www.bible.ca
www.bible.ca is a web site operated by Steve Rudd,
and contains a lot of material that we would likely agree with. However, we are hesitant
to accept his material at face value because of some pretty major discrepancies.
On other parts of our site, we deal with criticisms that
www.bible.ca levels directly at Ellen White. For this analysis
here, we'll
instead take a look at some information from www.bible.ca that
touches on one of Mrs. White's favorite topics, the seventh-day Sabbath. On one of his pages,
Steve makes the following claims:
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The Historical Record!
- Christians always worshipped on the first day (Sunday)
. . .
- While Sabbatarians will quote 20th century authors who guess
about what happened 1900 years earlier, we quote Christians whose writings
are 1900 years old and spoke what they saw!
The record of history, from the Resurrection of Christ, [sic] Christians have always
worshipped on the first day of the week (Sunday) and never on the Sabbath (7th day).
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Then to back up this rather bold claim, Steve gives a number of quotations from the
church "fathers."
Here are just a couple:
- 90AD DIDACHE: ...every Lord's day, hold your solemn assemblies, and rejoice: for he will be guilty of sin who fasts on the Lord's day, being the day of the resurrection... (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 7, pg. 449)
- 90AD DIDACHE: And on the day of our Lord's resurrection, which is the Lord's day, meet more diligently, sending praise to God that made the universe by Jesus, and sent Him to us, and condescended to let Him suffer, and raised Him from the dead. Otherwise what apology will he make to God who does not assemble on that day to hear the saving word concerning the resurrection...? (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 7, pg. 423)
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Sound pretty good? Actually, these two quotes are neither from the Didache nor from 90 AD.
They're from the Apostolic Constitutions, a document from around 250 to 350 AD.
By that
point in time, some Christians had started calling Sunday the Lord's Day, a practice dating
from the second half of the second century AD. While most Christians were still worshipping
on the Sabbath, some were not, and many were worshipping on both the Sabbath and Sunday.
How do we know that? Why, the very document that Steve Rudd quotes from on
www.bible.ca tells us so. Take a look at what Steve omitted from these
two quotes:
- [c. 250-300 AD Apostolic Constitutions:] . . . every Sabbath-day
excepting one, and every Lord's day, hold your solemn assemblies, and rejoice
[without fasting] . . . .—bk. 5, sec. 3, xx.
- [c. 250-300 AD Apostolic Constitutions:] . . . but assemble
yourselves together every day, morning and evening, singing psalms and praying
in the Lord's house: . . . but principally on the Sabbath-day. And on
the day of our Lord's resurrection, which is the Lord's day, meet more diligently
. . . .—bk. 2, sec. 7, lix.
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Of course you see the problem. You cannot ethically use a quotation that commands
Christians in 300 AD to meet "every Sabbath-day" and "principally on the Sabbath-day"
to prove that "Christians have . . . never [worshipped] on the Sabbath."
We pointed out these and other discrepancies about these quotations to Steve, and
after emailing back and forth a number of times, he replied:
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Ok Bob, you were very quite right. I fired the quote collector guy!
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That raises the question, Who was the quote collector? Did Steve tamper with these
quotations himself, or did he "plagiarize" them from someone else? (We use the term
"plagiarize" only because his site repeatedly accuses Ellen White of plagiarism.)
His page gives no credit whatsoever to any secondary source from which he might have gotten
these tampered quotations, but for that matter, neither do the other web sites
which copy these quotes verbatim without giving credit, even falsely stating that
they come from "90AD DIDACHE."
Well, Steve updated the page in question in November of 2003, though as of June 2004,
he has not updated three other pages that also refer to some of these so-called Didache
quotes. While the page in question
still says, "The record of history, from the Resurrection of Christ, [sic]
Christians have always worshipped on the first day of the week (Sunday) and never
on the Sabbath (7th day)," it also gives more context for these quotes so that the
reader can see that his statement is false. All the more is this true since he included the
following quote:
- 350 AD APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS ". . .
But keep the Sabbath,
and the Lord's day festival; . . . ."
(Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 7)
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Yes, it's absolutely true. The very document that's supposed to prove that "Christians
. . . never [worshipped] on the Sabbath" actually commands Christians
to not only worship on the Sabbath, but also to keep the Sabbath,
around 300 AD.
And that's just part of
why we feel that the information on www.bible.ca
is unreliable, and why we are reluctant to accept any of it at face value.
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