The Story of Sunday: How The Day Came To Be

Aisha Moon
Nov 15, 2024
7 min read

sol Invictus, sun god of roman empire — Sol Invictus, the Sun God of the Roman Empire

, 2022 11:06 PM EST

Sunday Is Not Any Other Day

In modern civilisation, we are partial to Sundays, not for reasons related to etymology or history but simply because they are the days when we do not have to work, toil, or rush to offices and workplaces in the morning but can relax and enjoy leisure. Sunday as a holiday is so given that we do not even think about this day as a human cultural construct. The fact is that Sunday is yet another day of the week, a human construct for the sake of understanding and categorising the otherwise fluid concept of time. The collective economic enterprise of us humans made it necessary to denote Sunday as a working holiday. Any other day would have been equally qualified for that purpose, but somehow, the dice of history chose this particular day; atheists would describe it as chance, while theists would still call it a realisation of a pre-existing divine plan.

The Hebrew Sabbath of Judaism

Travelling back in history, one could see that the Sabbath was the day of rest and prayer observed by the Jews from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. The day was counted this way because of the story of Genesis- “And there was evening, and there was morning, one day” (Genesis 1:5). The word Sabbath meant abstain or desist. As no Jew worked on the day of the Sabbath, it was believed that God provided them with food for that day- the divine ‘manna’, the bread from heaven. There will be a Sabbath morning service in the Jewish synagogue where a part of the Torah, the holy book of the Jews, is read. This was on Saturday.

Sabbath and Sunday

When people began to flock to Christianity, abandoning the Jewish and Pagan religions, a question arose about whether to observe the Sabbath or not. A shift happened, and the Sabbath changed to Sunday in Rome during the rule of Hadrian from 117 CE to 138 CE. Roman Christians were eager to differentiate their religious practices from the Jews and Judaism. Simultaneously, Jewish Sabbath observation was banned by Hadrian. The argument for Christianity to embrace it probably was that it was on the eighth day of the week that Jesus Christ was resurrected. Sunday was also a holy day for the pagan religion, as they worshipped the sun, and this religion was prevalent in those days. This factor also might have prompted the new Christians to adopt this day as a holy day.

The Sun Cult

The Sun cult of Mithraism was a pagan cult of Iran where Mithra, or the sun, was the supreme god. Mithraism reached Rome in 100 CE. The Romans already knew about the planetary week as early as 14 CE. Ancient Greece had different calendars for different state provinces. Athens had three calendars based on politics, agriculture, and festivals. Later, after Alexander’s unifying conquests, Greece adopted a more rational calendar system- based on Mesopotamian and Syrian calendar systems.

Romans in ancient times had an eight-day week. The eighth day was for shopping when markets would be alive with rural people bringing in the produce. By the time of Julius Caesar, in 45 BCE, the seven-day week was the norm in many neighbouring regions. During the time of Augustus, the seven-day week and eight-day week were in use. Only in 321 CE did Rome abandon the eight-day week and adopt the seven-day week. Emperor Constantine officially made this proclamation.

Many calendars in the Middle East had seven numbers of seven-day weeks, and the fiftieth day was observed as a festival day. Seven of such 50 days comprised a year, which had 350 days, but another week was added to it as a festival week, and also, after the fourth week, a single day was added. Thus, the total number of days in a year would be 365. This calendar was called the pentacontad calendar. The festival week after the fourth pentacontad marked the Passover celebration in honour of the freedom the children of Israel gained from the oppressive rule of Egypt.

People from Canaan to Mesopotamia believed that the seventh day was the day of evil. This was why the day was set aside for Sabbatical, a day to keep away from fruitful labour, a day of rest. With the dispersion of the Jews across Persia and Rome after the fall of Jerusalem and their expulsion from Babylonia, the day of the Sabbath gained more significance as there were no more temples to worship for the Jewish diaspora, and the symbolic value of the seventh day increased.

Pagan Beliefs and Christianity

Paganism was very much in practice as a religious sect when Christianity grew roots. This was why, even after becoming Christians, many continued to worship pagan gods and followed pagan rituals. There is a mention in the Bible that Peter, Paul, and John, the disciples of Jesus Christ, went to Jewish temples when they went to Jerusalem. Between the Monotheism of the Jews and the Polytheism of the pagans,

Christianity was required to tread carefully to attract people entrenched in both and also differentiate itself from them. The declaration, Alleluia, itself is a Hebrew word. The worship of Jesus Christ as the world's light contained cultural shades of the pagan sun worship. Christianity was compelled to adopt the pagan tradition of feasts as its attempts to ban them proved ineffective. The metaphors of light and fire were as abundantly used in early Christian literature, including hymns, as they were already in the pagan and Judaic religious texts.

