Acts Chapter 20 verse 7 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 7. - We were gathered for the disciples came, A.V. and T.R.; discoursed with for preached unto, A.V.; intending for ready, A.V.; prolonged for continued, A.V. The first day of the week. This is an important evidence of the keeping of the Lord's day by the Church as a day for their Church assemblies (see Luke 24:1, 30, 35; John 20:19, 26; 1 Corinthians 16:2). To break bread. This is also an important example of weekly communion as the practice of the first Christians. Comparing the phrase, "to break bread," with St. Luke's account of the institution of the Holy Eucharist (Luke 22:19) and the passages just quoted in Luke 24, and St. Paul's language (1 Corinthians 10:16; 1 Corinthians 11:24), it is impossible not to conclude that the breaking of bread in the celebration of the Lord's Supper is an essential part of the holy sacrament, which man may not for any specious reasons omit. Further, this passage seems to indicate that evening Communion, after the example of the first Lord's Supper, was at this time the practice of the Church. It was preceded (see ver. 11) by the preaching of the Word. The following description, given by Justin Martyr, in his second Apology to Antoninus Plus (or Marcus Aurelius), of the Church assemblies in his day, not a hundred years after this time, is in exact agreement with it: - "On the day which is called Sunday, all (Christians) who dwell either in town or country come together to one place. The memoirs of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read for a certain time, and then the president of the meeting, when the reader has stopped, makes a discourse, in which he instructs and exhorts the people to the imitation of the good deeds of which they have just heard. We then all rise up together, and address prayers (to God); and, when our prayers are ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president, to the best of his ability, offers up both prayers and thanksgivings, and the people assent, saving 'Amen.' And then the distribution of the bread and wine, over which the thanksgivings have been offered, is made to all present, and all partake of it." He adds that the elements are carried to the absent by the deacons, and that collections are made for poor widows, and orphans, and sick, and prisoners. Discoursed (διελέγετο); Acts 17:17, note. Prolonged (παρέτεινε). The word is found only here in the New Testament, but is of frequent use in medical writers.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(7) Upon the first day of the week . . .--This and the counsel given in 1Corinthians 16:2, are distinct proofs that the Church had already begun to observe the weekly festival of the Resurrection in place of, or, where the disciples were Jews, in addition to, the weekly Sabbath. It lies in the nature of the case that those who were slaves, or freed-men still in service, under heathen masters could not transfer to it the rigid abstinence from labour which characterised the Jewish Sabbath. And on this day they met together, obviously in the evening after sunset, to "break bread." On the half- technical significance of that phrase, as applied specially to the Lord's Supper, the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, see Notes on Acts 2:46, and 1Corinthians 10:16. Two further questions, however, present themselves--(1) On what evening was the meeting held? (2) How far was a meal such as was known as the Agape, or Feast of Charity, united with the Lord's Supper? In answer to (1), it seems probable that in churches which were so largely organised on the framework of the Jewish synagogue, and contained so many Jews and proselytes who had been familiar with its usages, the Jewish mode of reckoning would still be kept, and that, as the Sabbath ended at sunset, the first day of the week would begin at sunset on what was then or soon afterwards known as Saturday. In this case, the meeting of which we read would be held on what we should call the Saturday evening, and the feast would present some analogies to the prevalent Jewish custom of eating bread and drinking wine at that time in honour of the departed Sabbath (Jost, Gesch. Judenthums, i. 180). (2) Looking to St. Paul's directions in 1Corinthians 11:33-34, it is probable that the hour of the "breaking bread" became gradually later, so as to allow those who would otherwise have been hungry to take their evening meal at home before they came. The natural result of this arrangement was, as in the instance now before us, to throw the Eucharistic rite forward to midnight, or even later; and, as this was obviously likely to cause both inconvenience and scandal, the next step was to separate it entirely from the Agape, and to celebrate the purely symbolic feast very early in the morning of the first day of the week, while the actual meal came later in the evening of the same day. That this was so in the regions of Troas and Asia we see from Pliny's letter to Trajan (Epp. x. 96), in which he describes the Christians as meeting on "a fixed day," for what he calls a sacramentum at break of day, and again in the evening to partake of a simple and innocent repast. At Troas we have the connecting-link between the evening communion of the Church of Corinth, and the morning celebration which has been for many centuries the universal practice of the Church.Paul preached unto them.--The fact has a liturgical interest as showing that then, as in the more developed services of the second and third centuries, the sermon, and the lessons from Scripture which it implied, preceded what we now know as the Celebration.Ready to depart on the morrow.--It may perhaps seem to some strange, taking the view maintained in the previous Note, that the Apostle and his companions should thus purpose to travel on a day to which we have transferred so many of the restrictions of the Jewish Sabbath. But it must be remembered (1) that there is no evidence that St. Paul thought of them as so transferred, but rather the contrary (Galatians 4:10; Colossians 2:16); and (2) that the ship in which his friends had taken their passage was not likely to alter its day of starting to meet their scruples, even had those scruples existed. . . .