Jump to content

Page:Colson - The Week (1926, IA weekessayonorigi0000fhco).djvu/104

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

~ 92 ~

connects it with the law by which the circumcision of the child took place on the eighth day from birth[1]. 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[2], 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[3]. 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

  1. Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 41.
  2. Ch. 33. Also in Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XXII, 30, 5, with some adaptations.
  3. ἀνέτειλεν not ἀνέστη. He too like Barnabas inserts the 'also' which may perhaps indicate some uncertainty as to the origin of the practice.