No Wonder Adventists Back Then Were Spooked

Rev.Samuel Walter Gamble known
for research in the ancient
literature, enabling him to
reproduce the long lost Hebrew
calendar, upon which he bases
arguments to prove that
Sunday and not Saturday was
the "ancient and true Sabbath."
            - Who's Who circa 1920
 

I found a book published in 1900 and now residing in the Library of Congress by Samuel Walter Gamble, field secretary of the American Sabbath Union (later the Lord's Day Alliance) that purports to prove that the Sabbath is really actually on Sunday. It comes up near the top of the list when you do a search in Google images for the word "sabbath".This poor man, a valiant defender of laws making working on Sunday a crime in the United States, spent 18 years trying to prove his case by studying ancient calendars. He based his research on the assumption that God's people couldn't count to 7, and that God basically gave the Hebrews the wrong date for Sabbath when he gave them the 10 commandments.

He further assumes that despite the Biblical genealogies that go all the way back to creation, that the true Sabbath was "lost" after the flood and no one kept it. Also, because the seventh-day Sabbath couldn't occur on the same date every month, Gamble believes that the Jews and the string of God's followers chronicled in scripture all the way back to Adam, couldn't possibly have counted up to 7 days in order to keep the same Sabbath every week. They could only have done that if the Sabbath was on a fixed date, he says. Thus the Sabbath wandered around all over the calendar and can't be assumed to have occurred every seventh day.

Odd that Gamble seemed unaware that Sunday comes on different dates every month nowadays, but he'd rather we not look too closely at that. Flaws in the argument notwithstanding, Gamble and the American Sabbath Union prevailed in inspiring some pretty strict Sunday laws for some time, toughening up, if not national, then state Sunday laws. They were

Wilbur F Crafts
ASU Founder

 especially successful in the South. It should be noted that more than one Adventist farmer did jail time for working his fields on Sunday around that time, despite having rested the previous day and having attended church services that Saturday. Mr. Gamble heartily approved of this level of enforcement. Aggressive Adventist activists opposed ASU founder Wilbur F. Craft's efforts to promote the Blair Amendment (a national Sunday law) and the Breckinridge Bill (limited to Washington DC). Prominent SDA preacher A.T. Jones and Wilbur Craft got into a series of running conflicts that led in part to both men leaving their respective organizations.

Gamble says that Jesus fixed the problem of everyone worshiping on the wrong day by rising on the first day which was "really" the seventh day and that (reading the mind of Jesus who never said any such thing) Christ intended for the Sabbath to be on the first day of the week all along. He closes his eyes to the fact that Christ, Himself, kept the so-called Jewish Sabbath during his ministry and his apostles did the same afterward during theirs. Also, it's significant that after his crucifixion, Jesus rested in the grave from his labors from Friday to Sunday, only rising from the dead after the hours of the Sabbath had passed. The Sabbath, He had said, was made for man, but apparently Jesus kept it holy Himself.

A.T. Jones - Minister
and SDA Activist

Gamble has no problem with Roman Emperor Constantine, himself a major sun-worshiper, changing the Sabbath to "the venerable day of the sun" (Constantine's own words) in order to make the Pagans more comfortable joining the Catholic and coincidentally Roman State Church. The Vatican quickly held a counsel that accepted the change in order to ingratiate itself with the emperor and to pack the cathedral pews a little tighter with new pagan converts and their money. Apparently, that was not problematic for Gamble.

The author, an ASU officer at the time, was busily trying to shore up the nation's restrictive national Sunday laws. As part of his argument for tougher Sunday laws, Gamble claimed that if Seventh-Day Adventists were to succeed in getting the national Sunday laws of the day repealed, that all workers would suddenly be required to work 7 day weeks. Without the force of a national law requiring all workers to rest on Sunday, Gamble warned Congress that America's churches would be soon abandoned.He also claimed, again without evidence, that it had been "proved" that workers only live 12 years when working 7 days a week and that therefore Adventists would be responsible for the mass slaughter of millions of working fathers far earlier than what God intended.

Talk about logical gymnastics trying to prove that a largely Catholic Christian tradition, established on the Roman Church's own hook without scriptural authority was correct. He would have us believe that the ten commandments are flawed or at least the 4th one is. Given that, apparently, God didn't even know when Sabbath was supposed to be, then Gamble believes that the unbroken keeping of the 7th day Sabbath by Jews is, according to Gamble, impossible and irrelevant anyway. How could anyone have been expected to keep the 7th day Sabbath if it changed dates every month instead of being only on fixed calendar dates.

He went on to claim that the worst of it was that if the Sunday Laws were repealed millions would no longer come to his revival meetings and be saved.

 

And this silly book is enshrined in the Library of Congress, digitized and published online. Interestingly, Gamble acknowledges a debt to the Reverend D.M. Canright. Canright picked up the title "Reverend" when he left the SDA church to become a Baptist preacher. He left because, as he put it to a colleague, "I could be a great and popular preacher if this (SDA) message were not so unpopular." Coincidentally, Canright left shortly after Ellen White told him he was too long-winded and should pare his Sabbath sermons down from 2-3 hours to 20 or 30 minutes.

Gamble could have benefited from the same counsel. It seems this convoluted and often incomprehensible book was designed deliberately in order to encourage people to try to read it and then to give up in confusion. Nobody wants to admit they can't understand what the man is trying to say. So, many readers, looking for some comforting argument that means they don't have to make any big and uncomfortable life changes, decide that this guy must know what he's talking about.

Little hint: he doesn't.

(C) 2024 by Tom King