Commenting on the Seventh Day Adventist misunderstanding of the history of Sunday worship, Paul A. Hartog wrote that:
Ellen G. White wrote, “The keeping of the counterfeit Sabbath [Sunday observance] is the reception of the mark [of the beast]” (Spirit of Prophecy, 4:281). She continued,
In the first centuries the true Sabbath had been kept by all Christians . . . Constantine, while still a heathen, issued a decree enjoining this general observance of Sunday as a public festival throughout the Roman Empire. After his conversion, he remained s staunch advocate of Sunday, and his pagan edict was then enforced by him in the interests of his new faith. But the honor shown this day was not as yet sufficiency to prevent Christians from regarding the truth Sabbath as the holy of the Lord. Another step must be taken; the false Sabbath must be exalted to an equality with the true. A few years after the issue of Constantine’s decree, the bishop of Rome conferred on the Sunday the title of the Lord’s Day. (Spirit of Prophecy, 4:55).
According to White, Constantine attempted “to unite the conflicting interests of heathenism and Christianity,” so that “the day of the sun was reverenced by his pagan subjects and was honored by Christians” (Great Controversy, 53). The bishops of his era “perceived that if the same day was observed by both Christians and heathen, it would promote the nominal acceptance of Christianity by pagans, and thus advanced the power and glory of the church” (Ibid.) . . . In order to emphasize a Constantinian shift toward Sunday observance, White claimed that faithful Christians as a whole practiced Sunday Sabbath observance . . . Nevertheless, contemporary Seventh-Day Adventist scholars knowledge that a charge of Constantine initiating Sunday (the “Lord’s Day”) observance in the fourth century cannot be confirmed by the historical evidence. Samuele Bacchiocchi, an accomplished Adventist academic trained at the Gregorian Pontifical University, re-formatted Adventist discussion by pressing Sunday worship back to AD 135 (Bacchiochi, From Sabbath to Sunday. “The earliest explicit references to the Christian observance of Sunday are by Barnabas [about 135] and Justin Martyr [about 150], [Bacchiocchi, Divine Rest for Human Restlessness, 233]) . . . Bacchiochi recognized that he had diverged from Ellen G. White’s explanation. He acknowledged, “I differ from Ellen White, for example, on the origin of Sunday. She teaches that in the first centuries all Christians observed the Sabbath and it was largely through the efforts of Constantine hat Sunday-keeping was adopted by many Christians in the fourth century. My research shows otherwise” (Bacciocchi, email message posted to the “Free Catholic Mailing List”) (Paul A. Hartog, “Constantine, Sabbath-Keeping, and Sunday Observance” in Edward L. Smither, ed. Rethinking Constantine: History, Theology, and Legacy [Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick Publications, 2014],105-29, here, pp. 111-12, 113)
Hartog’s essay does a great job as refuting the myth that Constantine changed the Lord’s Day from Saturday to Sunday, while at the same time, correctly noting that:
[A]lthough Constantine did not change the day of worship for Christianity as a whole, he did play an important role by insisting upon Sunday as a day of rest from labor within imperial legislation. And the Konstantinische Wende did affect Christian liturgy. After Constantine, the term “Sabbath” came to be used regularly for Sunday—the “Lord’s Day.” The Council of Laodicea (ca. 364/365) declared that Christians should do no work on Sunday, “if possible.” Eventually, increasing legislation guaranteed Sunday as an entire day of rest. (Ibid., 128)
Further Reading
From Sabbath to Lord's Day: A Biblical and Theological Investigation, ed. D.A. Carson
Justo L. González, A Brief History of Sunday: From the New Testament to the New Creation