Testimony of Methodius, Bishop of Tyre

This father wrote about A. D. 308, and suffered martyrdom in A. D. 312. A considerable portion of his writings have come down to our time, but in them all I find not one mention of the first day of the week. He held to the perpetuity of the ten commandments, for he says of the beast with ten horns:-TFTC 105.2

“Moreover, the ten horns and stings which he is said to have upon his heads are the ten opposites, O virgins, to the decalogue, by which he was accustomed to gore and cast down the souls of many, imagining and contriving things in opposition to the law, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’ and to the other precepts which follow.” - Banquet of the Ten Virgins, Discourse viii. chap 13.TFTC 105.3

In commenting on the feast of tabernacles (Leviticus 23:39-42) he says:-TFTC 105.4

“These things being like air and phantom shadows, foretell the resurrection and the putting up of our tabernacle that had fallen upon the earth, which at length, in the seventh thousand of years, resuming again immortal, we shall celebrate the great feast of true tabernacles in the new and indissoluble creation, the fruits of the earth having been gathered in, and men no longer begetting and begotten, but God resting from the works of creation.” Discourse ix. chap.1.TFTC 105.5

Methodius understood the six days of creation, and the seventh day sanctified by the Creator, to teach that at the end of 6000 years the great day of joy shall come to the saints of God:-TFTC 105.6

“For since in six days God made the heaven and the earth, and finished the whole world, and rested on the seventh day from all his works which he had made, and blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, so by a figure in the seventh month, when the fruits of the earth have been gathered in, we are commanded to keep the feast to the Lord, which signifies that, when this world shall be terminated at the seventh thousand years, when God shall have completed the world, he shall rejoice in us.” Discourse ix. chap 1. sect. 4.TFTC 106.1

In the fifth chapter of this discourse he speaks of the day of Judgment as “the millennium of rest, which is called the seventh day, even the true Sabbath.” He believed that each day of the first seven represented one thousand years, and so the true Sabbath of the Lord sets forth the final triumph of the saints in the seventh period of a thousand years. And in his work “On Things Created,” section 9, he refers to this representation of one day as a thousand years, and quotes in proof of it Psalm 90:2, 4. Then he says:-TFTC 106.2

“For when a thousand years are reckoned as one day in the sight of God, and from the creation of the world to his rest is six days, so also to our time, six days are defined, as those say who are clever arithmeticians. Therefore, they say that an age of six thousand years extends from Adam to our time. For they say that the Judgment will come on the seventh day, that is, in the seventh thousand years.”TFTC 106.3

The only weekly Sabbath known to Methodius was the ancient seventh day sanctified by God in Eden. He does not intimate that this divine institution has been abolished; and what he says of the ten commandments implies the reverse of that, and he certainly makes no allusion to the festival of Sunday which on the authority of “custom” and “tradition” had been by so many elevated above the Sabbath of the Lord.TFTC 106.4