When Time Became Political: How Rome Replaced the Sabbath

In the modern world, time is treated as something to be used, optimized, and consumed. Productivity governs our days, and rest is tolerated only insofar as it restores us to usefulness. This outlook stands in sharp contrast to the biblical vision of time. As The Sabbath observed, Judaism is not primarily a religion of space but of time; a faith centered on the sanctification of time itself. The Sabbath, in this vision, is not a mere pause in labor, but a recurring sanctuary in which human life is reoriented away from production and toward meaning.

This raises a fundamental question for Christian history: if sacred time stands at the heart of biblical faith, when; and by whose authority; was the Sabbath set aside?

The assumption that the Sabbath was naturally replaced by Sunday in the earliest days of Christianity is deeply ingrained, yet historically fragile. The New Testament contains no command abolishing the Sabbath, nor does it record Jesus instituting a new weekly holy day. Jesus worships on the Sabbath, teaches on the Sabbath, and frames his healing ministry within it. The earliest Christian communities, especially in Jerusalem, remain firmly embedded in Jewish patterns of life and worship. If a decisive break had occurred at the apostolic level, it left remarkably little trace.

What we do see instead is a slow and uneven shift that takes place after the apostolic period, shaped less by theological revelation than by historical pressure. As Christianity spread into the Greco-Roman world, it increasingly found itself negotiating its identity within an empire that had grown hostile toward Jewish life. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and subsequent revolts, Jewish customs became politically dangerous markers. Sabbath observance, once a sign of covenantal faithfulness, became a liability.

In this climate, differentiation became a matter of survival. To distance themselves from Jews in the eyes of Roman authorities, Christians in predominantly Gentile centers; especially Rome; began to loosen their attachment to the Sabbath. This was not the result of a clear theological decision, but of a gradual process in which practice shifted first and justification followed later. Anti-Jewish rhetoric emerges in Christian texts precisely at this point, recasting the Sabbath as obsolete, burdensome, or merely symbolic. What had once been a gift was reframed as a problem.

Sunday, by contrast, offered a safer alternative. The Roman world already recognized the “day of the Sun” as part of its weekly rhythm. While early Christians did not adopt pagan sun worship, Sunday fit comfortably within Roman cultural patterns and did not carry the same political risk as the Sabbath. Over time, this pragmatic accommodation acquired theological explanations; resurrection symbolism, creation imagery, the language of the “eighth day.” Yet historically, these ideas appear after Sunday observance had begun to take root, not before. Theology, in this case, followed history rather than directing it.

The irony is that once Sunday became dominant, it was increasingly enforced through law. From imperial decrees to later civil legislation, rest and worship were regulated by the state. What had once been a free and communal act of trust in God became entangled with coercion and compliance. Yet this development raises a deeper contradiction. If Christ did not come to establish an institution; if his kingdom is explicitly not of this world; on what grounds could Rome presume to legislate sacred time at all? How can an empire claim the authority to declare “law” in matters that Christ himself refused to codify? When the sanctification of time is imposed rather than received in freedom, it ceases to be sanctification and becomes administration. Even in modern debates; whether framed in moral, social, or ecological terms; the impulse to legislate sacred time persists, often without reckoning with the more fundamental question of what makes time holy in the first place.

If Sunday is called “the Lord’s Day,” the question that must be faced is not devotional but theological: did Christ himself ever establish a new sacred day? The phrase kuriakē hēmera never appears on Jesus’ lips in the Gospels, nor does he designate any day as newly consecrated to himself. As a technical term for Sunday, it does not emerge with clarity until well into the second century. What the Gospel tradition records consistently, however, is something more demanding: Jesus calling himself “Lord of the Sabbath.” (The sanctified day is marked from Friday sunset through Saturday sunset).

This claim cannot be reduced to a slogan or reinterpreted as a calendar change. To be Lord of the Sabbath is not to negate it, but to exercise authority within it. Lordship here signifies interpretation and fulfillment, not replacement. Jesus does not say that the Sabbath is no longer needed; he discloses what it was always for. The Sabbath is not discarded as obsolete but revealed as meaningful.

