As I said earlier, I think we often read the Book of Acts with the assumption that the Apostles observed Sunday from earliest times. One need not make that assumption and there are some reasons for not doing so. In at least one case where the early disciples met to ‘break bread’, it becomes obvious from the text that this meeting actually took place upon what we would think of today as Saturday evening. Remember how people calculated the start and end of each day before Timex could ‘take a licking and keep on ticking’. The day started at sunset on the evening of what we would now deem the prior day, at least in Jewish reckning.
In one case, Paul was preaching ‘on the first day of the week’ long into the night (Acts 20: 7-12), when Eutycus fell asleep and tumbled from a window, apparently killing himself. Paul raised Eutycus from the dead and then finished preaching. When day broke, Paul said goodbye to his friends and departed. It looks very much as if the ‘evening of the first day of the week’ fell upon what we today call Saturday night, and one could argue with some degree of force that Christians may have been in the custom of closing the Sabbath each week with a Vespers meal–remember that many practicing Jews do this to this day (I doubt they call it ‘Vespers’), because one is not supposed to work needlessly to prepare food on the Sabbath itself. ‘Breaking bread’ is more commonly used in Scripture to describe a meal, not an observance of the Eucharist.
By the same token, the ‘first day of the week’ was set aside for gathering tithes and offerings among Christians probably for the same reason this was done amng observant Jews according to some authorities: because in Jewsih law, one could not handle money nor drive livestock nor transport goods on the Sabbath. (Remember that offerings in those days were often done in-kind–rather than giving money, one often contributed livestock or salable goods).
I actually doubt that the reason you are giving for the shift was used as justification for the switch from Saturday to Sunday. It took long centuries for a really sophisticated understanding of the Eucharist to emerge, and I think you are reading backward into the 1st century a development of theology which had not yet taken place. In fact, I don’t believe that Sunday was ever observed as a day set aside specially for worship within the lifetimes of the Apostles. However, the Apostles seem clearly to have become increasingly unconcerned to observe Saturday as a special day of the week for Christians. I think the custom of setting aside Sunday slipped in after the first generation of Christians had passed from the scene, but I also think there is nothing improper about this change based upon the texts I cited earlier.
that someone at Catholic Answers has written about Seventh-day Adventists. They have historically been explicitly anti-Catholic–the office of the Papacy is considered the ‘little horn’ of the Book of Daniel–e.g. the Antichrist–though Adventists stop short of saying that particular popes are themselves the Antichrist.
