The Jews Worship on Saturday: Isn’t that the Bible Sabbath?

The King James Version (KJV) is mostly used in these lessons. Click here to access the KJV online.

A common assumption made by Saturday sabbatarians is that Saturday must be the Bible Sabbath because it is the day kept by the Jews. The reasoning goes: "The Jews would never worship on any day except the true Sabbath. Therefore, Saturday must be the true Sabbath because that is when the Jews worship." A sterling example of circular reasoning.

It is true that the Jews have never lost track of the true Sabbath. However, by their own admission, the Jews deliberately and knowingly changed their calendar by which the true Sabbath was calculated. The persecution following legislation which forbade the "Jewish computation of the calendar" was so extreme that, in the end, the Jews gave up their calendar handed down from Creation through Abraham and Moses and adopted a calendar "fixed" by the vernal equinox.

The Jews are very open that their original calendar was set aside under the Roman persecutions which followed Constantine’s calendar legislation. "Under the reign of Constantius (337-362) the persecutions of the Jews reached such a height that . . . the computation of the calendar [was] forbidden under pain of severe punishment."¹They also freely admit that the original Sabbath was linked to the phases of the moon:

The New Moon is still, and the Sabbath originally was, dependent upon the lunar cycle . . . Originally, the New Moon was celebrated in the same way as the Sabbath; gradually it became less important while the Sabbath became more and more a day of religion and humanity, of religious meditation and instruction, of peace and delight of the soul. ²

Intercalations [of the calendar] were determined at meetings of a special commission of the Sanhedrin. But Constantius, following the tyrannous precedents of Hadrian, prohibited the holding of such meetings . . . How difficult the fixing of the annual calendar consequently became may be judged from an enigmatic letter addressed to Raba . . . and preserved in the Talmud . . . .

Almost the whole Diaspora depended for the legal observance of the feasts and fasts upon the calendar sanctioned by the Judea Sanhedrin; yet danger threatened the participants in that sanction and the messengers who communicated their decisions to distant congregations. . . . As the religious persecutions continued, Hillel determined to provide an authorized calendar for all time to come, though by so doing he severed the ties which united the Jews of the Diaspora to their mother country and to the patriarchate. ³

As a result of the extreme persecution associated with any attempt to use the Biblical calendar, Hillel II, the last President of the Sanhedrin, created a reformed calendar, tying the New Year to the vernal equinox, and adopting the continuous weekly cycle of the Julian calendar. The traditions of men, preserved in the Talmud and against which Christ sought to free the people, teach that it is not sinful to break the Sabbath so long as one does not know when it is. Under such circumstances, one’s only obligation is to keep one day in seven. By establishing a fixed calendar based on his authority as president of the Sanhedrin, Hillel II set aside the original calendar and established Saturday as the modern Jewish day of worship, thus "freeing" the Jews from the condemnation of the law since they did not know when the true Sabbath occurred.

The original calendar of Creation, used by Christ, the apostles and apostolic Christians, was set aside by the Jews themselves due to the intensity of the persecution following Constantine’s politically driven efforts at calendar reform:

Declaring the new month by observation of the new moon, and the new year by the arrival of spring, can only be done by the Sanhedrin. In the time of Hillel II [4th century A.D.], the last President of the Sanhedrin, the Romans prohibited this practice. Hillel II was therefore forced to institute his fixed calendar, thus in effect giving the Sanhedrin’s advance approval to the calendars of all future years.⁴

This is no secret among the Jews. Louis Finkelstein of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in a letter to Dr. L. E. Froom, dated Feb. 20, 1939 readily admitted, "The present Jewish calendar was fixed in the fourth century."⁵Maimonides and most other Jewish chronologers agree that the modern Jewish calendar is based upon the "mean motions of the sun and moon, the true [calendar] having been set aside."⁶

The Creator’s calendar is very accurate. It is also very "user-friendly". The weekdays and Sabbaths of every month always fall on the exact same dates of every month.⁷ When Hillel II "fixed" the calendar, disregarding the barley law of Moses and tying the start of the year to the spring equinox, certain problems arose. The new moon would sometimes fall on a day of the Gregorian week which threw off the feasts. As a result, rules of postponement were established – something that was never necessary when the original calendar was in use.