Later Christian reasoning often moves too quickly from lordship to substitution, arguing that if Christ is Lord of the Sabbath, he is therefore free to institute another day. But this logic is neither stated nor implied in the Gospels. Jesus never says, “I am Lord of the Sabbath, therefore I give you a new day.” Instead, he repeatedly situates his mission within the Sabbath. It is on the Sabbath that he teaches, heals, and reveals his authority. The Sabbath becomes the arena in which his identity is contested and clarified.

Luke’s Gospel makes this structure unmistakable. Jesus’ public ministry begins on the Sabbath, in the synagogue, with the reading of Isaiah. It ends as the Sabbath approaches, with his body laid in the tomb. Yet even here precision matters. The burial takes place not merely in anticipation of the ordinary weekly Sabbath, but as the high Sabbath of Passover draws near; the festival Sabbath inaugurating the feast. The Messiah rests in the tomb as Israel enters sacred time. His death is framed not by a break with Jewish worship, but by fidelity to it.

This is decisive for theology. Christ does not die to inaugurate a new temporal institution. He dies within Israel’s sacred calendar, aligning his rest with Passover and Sabbath alike. Redemption and rest converge not because the Sabbath is ending, but because its meaning is being realized. The narrative offers no hint of an impending replacement. It insists on continuity.

When Jesus reads from Isaiah; proclaiming release to captives, freedom to the oppressed, and “the acceptable year of the Lord”; he is invoking the sabbatical and jubilee traditions of Israel. These were not abstract spiritual symbols but concrete institutions of liberation. Land rested. Debts were forgiven. Slaves were freed. Property was restored. Time itself was structured to interrupt domination. The Sabbath was never merely about stopping work; it was about dismantling mastery.

Jesus’ declaration; “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”; does not announce the expiration of the Sabbath, but its arrival in embodied form. Fulfillment here does not mean cancellation. Biblically, fulfillment intensifies rather than abolishes. Passover does not cease once redemption deepens; it becomes clearer. In the same way, the Sabbath does not lose its relevance because Christ fulfills its promise. It becomes more intelligible, not less.

From the beginning, Scripture binds the Sabbath to blessing and liberation. At creation, the seventh day is blessed because creation is complete and declared good. In Exodus and Deuteronomy, the Sabbath is grounded explicitly in redemption from slavery. Israel rests because Israel has been freed. To keep Sabbath is to confess that Pharaoh no longer rules time. Rest is not leisure; it is testimony.

For this reason, the Sabbath always carried social consequences. It extended to servants, foreigners, animals, and even the land itself. It relativized ownership and productivity. It imposed limits on accumulation. Long before Rome appears in the biblical story, the Sabbath already stands as a refusal of imperial logic.

Jewish tradition recognized this. The Sabbath was not only remembrance of past deliverance but anticipation of future redemption; a weekly foretaste of the world made whole. The New Testament does not negate this vision; it deepens it. Hebrews speaks of a “Sabbath rest” that remains; not as geographical possession or mere cessation, but as participation in God’s own rest through faith and obedience. Christ opens access to what the Sabbath promised; he does not abolish the promise itself.

This explains why Jesus’ Sabbath actions provoke such hostility. His healings on the Sabbath are not violations but revelations. He heals on the Sabbath because the Sabbath is about release. To restore bodies and free lives on that day is not to break the commandment but to enact it. The charge against Jesus is therefore not ultimately Sabbath-breaking, but blasphemy. His opponents understand that by redefining the Sabbath around himself, he is claiming divine authority.

Yet Jesus never transfers this authority to an institution. He does not legislate a new calendar. He does not impose sacred time by decree. He explicitly refuses to ground his kingdom in coercive power. “My kingdom is not of this world” is not a retreat from history but a rejection of domination. If Christ would not rule through law, then no empire; however Christian its language; can claim authority over what God has sanctified.

