II. KISIM
Sunday Law - Pazar Günü Yasası
To some Christian leaders it made sense to take advantage of the popularity of Sunday. Especially Sunday observance would make Christianity more attractive to the pagans who already worshipped the sun on that day. For example, the Roman Emperor Constantine was, like Aurelian and Diocletian before him, a worshiper of the sun. He was the first Emperor to profess belief in Christianity.
It was during a crusade against his rivals that he was supposedly converted to Christianity. Sympathetic biographers claim that before a climactic battle near Rome Constantine saw a vision of a flaming cross in the sky. He credited this vision with his subsequent victory, and declared himself to be a Christian.
Historians debate whether or not Constantine's conversion was genuine, since he maintained his pagan superstitions throughout much of his reign. He consented to baptism only as he lay on his deathbed. Still, his reign did mark a dramatic turning point in the history of Christianity. In 313, with the agreement of his co-emperor Licinius, he effectively legalized the Christian religion.
"The reign of Constantine the Great forms one of the epochs in the history of the world. It is the era of the dissolution of the Roman empire; the commencement, or rather consolidation, of a kind of Eastern despotism, with a new capital…a new constitution…and, finally, a new religion." – Henry Milman in History of Christianity.
Was Constantine converted to Christianity or was it the other way around? Who knows? But what's important to us today is that what emerged was a different kind of church, a different kind of state. In fact, the two were so blended together it was hard to see where one ended and the other began.
It seems that Constantine's personal religion was a mixture of Mithraic sun worship and Christianity. According to his Christian biographer, Eusebius, he taught all his armies to zealously honor the Lord's day—Sunday—referring to it as "the day of light and of the sun" –distinctly pagan terminology. Take a look at this passage from his famous Sunday law of AD 321.
"On the venerable Day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country, however, persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits."
The first law requiring people to celebrate on Sunday and rest on Sunday was a law promulgated by the emperor Constantine in the year 321. And he does it without any reference to Christian theology or Christian ideas.
He says to abstain from labor on the venerable day of the sun, which is an allusion to the fact that the sun was becoming more and more the object of worship. So, the first Sunday law requiring people to keep Sunday had no Christian flavor at all.
Although Constantine promoted Christianity and built many many Christian churches, he closed very few pagan temples, and we have a Roman calendar from the year 354 – that's about 17 years after the death of Constantine—which has four separate festivals each year to the sun god. It shows that the sun god survived not only Constantine but into the reigns of his immediate successors.
Jim WOOD'un seminer ve sunumlarından İngilizce metinler.
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