The decrees of Nicæa, "destroyed the Temple of the Law in Judea," as it were, and the ancient regulation of Moses for harmonizing the course of the moon with that of the sun was ultimately replaced by calculations involving the vernal equinox,⁸after which the nearest full moon was chosen to be the paschal moon. From this equinoctial point, the [Catholic] church built up her ecclesiastical calendar and its Easter feast. It is easy to gloss over the real significance of the Council of Nicæa and its bearing upon the Jewish system of time, for though the church desired to depart from Jewish calculation, and to adopt a movable feast,⁹yet in the end, it turned out that both the Jewish and Roman Catholic festivals came to be computed from the same point of time – . . . the vernal equinox.¹⁰

The controversy over calendars was not resolved with Constantine’s edict. Rather, it opened the door for religious persecution of Christians, by Christians. Those who were convicted by conscience that the Passover (as well as the Sabbath) should be observed by the Biblical calendar were unwilling to accept civil legislation in the realm of religion. These continued to use the luni-solar calendar in the face of intense persecution.

Christians on the fringes of the Roman Empire used the Biblical reckoning centuries after Constantine. When Catholic princess, Margaret, married Scottish king Malcolm III (1031-1093) in 1070, she was instrumental in establishing Catholicism in Scotland. Prior to that time, Scottish priests still married, still observed Passover on Nisan 14 (regardless of the Julian date) and still worshipped on the seventh-day Sabbath – likely by the Biblical calendar as well, as they were observing Passover by that calendar.

The Council of Nicæa was the culmination of many years of compromise with paganism. It climaxed in legislation which outlawed the only calendar by which the true seventh-day Sabbath, and also the true date of the resurrection, may be found.

The spirit of concession to paganism opened the way for a still further disregard of Heaven’s authority. Satan, working through unconsecrated leaders of the church, tampered with the fourth commandment also, and essayed to set aside the ancient Sabbath, the day which God had blessed and sanctified (Gen. 2:2, 3), and in its stead to exalt the festival observed by the heathen as "the venerable day of the sun." ¹¹

Counterfeit worship requires a counterfeit calendar and the Council of Nicæa provided it. Biblical calendation was supplanted by pagan solar calendation, and the planetary week replaced the Biblical week which depended upon the moon.

This planetary week was paganism’s counterfeit of the true, Biblical week instituted by the Creator in the beginning of Earth’s history. In the counterfeit week employed in ancient paganism "the venerable day of the Sun" was esteemed by the heathen above the other six days because it was regarded as sacred to the Sun, the chief of the planetary deities . . . Just as the true Sabbath is inseparably linked with the Biblical week, so the false Sabbath of pagan origin needed a weekly cycle. Thus we have found that the planetary week of paganism is Sunday’s twin sister, and that the two counterfeit institutions were linked together . . . .¹²

When the historical facts of the Julian calendar are understood, it becomes clear that Sunday is not the only worship day founded upon paganism. Saturday, dies Saturni, as the original first day of the pagan week, is also a counterfeit. As the seventh day of the modern week, it is a counterfeit for the true seventh-day Sabbath of the Bible.

In 321 A.D., Constantine, emperor of Rome . . . by civil enactments made "the venerable day of the Sun," which day was then "notable for its veneration," the weekly rest day of the empire . . . The enforcement of the weekly observance of Sunday gave official recognition to the week of seven days and resulted in the introduction of it into the official civil calendar of Rome. The Romans passed that calendar down to us, and in it we have still the ancient planetary titles of the days of the week. ¹³

The aftershocks of the Council of Nicæa are still felt, world-wide, today. Of any direct or indirect attack against the truth of Yahuwah, this one act has had the most profound and far reaching affect. All the world has united in using this calendar in its modern, Gregorian form. Entire churches base their religious observance off of this pagan calendar. The foundation laid by Constantine’s "Sunday law" is the reason why Saturday and Sunday keepers worship on the days they do. The decrees of Nicæa legislated into place an entire counterfeit system of religion with its pagan solar calendar. Thus the knowledge of the Creator’s calendar with His true seventh-day Sabbath has been buried under the accumulated weight of centuries of continuously cycling weeks.