Nevertheless, this is precisely what occurs. When Sunday eventually replaces the Sabbath, it does so not by apostolic command but by imperial enforcement. Sacred time becomes regulated time. What was once a sign of freedom becomes an instrument of administration. The day said to honor Christ is imposed by the very structures Christ refused to bless.

The result is not merely a historical shift but a theological loss. In displacing the Sabbath, the church did not simply change a day; it surrendered a vision of time ordered toward liberation, justice, and trust in God. The Sabbath was not abolished by Christ. It was displaced by empire.

What modern church authority must therefore answer is not whether Sunday has been long observed, but by what right it claims the power to abolish what Christ never annulled. An institution that appeals to Christ’s lordship while overriding Christ’s own practice, silence, and refusal to legislate has already crossed a dangerous line. To declare sacred time by decree is not an act of faith but of control. If the church can redefine what God blessed at creation and sealed in redemption, then no commandment is safe from revision, and no limit remains on ecclesial power. The Sabbath stands as a judgment on that presumption. It testifies that holiness cannot be manufactured by authority, that liberation cannot be enforced by law, and that the kingdom Christ proclaimed remains irreducibly free; beyond the reach of empire, and beyond the church’s claim to rule in its place.

Jesus’ Sabbath healings sharpen the argument in a way that pure chronology never can, because they force the theological question: what does the Sabbath mean in the presence of the Messiah? If Jesus had come to render the Sabbath obsolete, the simplest path would have been to treat it as indifferent; ignore it, relativize it, or move the locus of divine action elsewhere. Instead, the Gospels present something more deliberate: Jesus uses the Sabbath as the chosen stage on which the kingdom’s meaning is disclosed.

Notice the pattern early in Luke. Jesus announces his messianic vocation in the language of jubilee; release, recovery, liberty, “the acceptable year of the Lord”; and the narrative immediately shows what that proclamation looks like in practice. On the Sabbath, in public worship, a man is liberated from demonic oppression. Then, in private space, a woman is raised from illness and restored to wholeness. These are not random miracles attached to a convenient day; they are enacted theology. The Sabbath becomes the time in which liberation is not merely promised but performed. And the details matter: the restored woman rises and serves. Healing leads to service, not self-indulgence. The Sabbath is revealed as redemption that produces love, not rule-keeping that produces pride.

At the same time, the narrative shows Jesus’ restraint. Many healings are postponed until after sunset. That is not because Jesus lacks power on the Sabbath, but because he knows the conflict his actions will provoke. In other words, Jesus is not “breaking the Sabbath” casually; he is choosing the Sabbath carefully. He is teaching, in deeds, what the Sabbath is for; and he is doing so in a world where religious authorities have turned the day into a test of boundary-marking rather than a practice of mercy.

The episode of the man with the withered hand makes the issue explicit. The question posed to Jesus is not abstract theology; it is concrete halakhah: “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Jesus does not respond by dismissing the Sabbath as irrelevant. He responds by re-centering its moral and divine purpose. His question; whether it is lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill; functions like a blade: it cuts through a false neutrality. Jesus refuses the idea that Sabbath-keeping is simply the avoidance of certain actions. The Sabbath, for him, is not a moral vacuum. It is a day ordered toward God’s life-giving intent. If the day is for life, then refusing to do good when one has the power to do so is not “keeping” the Sabbath; it is violating it at its heart.

Some interpreters claim that Jesus’ principle; save life; overrides the Sabbath and thus ends it. But that conclusion depends on a hidden premise: that the Sabbath and human restoration are in tension, that mercy is an exception to the day’s meaning. Jesus rejects that premise. He does not say, “Mercy matters more than Sabbath.” He implies something stronger: mercy reveals what Sabbath always meant. When he adds the illustration of rescuing a sheep, he is not abolishing the commandment by appealing to an emergency loophole. He is exposing hypocrisy and restoring proportion. If people will act on the Sabbath to preserve what they value; even an animal, even property; then the refusal to restore a human being is not reverence for God but hardness of heart masquerading as piety.

