The Lord’s Day and Acts 20

If the apostles kept the Sabbath, where did the change come from? For many Christians, the answer is a single verse in Acts. Paul and the believers in Troas gathered to break bread, and many take this as evidence that the early church gathered and worshiped on Sunday. It is a serious argument, held by thoughtful people, and it deserves a careful reading.

So we will read not one verse lifted out, but the whole night, in order.

The Whole Night

Acts 20:6-8 We sailed from Philippi after the days of Unleavened Bread, and came to them at Troas within five days; and there we stayed seven days. In yet the one of the sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), when the disciples were gathered together to break bread, Paul began talking to them, intending to leave the next day, and he prolonged his logos λόγος log'-os(word) until midnight. There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered together.

Then a young man named Eutychus, sitting in a window, falls asleep during Paul’s long talk and falls from the third floor. Paul goes down, embraces him, and tells everyone not to be troubled. And then:

Acts 20:11 When he had gone back up and had broken the bread and eaten, he talked with them a long while until daybreak, and then left.

Walk through the scene step by step.

First, the calendar. “We sailed from Philippi after the days of Unleavened Bread.” Luke dates the journey by a feast of the Torah. Paul and his companions had kept Unleavened Bread in Philippi, and only after those days did they set sail.

Second, the stay. “There we stayed seven days.” Paul was in a hurry. As we saw in Chapter 16, he wanted to reach Jerusalem for Pentecost if he could (Acts 20:16). Yet he stayed in Troas a full seven days, and a stay of seven days lets the sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on pass before he takes to the road again.

Third, the gathering. “In yet the one of the sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), when the disciples were gathered together to break bread.”

Fourth, the reason Paul spoke so long. He was “intending to leave the next day.” This was his last night with them.

Fifth, the time. “Many lamps in the upper room.” It was night. Paul talked “until midnight,” and after Eutychus was brought back, he went up again, broke bread, ate, and “talked with them a long while until daybreak, and then left.”

When the Day Begins

To read this scene as Luke’s first readers did, we need one piece of the biblical calendar. In Scripture a day begins at sunset, not at midnight. Evening comes first, and then morning.

By that reckoning, the order of events in Troas is this. On the sabbaton, when the synagogue gathering is over, the disciples come together in the afternoon to break bread. The meeting runs on past sunset into the night. The lamps are lit, Paul talks past midnight, and the gathering breaks up at dawn as Paul sets out. The meeting began on the sabbaton and became an all-night farewell for a man who would leave at first light.

Picture a friend who is moving to the other side of the world. On the night before his flight, everyone crowds into a small upstairs apartment. There is food, and he keeps telling stories. Someone dozes off. No one wants to be the first to leave, and the last guests are still talking when the sky turns gray. Now suppose a historian, two thousand years later, found a description of that night and announced that it proved the group had moved its weekly meeting to a new day. He would have discovered nothing but the conclusion he brought with him.

What Is Not There

Read the passage again and look for three things.

Look for worship. The Greek word for worship, proskyneo προσκυνέω pros-koo-neh'-o, is the word Paul used when he said he went up to Jerusalem “to worship” (Acts 24:11). It does not appear anywhere in this passage.

Look for “every week.” Luke does not say that this was what they did each week. He describes one night.

Look for a day being set. Nothing here says that a day was chosen, appointed or moved. No apostle announces a change, and no one says, “from now on.”

What is there is a meal, a long talk, a fall from a window, a boy brought back alive, and a departure at dawn. It is a farewell dinner, a moving and deeply human scene, but it does not change the calendar.

One of the Sabbatons

The Greek phrase Luke uses in Acts 20:7 is mia ton sabbaton (μία τῶν σαββάτων). Most English Bibles print it as “the first day of the week.” Before we accept that, we need to know two things: what the word sabbaton meant to the people who used it, and what the small pattern mia ton means every time it appears in Greek.

Shabbat and Shabbaton

The Hebrew Scriptures use two related words. Shabbat (שַׁבָּת) is the seventh day, the Sabbath. Shabbaton (שַׁבָּתוֹן) is a solemn rest. Shabbaton appears eleven times in the Hebrew Bible, in ten verses: Exodus 16:23; 31:15; 35:2; Leviticus 16:31; 23:3, 24, 32, 39 (twice); 25:4, 5.

Notice where it falls. Leviticus 23:3 is the weekly Sabbath. Leviticus 23:24 is the Day of Trumpets. Leviticus 16:31 and 23:32 are the Day of Atonement. Leviticus 25 is the year of rest for the land. And at Sukkot the word appears twice in one verse:

Leviticus 23:39 But on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you gather in the produce of the land, you shall keep the feast (chag חַג khag) of the LORD seven days; on the first day is a Shabbaton, and on the eighth day a Shabbaton.

The same word covers both the seventh day and the appointed times.

By the first century, people called all of these by one Greek word, sabbaton (σάββατον). The seventh day was the sabbaton, and the feast days were the sabbaton as well. That was how people spoke, and the New Testament writers wrote as their readers spoke. They used sabbaton for both Shabbat and shabbaton שַׁבָּתוֹן shab-baw-thone', without drawing a line between them. That is why the YLV marks every sabbaton with the note “referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23.” A moed מוֹעֵד mo-ade' is an appointed time, and Leviticus 23 lists them all, beginning with the weekly Sabbath.

In the Byzantine Majority Text (Robinson–Pierpont 2018), the reference text of the YLV, sabbaton appears 68 times in 62 verses, 41 times in the singular and 27 times in the plural. When the plural is joined to “one of,” it points to one day among the sabbatons, one day of the appointed times.

