The resurrection of Christ was NOT on Sunday morning.
Yet today it is almost a universal custom among professing Christians
to celebrate Sunday as the "Lord's Day." WHY?
The incredible TRUTH about the origin of Sunday observance is published for the first time in The PLAIN TRUTH.
BELIEVE it or not, Sunday was celebrated by pagans as the "Lord's Day" over 2000 years before the resurrection of Christ!
It was on Sunday that the worshippers of BAAL met every week. How did this heathen practice invade the Christian Church?
It is time we peer behind the curtain for the facts! It is time we understand HOW, WHEN and WHERE Sunday observance originated. The facts of history will shock you!
Christ NOT Resurrected on Sunday
You have probably assumed that Sunday was called the "Lord's Day" to honor the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But have you ever stopped to prove on which day of the week Christ was resurrected? How can you figure three days and three nights between Friday sunset and Sunday morning? Did you ever notice that Jesus Christ was not there when the women came to the tomb Sunday morning?
"But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came unto the tomb, bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus" (Luke 24:1-3). Of course not! He was already risen the evening before — exactly three days and three nights after he was buried.
There is not space in this article to explain it in full. But you can have the full proof in Mr. Armstrong's astounding free booklet "The Resurrection Was Not on Sunday!" It explains which day was the resurrection, which day the crucifixion. In it you will find the Biblical proof that Jesus was resurrected shortly before sunset on the Sabbath, exactly 72 hours after He was buried.
Then there is a companion article "The Crucifixion Was Not on Friday." It contains the seven proofs from history that in the year Jesus was crucified the Passover was not on Friday.
Now to continue.
Since Christ is not the "Lord" whose resurrection is honored on Sunday, then who is the "Lord" whom the churches worship today when they observe Sunday?
Why Pagans Named Sunday the "Lord's Day"!
How did Sunday become known as the "Lord's Day"?
The answer is found in I Corinthians 8:5. "Gods many, and lords many," wrote Paul to the Corinthians, filled the heathen world. Each of these gods and lords was honored on certain specific days. The chief day of the heathen Mysteries was known as the "Lord's Day." It was celebrated in honor of the supposed Sunday resurrection of Baal, the Sun God. Baal means "Lord" in the Semitic languages. That is how Sunday became known as the "Lord's Day" — Baal's day — more than 2000 years before the resurrection of Christ.
WHO WAS THIS "LORD" BAAL WHOSE FABLED RESURRECTION WAS CELEBRATED BY THE PAGANS ON SUNDAY?
It is none other than Nimrod, the world's first recorded false Messiah! He is mentioned in your Bible in Genesis 10:8-10.
The heathen had been led by their priests into commemorating the death of Nimrod on Friday and his supposed resurrection on Sunday morning. The Gentile nations celebrated their Mysteries every Sunday in Abraham's day and in Paul's day, and professing Christians are celebrating Nimrod's supposed resurrection on Sunday to this very day without knowing it!
But how it is possible that Nimrod — who was known among the heathen as "Baal," the "lord," and the "Sun-God" — came to be honored on Sunday as the "Lord" among Christians? How is it that his day — Sunday — instead of God's Sabbath, has become the chief of "Christian holidays"?
Prophesied to Happen
"Why," you might ask, "does the Bible not warn us that Sunday would be substituted for the Sabbath?"
The answer is that the Bible DOES WARN US! It was prophesied in advance — over 800 years before Sunday crept into the professing Christian world!
Turn to the Book of Hosea. The prophet had a message for the future — for our day! It is a warning to the churches of our land.
Read it!
"And I" — God is speaking — "will punish her" — our people Israel — "for the FEAST DAYS OF THE BAALS."
Sunday is a feast day of BAAL.
Israel "forgot Me, says the Lord" — because they rejected the Sabbath. "And in that day" — the very near future when Christ intervenes in world affairs — "you [Israel] will call Me, 'My husband,' and no longer will you call me, 'My Baal.' For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more" (Hosea 2:13, 16-17, RSV).
How plain! Israel today — and that means the English-speaking world — has adopted the feast days of Baal — and that includes Sunday! Here is a prophecy that the churches of Israel would be celebrating the festivals of Baal — that they would even call God by the names of Baal! That is exactly what they do when they call Sunday the "Lord's Day" — that is, Baal's Day — thinking that they honor Christ.
Our land is filled with the names of Baal. The greatest of Church holidays — Easter — is named after Ishtar, the wife of Nimrod, and yet Christians think that they honor Christ by celebrating this Babylonish feast!
God warns in this prophecy that He will punish our people — and the ministers who have misled them — for rejecting His way and His Sabbath (Ezek. 20:18-21) and adopting the ways and feasts of the Babylonian mysteries.
