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The Sabbath in 1 Cor. 16:2

We the faithful to Messiah Yeshua, know that every Scripture text is inspired by the Almighty and profitable for us, so we must pay attention to it. But we must be careful to make sure that we are not deceived by the false translations in our English texts. I am sure you are already aware of many false interpretations and also false theological paradigms applied to texts by those rejecting the importance of keeping Yeshua's commandments, who is himself the true Almighty and The Everlasting Life who himself gave us the Scripture. So, we must also educate ourselves about where the false translations are so we are not tripped up by them and can recognize what isn't actually Scripture.

One of the places where Scripture has been replaced by tradition is 1 Cor. 16:2. Tradition says:

But the inspired text says:

This is from the original Greek as translated in the Good News of Messiah.

The interpretation is not hard. In Hebrew, Leviticus 23:15 commands us to count seven Sabbaths between the feast of Passover and the feast of Pentecost. And indeed, Paul mentions the up-and-coming feast of weeks a few verses later in 1 Cor. 16:8, saying:

And always, the first of the Sabbaths is found between Passover and Shavuot. Paul sent the letter so that it would arrive for Passover. In 1 Cor. 5:8, he states, "Clean out the old leaven," and "we should be celebrating the feast, not with the old leaven." Of course, he applies the spiritual lessons in the text, but the occasion for it is the coming Passover.

But Paul says he will stay in Ephesus for a while and come to them later. The year was AD 56. Paul suggested that he or those whom he approved would transport their gift to Jerusalem after Shavuot. And by adopting this plan, he was giving an interpretation of the commandment in Exodus 23:15, "The feast of unleavened bread thou shall observe seven days. Thou shall eat unleavened bread as that I commanded thee at the appointed time, [in] the month of Fresh Ears, because in it thou had gone forth from Egypt. And none will see my face empty-handed." This last phrase, "and none will see my face empty-handed," is a prescription to come to the holy place bearing gifts. So since the faithful of Corinth lived too far from the holy city, they collected the gifts and sent them to Jerusalem. The phrase "No one should appear before the LORD empty-handed" is also found in Deut. 16:16 in connection to all the pilgrim feasts.

So we see that he wanted them to begin storing up the gift at the start of the counting for seven Sabbaths and then down from there to Shavuot, after which the gift would be transported to the holy city.

The year was AD 56, and it appears that due to a riot in Ephesus and plots against him, Paul was delayed until AD 57 in actually transporting the gift. This is mentioned in Acts 24:17. Paul says, "Now after many years I came to bring alms to my nation and to present offerings." After the riot caused by Demetrius the silversmith, Paul went to Macedonia, and then he made his way down to Greece, where he stayed a while with the Corinthians. He had already written to them in 2 Corinthians during his delay. He left Corinth well before Passover in AD 57 and went back through Macedonia, then set sail from Philipi to Troas during the intermediate days of Passover, meeting there on the first of the Sabbaths in AD 57. Then he was able to reach Jerusalem by the time of the feast of Pentecost, after a brief meeting with the Ephesian faithful at Miletus. After that, he reached Jerusalem, and he joined some men in a Nazarite vow to disprove the charge that he was not teaching the faithful to circumcise their sons (Acts 21:21).

I will make a few remarks on the Greek text. The word Sabbaths is in the plural in the best Greek texts. In other Greek texts, it is singular. The preposition KATA at the beginning of vs. 2 literally means "down from" or "down through." Paul is not just asking them to save on the first Sabbath, he is asking them to begin saving then, down through it, and up to Shavuot. So they are putting aside as much of their savings as they can during this period of time.

There are many technical details of Greek here and also Hebrew idiom, and if you are interested in an exhaustive grammatical analysis, you can acquire my book on the Resurrection Day of Messiah Yeshua, but I should simply say clever and crafty scholars from the institutional church try to exploit everything they think they know to say it isn't so. I am well aware of all their tricks. All you really need to know is that they teach all the other false doctrines that come from their schools and are therefore disqualified. And all others who teach their false doctrines learned from them and still have to unlearn their lies. You will find this out if you study the history of where they get their ideas from, and it isn't Scripture.

The fact is, Scripture commands us to count seven Sabbaths, and that is literally what Paul was doing, and upon this basis, he taught the Corinthians. The opposition simply leaves the commandment hanging in the air with no explanation as to how or when it was kept.

So, now for you Greek and Hebrew students out there, I will highlight a few points. The Greek texts vary between reading Κατὰ μίαν σαββάτων and Κατὰ μίαν σαββάτου. This is a difference between plural "sabbaths" and singular "sabbath," which indicates either "day of sabbath" if in the singular or "day of the sabbaths" if in the plural. Either way, the Sabbath day is indicated. I prefer the plural reading because it is the same as Matthew 28:1 and Acts 20:7. Codex Sinaiticus is a century older than Codex Alexandrius and Vaticanus.

