Free The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan Page A

Constantine’s true personal beliefs, his fusion of church and state ended what was in essence an experiment begun by Caesar and Augustus to decouple religion from the government--and religion from time. Its impact would utterly transform Europe over the next several centuries, affecting all aspects of life, including the way people kept track of calendar days.
     
    Inevitably Constantine’s new order, like Caesar’s three and a half centuries earlier, got around to putting its stamp on the calendar, in this case by creating a new, religiously inspired system of measuring time. He did this by leaving intact Caesar’s basic calendar of 365 1/4 quarter days and 12 months, while making three major changes within this structure: the introduction of Sunday as a holy day in a new seven-day week; the official recognition of Christian holidays such as Christmas with fixed dates; and the grafting onto the calendar of the Easter celebration, which is not a fixed date, being tied to the Jewish lunar calendar in use when Christ was crucified. The existence of these two types of holy days, fixed and floating, is where Christians get the terms ‘immovable feast’ and ‘movable feast’.
    The emperor’s first move to reorder the calendar came in an edict issued in 321, nine years after the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge, when he established Sunday as the first day in a seven-day week--a unit of time unknown in the original Roman calendar of kalends, nones and ides.* According to Constantine’s dictate, all citizens other than farmers were ordered to abstain from work on dies Solis-- the Sun’s day. He also ordered the courts closed for litigation and the commanders of the army to restrict military exercises so that soldiers could worship the god of their choice.
    *The Romans did have an informal cycle of market days held every eight days
    Constantine’s selection of Sunday was not without controversy. It blatantly rejected the long-held observance of Saturday as the sabbath by Jews and by Roman pagans, who in the late empire had set aside Saturday--Saturn’s day--as a day to rest and worship.
    Saturday at one time was the choice of many Christians as well, since most early believers were Jews who felt obligated to keep their traditional holy day on this seventh day in the Jewish week. But because Jesus was crucified on the sixth day of the Jewish week and, according to the Bible, rose from the dead on the first day of the next week--a Sunday--some early Christian leaders decided to shift their sabbath to Sunday, and to mark this day each week by a special service featuring the Eucharist.
    But old ways died hard. As late as the turn of the second century, Christian prelates were still complaining about certain Christians who continued to favour a Saturday sabbath, which one bishop condemned in a letter as a ‘superstition’, describing ‘the show they make of the [Jewish] fast days and new moons’ as being ‘ridiculous and undeserving of consideration’.
    By the time Constantine issued his edict Christians had largely settled the issue of Saturday versus Sunday, with Sunday the victor. The emperor, however, did not strike a purely Christian line with his new law. By placing the sabbath on the day devoted to the sun in the seven-day cycle of pagan planet-gods, the emperor also curried the favour of the Mithraists and other sun worshippers. Constantine’s official designation of this day in the Roman legal code as dies Solis cannot have pleased his new hierarchy of Christian bishops, priests, and laymen, even if some tried to justify the emperor’s decision by insisting that Christ, like the sun, was the light of the world.
     
    As for Constantine’s new seven-day week, it had already been gaining in use and popularity among Romans because of its astrological significance--seven referring to the number of planets (including the sun and the moon) then thought to be in the sky, each of which ‘controlled’ a day of the week.