That is why Matthew’s summary is so theologically important: “It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” This is not a concession; it is a definition. The Sabbath is not merely permitted to include acts of goodness; it is fulfilled by them. Christ’s teaching does not relocate holiness from the Sabbath to another day; it relocates holiness from external compliance to the God-like act of giving life. The Sabbath is thereby rescued from becoming a mechanism of self-justification and restored as an instrument of communion; communion with God expressed as mercy toward neighbor.

Here the Old Testament foundation becomes decisive. The Sabbath command is never delivered as an isolated ritual; it is embedded in a moral economy. It repeatedly names the vulnerable; the servant, the stranger, the dependent, even the animals. The point is not simply that everyone must rest, but that no one may be made to function as a tool for another’s gain without interruption. The Sabbath is God’s weekly check against exploitation. It interrupts the master’s illusion of absolute rights. It tells the powerful: you are not God, and your workers are not yours. In that sense, the Sabbath is not an arbitrary rule; it is a form of justice enacted in time.

Jesus’ controversy with the religious authorities exposes how radically the Sabbath had been reversed in practice. When the correct performance of regulations becomes more important than the relief of suffering, the Sabbath has been hollowed out and turned into its opposite. Jesus is not dismantling the Sabbath; he is dismantling a counterfeit version of it; one that protects systems and reputations instead of people. His grief at hardened hearts is not a side emotion; it is a judgment: a Sabbath that cannot bear mercy has ceased to be God’s Sabbath.

Now press this to its theological conclusion. If the Sabbath is rooted in creation blessing and redemption from slavery, and if the Messiah comes as the definitive agent of blessing and liberation, then the Sabbath is not less relevant after Christ; it is more luminous. Christ does not fulfill Sabbath by discarding it, but by embodying it: he makes visible, within sacred time, what sacred time signifies. The healings are not a declaration of irrelevance; they are a revelation of purpose. The Sabbath is shown to be a weekly sign that God is for life, for restoration, for freedom, for the re-humanizing of those bent under burdens.

And that is why it should never have been abolished. Abolition implies that the thing abolished has outlived its purpose. But Jesus’ Sabbath ministry demonstrates the opposite: he brings the Sabbath’s purpose to the surface and intensifies it. If anything deserves to be abolished in the Gospel narratives, it is not the Sabbath but the religiosity that weaponizes it; religiosity that can scrutinize a suffering body while calling itself faithful, that can debate law while plotting death. Jesus’ question; save or kill; lands with prophetic force because it reveals that the real conflict is never between Sabbath and mercy. The real conflict is between God’s holy time as liberation and human power as control.

In other words, the Sabbath is not a ceremonial relic awaiting replacement. It is a weekly proclamation that the kingdom of God is life-giving, that holiness is merciful, and that no system; religious or political; may claim the authority to define righteousness while refusing compassion. To abolish the Sabbath is therefore not a minor calendrical adjustment. It is to sever the church from one of God’s most concrete, embodied, and socially disruptive gifts: time structured to free the oppressed, limit the powerful, and restore the human person.

Once Jesus’ Sabbath ministry is taken seriously, the later transformation of Christian time under Rome appears not as a natural development but as a profound contradiction. The issue is not merely that Sunday replaced the Sabbath, but that the meaning of sacred time itself was inverted.

In the Gospels, the Sabbath functions as a sign of God’s reign precisely because it interrupts ordinary power. It limits mastery. It suspends economic domination. It compels mercy where hierarchy would normally prevail. Jesus’ healings expose this logic: sacred time is the moment when the claims of suffering override the claims of efficiency, legality, and control. The Sabbath does not serve the system; it judges it.

Roman time, by contrast, is structured in the opposite direction. It is linear, administrative, and instrumental. Time exists to organize labor, extract productivity, and maintain order. When Rome adopts a “Christian” day, it does not adopt the Sabbath’s theology of liberation; it domesticates sacred time into a tool of governance. Rest is no longer a gift that disrupts power; it becomes a regulation that reinforces it.

