measurements such as the Roman nundinatio or the numerous sporadic holidays? The answer is because it had imbibed the habit of thinking in terms of seven-day cycles. When it was composed mainly of Jews or those who approached it through the medium of Judaism it was natural enough that the Lord's day should recur every seventh day. But when the Gentile became the overwhelming element, one may doubt whether this practice, which could hardly be said to have apostolic authority, would have maintained itself, if the world had known no seven-day cycle apart from Judaism. The fact then is, I believe, that we owe our religious and civil Sunday to the combination of these two factors, the immemorial familiarity of the Jewish Christian with the Sabbatical week and the recent familiarity of the Gentile Christian with the planetary week.
* ↑ This is in itself a natural idea. As Christians who looked with favour on astrology might identify the planets with angels (v. infra, p. 98) so those who held the system in abomination might identify them with demons. Have we not possibly a hint of this in the one passage in the N.T. where the planets are mentioned (Jude 13)? There the deceivers of the Church are called 'wandering stars (ἀστέρες πλανῆται) to whom the blackness of darkness is reserved for ever.' The diabolical powers who now shine so brightly will be plunged with their devotees into eternal night.
* ↑ Reitzenstein, Poimandres, p. 80.
* ↑ In some articles written in English with an introduction by Professor Ramsay in the Expositor, 1911 (1).
* ↑ Hellenistische Studien zu Weltbild der Apocalypse.
* ↑ xx, 7.
* ↑ 1 Cor. xvi, 2.
* ↑ i, 10.
* ↑ Ignatius, ad Magnesios, 9.
* ↑ Ch. 15. 'Barnabas' seems to follow the version of the Ascension in Luke xxiv where it appears to be placed on Easter Day rather than that of Acts i, where it occurs 40 days after. So too does pseudo-Jerome quoted on p. 94.
* ↑ Ch. 14.
* ↑ The degree of importance to be attributed to this consideration will no doubt largely depend on the currency which we suppose the planetary week to have obtained during the period in which the Lord's day was becoming an unquestioned and sacred element in Christian life. Now we certainly must not assume, and indeed I think it is improbable, that at this period, which may roughly be regarded as covering the later decades of the first and the earlier decades of the second century, the week had obtained anything like the general recognition of Dion's time. On the other hand it probably had all the vigour of a growing institution, and also we may suppose that the temperament which led men at one part of their lives to planetary devotion, would often lead them at another to Christianity.
* ↑ Les Mystères Paiens, pp. 223–229.
* ↑ Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 41.
* ↑ Ch. 33. Also in Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XXII, 30, 5, with some adaptations.
* ↑ ἀνέτειλεν not ἀνέστη. He too like Barnabas inserts the 'also' which may perhaps indicate some uncertainty as to the origin of the practice.
* ↑ Vita Constantini, IV, 18, 3.
* ↑ Migne, Patrologia Latina, 30, p. 218.
* ↑ Ib. 57, p. 371.
* ↑ στοιχεῖα.
* ↑ One of the most striking examples quoted by Boll (v. p. 85) from the Apocalypse is ch. ix, 15, 'and the four angels were loosed, which had been prepared for the hour and day and month and year, that they should kill the third part of men.' Those who are convinced otherwise that the book is permeated by astrology, will naturally find Valens' four chronocratories
* ↑ Thus in the 'Preaching of Peter' quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, VI (Potter, p. 760), the Jews are accused of worshipping 'angels and archangels, the sun and moon.' Philo, De Opificio Mundi, 50 (144), seems to say that the stars are bodies of angels. Compare also Book of Enoch (ed. Charles), ch. 86.
* ↑ V. Schürer, p. 21. In the 'Slavonic' Enoch or Book of the Secrets of Enoch (edited by Charles and assigned by him to the first century A.D.) we find seven heavens, each with their planet in the normal order just as in Cicero and Dante, and in each of these heavens angels are located, though they are not identified with the planets. Cf. also a curious document in Cat. Cod. Astr. Graec. VII, p. 179, where the angels for each day of the week are named.
* ↑ Stromateis, VI (Potter, p. 813)
* ↑ Josephus, Antiquities, III, 6, 7; Philo, Quis Rer. Div. Her. 45 (221).
* ↑ Bouché-Leclercq, L'Astrologie Grecque, p. 607, has an attractive explanation of these words. The third heaven which according to the 'Slavonic' Enoch was the place of Paradise is of course the zone of Venus in the normal astrology and indeed according to 'Enoch' himself. Thus to give the Morning Star is to give Paradise. He supports this by 2 Cor. xii, 2–4, where St Paul tells how he was 'caught up as far as the third heaven and into Paradise.'
* ↑ ἀοτὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ξώοιοιν ἑῷος | νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις ἕσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις. (The translation is Shelley's, though not printed with Adonais.)
* ↑ Compare the most famous of the passion hymns, the 'Pange Lingua': Pange, lingua, gloriosi praelium certaminis, et super crucis tropaeum dic triumphum nobilem.
* ↑ V. note on p. 64.