Sunday in Christianity

The revelation of John 1:10 mentioned, for the first time in Christian literature, the name of Lord’s Day for Sunday, the first day of the week. By then, the Latin church was already calling the week's first day Dominica. During this period, there were still many pagan worshippers who were politically and socially powerful. They used to worship the Unvanquished Sun, Sol Invictus. For example, the Roman Emperor, Septimus Severus, who ruled between 2 CE and 3 CE, was a sun worshipper.

Even Constantine Chorus, the father of Emperor Constantine, worshipped the sun. Constantine had a kind of mixed faith- he believed in the sun god as well as in Christianity, and he took baptism only upon his deathbed. In the First Apology by Justin Martyr, where he explains Christianity and argues for it before the then-Roman Emperor, Justin says there is a difference between sun worship and the Christian observance of Sunday. He further elaborates that both had different reasons behind them. In memory of Jesus and his disciples together celebrating Passover, Christians used to break the bread in the early days of Christianity, and they used to do this at least once a week. This began to be done on Sundays. Theologically, Sunday is the day of the new creation, as it marks the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

St. Basil the Great wrote in his Treatise on the Holy Spirit,

“Sunday seems to be an image of the age to come… This day foreshadows the state which is to follow the present age: a day without sunset, nightfall or successor, an age which does not grow old or come to an end.”

Naming of the Days of a Week

The naming of the days after heavenly bodies is believed to have originated in Babylon. In history, for the first time, Romans named the days after the seven cosmic bodies they could see with their naked eyes- sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. Still, Romans did not have the concept of a Sabbatical day. (Wednesday had a different origin. This day was named after Woden, the Anglo-Saxon king of the Gods. In Saxon, Wednesday was earlier known as Wodnesdaeg).

The Christian leaders initially tried to change this naming practice. They succeeded in Greece, where the days were renamed rather bland- The Lord’s Day, the second day, the third day, and so on. Despite all these efforts, other than a few exceptions, the naming of the days after the heavenly bodies stuck to the civilisational narrative. During the Reformation, the Catholic Church naming the days was contested, and the Protestants questioned the special status given to Sunday. Protestants saw traces of paganism in this practice, but their arguments also did not stand the test of time.

Sunday in Non-Christian Societies

For non-Christian societies, Sunday has always been part of the weekend and not the beginning of a new week; the week begins on Monday. Practically for Christian societies, even the week now starts on Monday. The US Law Dictionary, written by John Bouvier, still states that Sunday is the first day of the week. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) now defines Monday as the first day of the week. In American society, a special place for Sunday wear existed compared to the clothes people wore on other days. In the Virginian plantations, on Sundays, the plantation owners permitted the slaves to have some special dish for their children- “a little molasses from the ‘big house’”. America has a special reverence for Sundays, which lingers on.

Sunday Lore

In Britain, a centuries-old children’s rhyme states that a child born on Sunday would be “fair and wise and good and gay.” The rhyme goes like this,

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for its living,

And a child that’s born on the Sabbath day

Is fair and wise and good and gay.

Is Sunday Forever?

According to the Julian calendar, which was a modification undertaken by Julius Caesar of the Roman calendar in 46 BCE, December 25 is the winter solstice, marking the shortest day of the year, and the succeeding days lengthen progressively. For pagans, this day also denoted the birthday of Sol Invictus, the Sun God. The early Christian church did not celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ, primarily because the birth date was not exactly known, and Christian religious leaders thought it improper to celebrate the birthdays of prophets, saints and the like. Only on December 25, 432 CE, did Christians celebrate the birthday of Jesus for the first time in history. On that day, in Alexandria, Paul, Bishop of Emesa, preached about Mother Mary and the birth of Christ, and this was the beginning of Christmas.

History has a habit of redefining pre-existing cultural ideas and re-moulding them into new concepts. The concept of Sunday, so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, could one day weaken and disappear as society changes into new economic and social patterns regarding work and rest. I will leave you with one question to ponder- will Sunday have a similar importance as our times, when remote working and work-from-home become the norm due to the technological progress of future times?