This is why the shift matters so deeply. Under Christ, Sabbath time confronts authority with the demand to heal, release, and restore. Under empire, sacred time confronts the population with the demand to comply. What Jesus refused to legislate, Rome codified. What Jesus enacted through mercy, Rome enforced through law.

The logic of coercion alone should give pause. In the Gospel vision, holiness cannot be compelled without ceasing to be holy. The Sabbath is sanctified because God blesses it, not because an authority mandates it. Jesus’ refusal to impose observance; despite his unmistakable reverence for the Sabbath; reveals something essential about the kingdom he proclaims. God’s reign advances through invitation and transformation, not through decree. Sacred time belongs to covenant, not to control.

Once Sunday becomes a matter of imperial legislation, sacred time is no longer received; it is administered. The Sabbath was given to announce that no ruler; Pharaoh or Caesar; commands time; to override it is to silence that proclamation. What was meant to limit power is now wielded by it. The church, in accepting this arrangement, trades a theology of liberation for a theology of order.

This helps explain why later Christian defenses of Sunday increasingly rely on abstraction rather than practice. Resurrection symbolism replaces embodied rest. “Spiritual” meanings substitute for concrete justice. The poor, the laborer, the land, and the stranger; so central to the Sabbath command; quietly disappear from the conversation. Sacred time is detached from social consequence. Once this happens, the day can be moved, redefined, or enforced without resistance, because it no longer threatens the structures that govern daily life.

Yet this is precisely what the Sabbath was given to do.

Jesus’ Sabbath reforms do not point toward a new holy day; they point toward a reclaimed one. He restores its capacity to expose hardness of heart, to unsettle religious certainty, and to confront systems that value order over life. The Sabbath remains dangerous because it insists that God’s authority expresses itself not in control, but in compassion.

From this perspective, abolishing the Sabbath is not a neutral theological adjustment. It is the removal of a weekly protest embedded in creation and redemption alike. It silences a commandment that refuses to let the powerful forget the vulnerable, that refuses to let productivity define worth, and that refuses to let time itself become an instrument of domination.

This is why the question is not whether the church had the historical power to change sacred time; it clearly did; but whether it had the theological right. If Christ fulfills the Sabbath by embodying its meaning, and if that meaning is liberation enacted in time, then abolishing the Sabbath is not fidelity to Christ but departure from him. It replaces a sign of the kingdom with a symbol compatible with empire.

If God sanctified the seventh day, and Christ never revoked that sanctification, then to devalue, suppress, and replace that day is not simply “development.” It is an act of usurpation. It is a crime against the order of holiness; because it presumes authority over what belongs to God alone.

Bacchiocchi’s research helps because it refuses to romanticize the process. He shows that Sunday observance arose “in conscious opposition to or distinction from the Jewish Sabbath,” driven by anti-Jewish imperial pressure and conflict between Jews and Christians, and that the Church of Rome played a leading role in inducing the adoption of Sunday while taking measures to devalue the Sabbath “theologically and practically.” That is not merely a sociological detail. It means the change did not begin as a pure act of worship, but as an act of identity management under empire.

And this is the first theological fracture: when the church reshapes what God sanctified in order to appear acceptable to political power, it has already shifted its center of gravity from Christ to Caesar.

How did Rome “get away with it”? Bacchiocchi shows the mechanism in plain terms: delegitimization first, substitution second, enforcement third.

The Sabbath had to be made spiritually suspect in order for Sunday to appear necessary. Bacchiocchi documents the production of arguments that reinterpret the Sabbath as temporary, inferior, even punitive; a sign of Jewish unfaithfulness or divine displeasure. He notes that such “polemic and often absurd arguments” were fabricated precisely to invalidate the Sabbath so Sunday could be justified in its place. This is crucial: the early church did not simply “move” a practice; it had to damage the Sabbath’s moral credibility. And that is already an admission that the Sabbath stood too firmly on divine ground to be displaced cleanly.