The apostle Peter sounded the same warning: "But there were false prophets among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them" — by substituting the doctrines and customs of Baal worship and the Babylonian Mysteries in place of the Bible, but still calling these heathen customs "Christian."
Peter continues: "And many" — not the few, but the MANY — "shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth" — the teachings of your Bible, the practice of the original, inspired true New Testament Church — "shall be evil spoken of" — people call it "Jewish" today! (I Peter 2:1-2)
These false teachers — conspirators of the Babylonian priesthood — deliberately, but secretly, entered into the Church in order to clothe their religion with the name of Christ and present it as a new religion to the world.
Now let us consider when and how the Babylonian priesthood wormed its way into the New Testament Church, took the name of Christ, then left — but still claimed to be the true Church — and finally introduced sun worship in the cloak of Christ.
The Surprising Answer
Sunday is directly connected with Easter. Easter is the pagan counterfeit for the New Testament Passover, or Communion service. It was at the Passover — not the Sabbath — that the Babylonian priests, who masqueraded as Christ's ministers, struck first!
Anyone who keeps the Passover knows that Jesus Christ was not resurrected on Sunday. And without a "Sunday resurrection" they could not attach the name of Christ to their Babylonian sun worship!
They knew that they could not introduce Sunday worship services until they had first counterfeited the New Testament Passover, or Communion service, which Paul and the whole New Testament Church celebrated once each year as a memorial of Christ's death. (The booklet "How Often Should We Observe 'The Lord's Supper'?" explains this New Testament ordinance)
Those who kept the paschal MEMORIAL of Christ's DEATH were taunted as "Jewish." The Gentiles, of course, didn't want to be called "Jewish." They wanted to do what their pagan neighbors are doing.
And what was that?
They were celebrating each Sunday a kind of communion called the "sacred mysteries" in honor of the supposed RESURRECTION of the false Babylonian savior Nimrod, known as Baal or Tammuz. The natural thing to do was to introduce this pagan custom into all the churches each week supposedly to honor the resurrection, instead of commemorating the death, of Christ.
This is exactly what occurred!
But wait — since Christ was resurrected on Saturday, that would mean weekly communion would customarily be held on the Sabbath. The Sabbath, remember, was the day on which all Christians were meeting.
Does that mean that the early Babylonian priests who entered the New Testament Church as ravening wolves to devour the flock (Acts 20:29) actually induced the people to observe communion every Saturday?
Indeed it does!
Weekly Communion on Saturday
Here is the testimony of Socrates, the Catholic historian who lived after 400 A.D.:
"In Asia Minor [that was where Paul mainly preached, and where John spent his last years] most people kept the fourteenth day of the [first] month" — the true date of the Passover. "While therefore some in Asia Minor observed the above mentioned day, OTHERS IN THE EAST KEPT THE FEAST [THE COUNTERFEIT OF THE PASSOVER-EASTER] ON THE SABBATH indeed. . ." [The "SABBATH" always means Saturday, not Sunday, in early Catholic literature.]
Why the Sabbath? Because it was still the common knowledge, even among those who had fallen away, that Jesus rose on the Sabbath!
But this is not all the evidence! Here are more incredible facts from the pen of the church historian Socrates:
"For although almost all churches [the false churches, not God's Church] throughout the world celebrate the sacred mysteries ON THE SABBATH of every week" — this was about 400 years after Christ — "yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient tradition, have ceased to do this [though they did so at a prior time]. The Egyptians in the neighborhood of Alexandria, and the inhabitants of Thebais hold their religious assemblies on the Sabbath, but do not participate of the mysteries in the manner usual among Christians in general." (Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, book V, chapter 22. Quoted from Vol. 2 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, pp. 131-132)
Do you really grasp the astounding significance of this historical record? If the Sabbath had not been kept — if the resurrection were not on the Sabbath, there would have been no reason to introduce the pagan "sacred mysteries" — the heathen counterfeit of the Passover — on every Sabbath.
Here is absolute testimony to the Sabbath resurrection of Christ. If Christ had been resurrected on Sunday, certainly the Catholics would have instituted the "sacred mysteries" on Sunday, the day that their heathen neighbors always celebrated the "sacred mysteries,"
which originated in Babylon! Though they adopted the "sacred mysteries" — the mass or communion — from the pagans, they celebrated it on the true day of Christ's resurrection!
Notice further that it was at Rome and at Alexandria — in Egypt, the land of SIN — that Sabbath services first ceased! And it was at Rome — as we shall see — that Sunday was first introduced as a "Christian holiday."