EIGHTH DAY

EIGHTH DAY. Referring to Sunday as the “Eighth Day,” as well as the first day of the week, is an early Christian adaptation of Jewish apocalypticism and messianism. The Jewish context for the reference can be found in the Book of Enoch. In this eschatological way of thinking, the Eighth Day was the first day of the new aeon, something that went beyond the seventh-day Sabbath, as a new “first and last” day, and ushered in the time of the messiah-or rather stood outside time itself! With belief in the Resurrection of Jesus on Sunday, after his Sabbath’s rest, the theology of the Eighth Day was co-opted by Christians in order to identify Jesus with the awaited messiah and to see this event as the advent of the new creation, the new aeon. As Jean Danielou and Alexander Schmemann have shown, the Eighth Day is not only the day of resurrection but also the day of the Christian Eucharist (q.v.). Thus, references to the celebration of the Eucharist from the beginning are associated with a fixed day (statu die), not a day of rest-which came only later with the Christianization of the Roman Empire-but a day that went beyond time to an eschatological point of completion, and the time of a new creation. As a result, scriptural and early Church documents refer to the celebration of the Eucharist on the Eighth Day. The Church Fathers (q.v.) of late antiquity were also well aware of the theology of the Eighth Day, which after a hiatus has again come to the fore in some 20th-c. Christian circles.