Then came substitution. Bacchiocchi argues that anti-Judaism created the felt need for a new day, and that Sunday was chosen for additional reasons tied to the rising prestige of the day of the Sun in the Roman world and its symbolic usefulness for converts. This is where the theological sleight of hand begins. Instead of confessing, “We have chosen a day for strategic reasons,” the church gradually sacralizes the choice by layering symbols: light, creation, resurrection, eighth day. Bacchiocchi even shows how later writers devised sophisticated but unscriptural constructions; two creations, first creation ended, second creation begun; to claim Sunday’s superiority and make the Sabbath appear obsolete.

Notice what is happening: theology is no longer derived from revelation; it is being manufactured as apologetic cover. Bacchiocchi explicitly suggests that these constructions arose in polemic, as tools to defend the new day against pagans and against Sabbath-keeping Christians. In other words, the logic runs backward: practice generates argument; argument is then treated as doctrine. That reversal is not a harmless academic point. It is how institutional power sanctifies its own decisions.

Finally came enforcement. Here the moral seriousness becomes unmistakable. When a practice truly belongs to God, it persuades by truth and attracts by life. When a practice belongs to power, it requires coercion. Bacchiocchi documents Rome’s use of disciplinary strategies to stigmatize the Sabbath: Sabbath fasting, forbidding Eucharist and assemblies on Saturday so Christians would not appear to observe the day with Jews. The logic is chillingly frank. Pope Sylvester’s rationale is reported in precisely these terms: Christians should treat the Sabbath with mourning and fasting “in execration of the Jews,” so that Sunday may be observed with joy. Whatever one thinks of the later church, this cannot be treated as a minor liturgical preference. It is the deliberate cultivation of contempt as a spiritual discipline. It weaponizes sacred time as a boundary-marker against a despised people, transforming holiness into hostility and devotion into exclusion; exposing the absurdity of claiming infallibility while practicing a piety rooted in contempt.

Bacchiocchi’s citation of Canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea exposes a decisive moment in the church’s self-understanding. The canon does not claim that God revoked the sanctity of the Sabbath. It does not argue from Christ’s words or actions. It does not even attempt a theological demonstration. Instead, it issues an administrative prohibition: Christians must not “Judaize” by resting on the Sabbath; they must work on that day and honor Sunday instead. Those who refuse are threatened with anathema; formal exclusion “from Christ.”

—a move that quietly assumes Christ’s authority can be overridden by those who claim to speak in his place.

This move deserves careful scrutiny, because its logic is neither incidental nor benign. The canon does not merely elevate Sunday; it criminalizes obedience to a day God sanctified. In doing so, it establishes a new criterion of fidelity: holiness is no longer measured by conformity to God’s acts in creation and redemption, but by conformity to ecclesiastical policy. The Sabbath becomes suspect not because it is untrue, but because it is associated with a people the institution wishes to distance itself from.

Christ calls himself “Lord of the Sabbath,” situating his authority within the very structure of the day God blessed. The canon, by contrast, threatens exclusion from Christ for honoring that same day. The implication is stark: the institution claims the authority to define loyalty to Christ even when that definition contradicts Christ’s own self-identification. This is not interpretation; it is substitution. The church does not mediate Christ here; it replaces him as the arbiter of holiness.

Logically, this requires an extraordinary assumption: that the church possesses authority not only to teach or discipline, but to override the theological meaning of God’s actions. God sanctifies time; the institution desanctifies it. God blesses; the institution curses. God declares holy; the institution declares dangerous. For this to be coherent, the church must implicitly claim a jurisdiction equal to or greater than God’s with respect to holiness itself. There is no middle position.

The moral dimension intensifies the problem. The canon does not merely regulate practice; it encodes contempt. Sabbath observance is framed as contamination;“Judaizing”; and thus as a threat to Christian identity. Sacred time is weaponized as a boundary-marker against a despised people. Holiness is redefined not by love of God or neighbor, but by repudiation of the other. This is not an accidental excess; it is the operative logic of the policy. Exclusion becomes a spiritual virtue.

