ed order, deemed it to be good and complete, and rested from His labor. No doubt, the earliest Hebrew Christians maintained, at least for a short while, the custom of the Sabbath prior to adopting the pattern of worship which instead commences on and commemorates the first day of the week, which, by the end of the first century C.E. had come to be known as the Lord's Day.
Only once in the language of the New Testament does the phrase "Lord's Day" appear. It is obvious, however, as we recount the time of the Passion and Resurrection, in temporal relationship to the Passover according to the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel According to John, that Jesus was crucified on the day preceding the Sabbath, and that He rose on the first day of the week. Paul attributes to the first day of the week the collection of monies (I Cor 16:2), and he celebrated the Eucharist at Troas on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).
Talley presents a learned, albeit lengthy, discussion of the timing of the Passover, Crucifixion, and Resurrection in relation to the establishment of "the Lord's Day." However, in maintaining that the early church must have based its ritual on the Johannine chronology, in contrast to that of the Synoptists (see n. 4), Talley cautions that placing extraordinary emphasis on the early Christian observance of the Pascha requires a more formal institution than probably existed prior to the mid-to-late second century. Instead, he reasons that Paul's treatment of the Eucharist as a type of Passover/Last Supper is not limited to an annualized festival (a tradition from which Paul himself would not have been easily separated), but rather is a celebration of Christ's death which can be revisited as often as the Eucharist is observed.
Clearly, the observance of the first day of the week as the Lord's Day was firmly established by the end of the first century. Talley contends that the Christian observance of first ...