“One of the …”

Now to the pattern. In Greek, mia μία hice means “one,” and ton (τῶν) means “of the.” When a plural noun follows, mia ton means “one of the …”: one picked out of a group. The New Testament uses this pattern again and again, and English Bibles render it as one out of a group, “one of the …,” “a certain …,” or “one day,” and never as “the first.” The only exception is the noun sabbaton.

No one translates these as “the first commandment,” “the first city” or “the first synagogue.” One of the commandments is one of the commandments.

The Same Words, Every Time

Now place sabbaton in the same pattern. These are the places where the New Testament speaks of “one of the sabbatons”:

Luke 24:1 But yet one of the Sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), at early dawn, they came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared, and some others with them.

The grammar is the same as in every line of the first table: mia, one; ton sabbaton, of the sabbatons.

The word for “first” is not there.

The word for “day” is not written either, but it is understood, for mia is feminine, and so is the Greek word for day, hemera (ἡμέρα). Luke writes the whole phrase out in 5:17: en mia ton hemeron, “on one of the days.” So mia ton sabbaton means “one day of the sabbatons,” one day among the appointed times.

The word for “week” is not there either. Greek has a word for a week, hebdomas ἑβδομάς heb'-dom-os, and the New Testament never uses it.

One verse does use the word “first.” Mark tells us when Yeshua appeared to Mary Magdalene:

Mark 16:9 Now after He had risen, proi-prote(at the earliest-first part) of the sabbaton(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom He had cast out seven daimonia(demons, evil spirits).

Here the Greek is proi prote sabbatou πρωῒ πρώτῃ σαββάτου sab'-bat-on. It should be taken word by word, because the grammar settles the question.

Proi (πρωΐ) is an adverb meaning early, at first light. Mark uses the same word a few verses earlier, “very early” (Mark 16:2).

Prote (πρώτῃ) means “first,” and its form shows how it works. It is feminine, singular and in the dative case, the case Greek uses to say when something happens: “at the first.” No noun is written beside it. It describes a point in time.

Sabbatou (σαββάτου) is sabbaton in the genitive singular, “of the sabbaton.” It names the whole to which this first part belongs.

Now consider what the grammar rules out. Sabbaton is a neuter noun, and prote is feminine. In Greek an adjective agrees with the noun it describes in gender, number and case, so prote is not describing sabbaton, as if Mark meant “the first sabbath.” And there is no word for “week” anywhere in the sentence.

So proi prote is one descriptive phrase, a single unit that marks the time: the early, first part. Sabbatou tells us what it is the first part of. Read together, Mark’s words mean “at the earliest-first part of the sabbaton.” The YLV renders it that way, joining the two words with a hyphen to show that they belong together: proi-prote, “at the earliest-first part,” of the sabbaton. Proi is the time when the night ends and the first light comes, and prote is the first of that time, its very front edge. Together they mark the starting point, the moment the light begins to shine. Mark is not numbering the days of a week. He is telling us that Yeshua had risen, and appeared, at the first light of the sabbaton.

Matthew describes the same moment in his own words:

Matthew 28:1 Opse(the latter part of the festival period) yet sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), as it began to dawn toward one sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave.

His word is te epiphoskouse (τῇ ἐπιφωσκούσῃ), from epiphosko (ἐπιφώσκω), “to begin to shine,” the moment when light breaks through. Mark calls it the earliest-first part, and Matthew calls it the beginning of the light. Both point to the same starting point, and neither of them says “the first day of the week.”

So when Luke wrote Acts 20:7, his readers heard what the Greek says: the disciples gathered on one of the sabbatons, one day of the appointed times. Which day it was, and how the resurrection morning fits into the feast, is the subject of Book 4 of this series, The Only Sign. Here it is enough to see what the Greek says, and what it does not say.

The Money Put Aside

A second verse is often placed beside the night in Troas. Paul, organizing a gift for the holy ones in Jerusalem, wrote to Corinth:

1 Corinthians 16:2 According to one Sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), each one of you is to put aside and save as he may prosper, so that no collections be made when I come.

Many read this as a picture of an offering plate passed around at a weekly service. But the Greek says something else. Paul writes par’ heauto titheto thesaurizon (παρ’ ἑαυτῷ τιθέτω θησαυρίζων): “let him put by himself, storing up.” By himself means at home. The word thesaurizo θησαυρίζω thay-sow-rid'-zo means to gather and lay up, to store up treasure. Each person was to set money aside privately, little by little.

Paul also gives his reason: “so that no collections be made when I come.” The aim was the opposite of a collection at a meeting. Paul wanted the money already set aside at home, so that no one would need to gather it when he arrived. This verse does not describe a gathering for worship at all.

The Lord’s Day

The last verse usually brought forward comes from Revelation:

Revelation 1:10 I came to be in the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit) on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a great voice like a trumpet,

“The Lord’s day.” Many assume that this must mean a particular day of the week. But nowhere in Scripture is “the Lord’s day” called Sunday; the Bible never makes that connection. What the Bible does tell us is the day of which Yeshua said He is Lord:

Mark 2:27-28 Yeshua said to them: "The sabbaton(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23) was made for man, and not man for the sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23). So the Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbaton(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23)."

“The Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbaton(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23).” If we want to know which day Yeshua said He is Lord of, that is the answer He gave.

The three verses said to show a change of day, then, turn out to be a farewell dinner that ran until dawn, money set aside at home, and a “Lord’s day” that the Bible never calls Sunday. None of them says that the Sabbath moved.

Still, one objection remains, and it carries weight. Many people say, “Even so, the Sabbath is the one commandment the New Testament never repeats. Nine of the ten are repeated, and one is not.” That claim deserves to be tested.