What makes this posture especially perverse is its selective amnesia. In directing hostility toward Jews, Rome quietly diverts attention from its own historical role. It was not Judaism that wielded the power of execution; it was Rome. It was Roman authority that crucified Christ, Roman law that authorized the sentence, and Roman violence that later hunted, imprisoned, and butchered his apostles. Yet the institution that inherited Rome’s power structure redirects moral suspicion away from itself and toward the very people from whom Christ and his first followers came. Contempt is thus displaced downward, onto the vulnerable, while responsibility is obscured upward, where coercive power actually resided.

In this light, the charge of “Judaizing” functions not as theological discernment but as moral deflection. It allows an empire-shaped church to distance itself from those it can safely marginalize, while forgetting; or suppressing; the fact that it was imperial authority, not Jewish fidelity to sacred time, that shed the blood of Christ and his witnesses. Such a move does not purify holiness; it corrupts it.

At this point, the later claim to be Vicar of Christ; the representative of Christ on earth; becomes difficult to take seriously.. The Christ represented in the Gospels heals on the Sabbath, identifies his mission with Israel’s sacred time, and refuses coercion as a means of advancing God’s reign. The Christ presupposed by Canon 29 excludes, disciplines, and anathematizes in order to enforce conformity. These are not two emphases of the same authority; they are two different logics of authority altogether.

The hypocrisy in question is not merely moral; it is structural. To claim infallibility while institutionalizing contempt is to redefine infallibility as immunity from moral accountability. Appeals to technical limitation do not resolve the problem; they sharpen it.

It is often objected that papal infallibility is narrowly defined; exercised only ex cathedra, only under specific conditions, only when formally teaching doctrine while seated in the Chair of Peter. Even if this claim is granted in full, it does not absolve the contradiction at hand. The issue is not whether every utterance is infallible; it is whether an authority that claims infallibility at all can simultaneously authorize policies that contradict the moral and Christological substance it claims to safeguard.

Canon 29 of Laodicea, and the broader Roman posture toward Sabbath observance and “Judaizing,” are not presented as fallible personal opinions. They are binding ecclesial judgments, enforced through discipline and anathema, shaping Christian conscience and practice. They determine who may be regarded as faithful and who may be excluded “from Christ.” Whether or not one labels this ex cathedra is beside the point. When an institution claims the authority to exclude persons from Christ while acting contrary to Christ’s own example and teaching, the problem is not technical; it is theological.

Invoking the Chair of Peter does not resolve this tension; it intensifies it. The authority symbolized by that chair is supposed to represent continuity with an apostle who followed a crucified Messiah, not sovereignty over sanctification itself. To sit “in Peter’s chair” while anathematizing fidelity to what God blessed and Christ honored does not clarify authority; it exposes its dislocation. Representation without resemblance is not mediation; it is impersonation.

Of course, all of this presumes a form of papal supremacy that did not yet exist; raising the awkward question of how an authority not yet articulated could already be exercised with such confidence.

Even the symbolism surrounding the chair underscores the irony. The historical object traditionally identified as the Cathedra Petri incorporates imagery from imperial and mythological sources; reliefs associated with Hercules among them; reflecting the church’s long entanglement with Roman culture and power. One need not overstate this symbolism to acknowledge its resonance: the authority claimed is apostolic in name, but imperial in posture. The chair may be invoked as a sign of continuity, but continuity is not guaranteed by furniture; it is demonstrated by faithfulness.

The deeper issue, then, is not whether infallibility is claimed narrowly or broadly. It is that the claim functions selectively. Infallibility is asserted to shield authority from error, but not to restrain authority from injustice. It protects decisions from reversal, but not from moral scrutiny. In practice, it becomes a doctrine that secures power rather than truth; a claim to correctness that does not require Christlikeness.

And this returns us to the central contradiction. Christ never excluded others from himself by decree. He never cursed fidelity to God’s sanctified time. He never weaponized holiness against a people. Any authority that does these things while claiming to stand in his place has already undermined its own claim; regardless of how carefully it limits the conditions under which it speaks “infallibly.”

So the problem is not solved by narrowing the definition. It is exposed by it.