This image is from Sinaiticus from "The Center For The Study Of New Testament Manuscripts":

Observe that a corrector scribe wrote in the Greek letter NU at the end of σαββάτων. That's the N above the line spliced between the omega and the epsilon of the next word. Without the NU, the word would be in the dative case and be singular, and the text would easily translate "one [day] to [the] Sabbath." But with the NU properly at the end, it would be in the genitive plural case and read, "one [day] of [the] Sabbath."

A similarly suspicious reading occurs in Matthew 28:1:

Mark 16:2 also seems to have this curious ending, but there is a line to indicate a correction or a NU:

Observe here that scribe number 1 wrote: σαββάτω.  But the corrector scribe indicated in the margin that a NU should be read on the end of the word: σαββάτων. The NU is not missing at Luke 24:1, John 20:1, 20:19, or Acts 20:7. The dative reading is obviously an intrusion into the text of possibly an individual book reading of someone who realized that the text should read "one to the Sabbath" in order to mean the first day of the week, and so accordingly, a source scribe left off the NU in one of the MSS followed by the Sinaiticus copiest. And indeed, this "one to the Sabbath" argument was often suggested by scholars in the past defending the traditional interpretation, because in Hebrew, in the Mishnah and Dead Sea Scrolls, we run across the idiom, "one to the Sabbath," "two to the Sabbath," and so on, up to "the eve of the Sabbath" and "the Sabbath."

Most importantly, in this idiom, there is no "sixth to the Sabbath," proving conclusively that "Sabbath" never had the meaning of the word "week" in this idiom. Rather, the idiom also goes, "the eve of the Sabbath." So without the dative case, the scholars now argue that it means "first day of the week," having changed their argument from an earlier argument "one to the Sabbath." The claim that the word Sabbath means "week" does not correspond to the Hebrew idiom, for which the whole point was to count days to the Sabbath.

Some novices are tripped up by the fact that the word in μίαν Greek for "one" is a cardinal number and not the oridinal number "first." This is due to the fact that in Hebrew the cardinal number "one" will often be used to mean the number one item in a series, and this is in fact seen in Genesis 1:5, where the first day is called day one, but subsequent days are numbered with ordinal numbers, second, third, etc. Being tripped up by this, they then take "one of the sabbaths" in an indefinite sense. The indefinite sense of "one" does indeed occur in Greek. For example, "one of the days of the son of man."

Some novices are also tripped up by the word "day" put after the word μίαν, as if it was put there by the translators to mislead. It wasn't. In Greek, the word "one" is inflected in the feminine gender, and the ordinary phrase for the Sabbath in Greek is "day of the Sabbaths," in which "day" is present and is feminine in Gender. So believe me here. The indication of the word day in the text is an irrefutable affirmation for those of us who know Greek well enough that what comes after the word μίαν is nothing other than the Sabbath day. This is explained at length in the Resurrection Day book.

I have seen both of these errors trip up well-meaning faithful in Yeshua whose hearts are in the right place and who have noted that Sabbath is meant. Please don't fall for it. It just makes you an easy target for the upper crust of institutional scholars to come back with a believable rebuttal, at least one that their side will take comfort in knowing about.

Also, do not expect arguments to sway them, even if you give them the right answers. I have presented this mainly to better educate the faithful in Yeshua who hold to his testimony and keep his commandments. As for the opposition, you must realize that their opposition is not so much an individual rebellion or sin as it is a collective sin based on their tradition,  their investment in the tradition, and a religious and theological narrative that has been evolved and designed over the centuries to keep them locked into the positions of the rebels that first introduced the heresies.

Realize that most of us have had to be knocked off our horses by the Holy Spirit at one time or another to realize the truth. I don't teach the total depravity doctrine, but tradition and its interlocking apologetics do lead to terminal corruption, and false translations play a part in this. After a remnant is delivered from this corruption, what remains will be destroyed, and only the remnant will be left with the resources of the truth.

False translations do not become obvious until you do a word study on the word in the original language and obtain from it the normative meaning of the word and the associated grammar. The next step is to observe that the norms do make sense in the context and that it is the tradition that departs from the norms. Then you can see objectively what the truth is. My goal is to show you what those norms are and that they do make sense. But the craft of the defenders of tradition seems always to be to sweep the truth out of the way and simply restate the tradition based on their authority, which they know people will listen to because people who are not seeking God don't want to hear any answer that exposes their sin. That is why only a remnant will be delivered from this age.

Some usages of KATA in the Good News Of Messiah:

Mat    24:7     and down through [various] places

Luke    8:1     And it came about soon afterward, that he
                was going down through city and village,
                pro­claiming and announcing the good news of
                the kingdom of the Almĭghty.

Acts    8:1     scattered down through the country sides

Acts   11:1     who were down through Yehudah

Acts   13:27    being read down through every Ȿabbaȶh

Acts   15:23    to the brothers down through Antioch and Syria

Acts   16:7     they had come down through Mysia

Acts   18:4     And he was reasoning in the congregation
                down through every Ȿabbaȶh

Acts   24:12    And neither in the Temple, nor in the
                congregations, nor besides down through the
                city itself did they find me carrying on a
                discussion with anyone or causing a riot.

The extension of KATA to time is in the sense that time flows down from a point or down toward the future.