The Churches of God (COGs) are pretty much unanimous in arguing that Acts 20:7 describes a one-time, farewell meeting with Paul and the disciples on Saturday night, rather than a Sunday church service. They have to argue this because agreeing that Luke here records a regular Sunday church service would seriously undermine the COGs’ claim that Sunday worship crept into the primitive church after the death of the apostles at the impetus of the pagan emperor Constantine and the apostate bishop of Rome.

Let’s think about this.

First, what did Luke mean when he wrote, “And upon the first day of the week”? Was he reckoning time by the Jewish method, from sunset to sunset, or by the Roman method, from midnight to midnight?

When I was a member of a COG with my Sabbath-keeping brethren, I never thought about other days of the week beginning and ending at sunset, only the Sabbath and holy days. The rest of the time, I hewed to the Roman reckoning of time, where days began and ended at midnight. I lived in a society where everything followed the Roman manner of timekeeping. Thus, I never spoke of Saturday evening as Sunday. It was always Saturday evening. The minute the Sabbath was over, I reverted to Roman reckoning until the next Sabbath.

I suspect that ancient Christians–Gentile converts especially–did the same because daily civic life would have been ordered around the Roman reckoning. The only time the Jewish reckoning would have mattered was in calculating the beginning and ending of a Sabbath or holy day.

We see evidence of this in John 20:19, where the apostle John followed the Roman reckoning when he referred to Sunday evening after sunset as “being the first day of the week” (Jn. 20:19) not the second. So, it is quite possible that it was commonplace, even for Jews, to use the Roman reckoning of days from midnight-to-midnight, except when speaking of a Sabbath or holy day.

Here, in Acts 20:7, the Sabbath has certainly passed or Luke would have surely said that Paul met with the disciples on the Sabbath. If this meeting occurred on a Saturday night, then it seems unlikely that Paul kept the Sabbath with these disciples at all. Else why would Luke describe a separate evening gathering of the disciples “on the first day of the week” when they had already gathered a few hours earlier for the Sabbath?

Next, Luke states that the first day of the week was when the disciples gathered together to break bread. Any effort to pass this off as an incidental reference to an ordinary weekday that happened to be a convenient time for a farewell meeting runs immediately into problems. First is the question of why, in that event, Luke would even mention the day of the week?

Luke never mentions any day of the week in his gospel or in Acts except the Sabbath, the Preparation, and the first day of the week. The Sabbath and Preparation, of course, have a definite importance. But what is the importance of the first day of the week?

In Luke’s writings, the first day of the week was the day Christ rose from the dead (Lk 24:1). It was also on the evening of the first day of the week that Jesus broke bread with his disciples after his resurrection (Lk. 24:13-35). And it was on Pentecost (Sunday) that the disciples received the Holy Spirit and commenced to break bread together from house to house, per the apostles doctrine (Ac. 2:42, 46).

Here in Acts 20:7, the disciples also came together to break bread, and Eutychus was miraculously “resurrected” back to life (vss. 9-10). These two events parallel earlier events that Luke describes as also occurring on the first day of the week. Paul performed many miracles (e.g. Ac. 14:8-10; 28:8-9), but Luke never marked any of them with a day of the week, except in this one instance. This suggests that the Resurrection Day had already attained some special significance in the early church.

Of course, there is nothing here about Sunday being a holy day, a day of rest, or a substitute for the Sabbath. But it is spoken of as the regular day when the disciples gathered together to “break bread.”

But what is meant by the phrase “break bread”? And was the resurrection really on Sunday? These are topics for another post.