If infallibility cannot prevent the institutionalization of contempt, then it is not guarding the faith; it is insulating power. And if sitting in Peter’s chair authorizes actions Peter himself would have recognized as a betrayal of the gospel, then the appeal to the chair does not confer legitimacy; it raises the question of who, exactly, is being represented.

That question cannot be answered by technicalities. It can only be answered by conformity to Christ. To claim vicariate authority while condemning what Christ honored is to sever representation from resemblance. A representative who acts contrary to the one represented does not mediate authority; he falsifies it.

The deeper theological offense, then, is this: the institution positions itself as the final judge of holiness, even against God’s own sanctification, and as the gatekeeper of Christ, even against Christ’s own practice. Union with Christ is made conditional on obedience to the institution, not on fidelity to God’s acts. This reverses the order of authority. Christ becomes the instrument of ecclesial discipline rather than its judge.

Seen in this light, the anathema attached to Sabbath observance is not simply harsh; it is incoherent. It threatens separation from Christ for obedience to a sign that Christ himself embodied and affirmed. That threat only functions if Christ’s authority has already been subordinated to institutional power. The canon therefore reveals more than a policy decision; it reveals a transfer of sovereignty; from God to Rome.

If theology is to retain any internal coherence, this cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate excess. It is a decisive error of first principles. To curse what God blessed, to exclude in Christ’s name what Christ identified with, and to call this holiness is not merely mistaken. It is a contradiction at the heart of authority itself.

If such an act does not qualify as a spiritual crime; an attempt to rule where only God may rule; then the concept of divine holiness has been emptied of meaning.

Now we have to ask the authority question directly: where did Rome think it got the right?

Rome’s unique ecclesiastical influence in the second century to spread new customs; imperial anti-Judaic pressure that made Sabbath observance socially dangerous; the use of Sun-day symbolism as a bridge for pagan converts; and later legal and canonical enforcement.

But from first principles, every one of those claims fails.

The Sabbath is not holy because a community votes it holy. It is holy because God sanctified it. Holiness is not a social label; it is a divine act. If an institution can revoke what God sanctified, then sanctification is no longer God’s work; it is administrative. The church becomes a producer of holiness rather than a witness to it. That is not Christianity; it is sacerdotal sovereignty.

Worse, it contradicts Christ. Christ refuses coercion. He refuses to establish his kingdom by the machinery of worldly power. He does not legislate sacred time. He heals on the Sabbath to reveal its meaning, not to dismiss it. He calls himself Lord of the Sabbath; Bacchiocchi stresses the logic of that saying: Christ’s lordship over the Sabbath is grounded in the fact that the Sabbath was made for humanity’s good and ultimately in Christ’s authority as Creator and institutor of the day. If Christ’s lordship is grounded in creation, then the church cannot claim a higher jurisdiction without overthrowing the very basis of his lordship.

So how did Rome “get away with it”? Because it replaced Christ’s mode of authority with its own.

Christ sanctifies by giving life. Beast Empires rule by enforcing order. When the church borrows empire’s method, it may gain compliance, but it loses truth. It can produce uniformity, but not holiness.

This is the deepest theological indictment: Rome did not merely change a day. It changed what holiness means. It moved sanctity from God’s blessing to institutional decree. It moved sacred time from covenantal gift to political tool. It took a sign designed to limit domination and bent it into a mechanism compatible with domination.

When the church leans on empire to redefine sacred time, it has already confessed that its “Lord’s Day” needs Caesar to survive. The Sabbath never needed Caesar. It only ever needed God.

What comes from God does not need coercion to be true. What needs coercion to survive has confessed its origin in power.

So yes; call it what it is. To suppress the Sabbath because it looked too Jewish; to enforce contempt through fasting “in execration of the Jews”; to anathematize Christians for resting on the day God blessed; to replace divine sanctification with imperial management; this is not merely unfortunate. It is an offense against God’s authority over time. It is a spiritual crime: the attempted seizure of what belongs to the Creator.

By what logic can Rome claim the power to save when it has acted against the sanctification of God?

from_Sabbath_to_Sunday_samuele_bacchiocchi.pdf

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