Did the Apostle Paul Do Away With the Sabbath and Holy Days, and Should Christians Celebrate New Holidays Instead?

Many of Paul’s writings have been misunderstood, as was the case even in his own day. The apostle Peter stated that in Paul’s epistles “are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15-16). So we should delve into what Paul wrote very carefully, making sure we understand the context and the general record of his life and practice.

Before his conversion, Paul had been a strict adherent of the Jewish sect of the Pharisees (Acts 22:3). Following the dramatic events on the road to Damascus, Paul became a true Christian. Contrary to what many have believed, he continued to observe the biblical festival days the Jewish people observed.

As a Christian apostle, he taught regularly on the weekly Sabbath (Friday sunset to Saturday sunset), as was his custom (Acts 17:2). When asked by gentiles to teach again the next Sabbath, he did not tell them that they should just meet the next day on Sunday—He returned to teach the next Sabbath (Acts 13:42-44).

While some of Paul’s contemporaries accused him of teaching fellow Jews to “forsake Moses,” Paul repeatedly refuted this contention (Acts 21:20-21; Acts 24:14; Acts 28:17). Perhaps his commitment toward the biblical festivals could best be summed up by Acts 18:21: “I must by all means keep this coming feast in Jerusalem” (emphasis added throughout).

In addition, Acts 20:16 mentions Paul’s determination to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost. He had intended to be there for the biblical Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread, but circumstances required him to observe them en route in the Greek city of Philippi (Acts 20:1-6)—leaving him even more determined to be in Jerusalem for the next festival.

Paul wrote his epistle 1 Corinthians to the predominately gentile church congregation in the Greek city of Corinth during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Many scholars acknowledge this timing based on the letter’s internal evidence, especially chapter 5, where Paul uses the analogy of leaven to make important spiritual points about sin.

Analogies and metaphors are effective only if the audience is familiar with the illustration. Paul’s mention of leaven without explanation clearly implies the congregation understood the process of putting out leavening during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, an annual biblical festival.

In their classic work The Life and Epistles of St. Paul, W.J. Conybeare and J.S. Howson conclude: “There seems no difficulty in supposing that the Gentile Christians joined with the Jewish Christians in celebrating the Paschal [Passover] feast after the Jewish manner, at least to the extent of abstaining from leaven at the love feasts. And we see that Paul still observed the ‘days of unleavened bread’ at this period of his life” (1974, p. 390).

Paul also gives a command regarding the mindset we should have in observing the Feast of Unleavened Bread: “Let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:8). In the construction of the original Greek here, the verb translated “let us keep the feast” is used “to urge someone to unite with the speaker in a course of action upon which he has already decided” (Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 1997, p. 464).

What about the other festivals listed in Leviticus 23? Did Paul observe only those specifically reaffirmed in the New Testament? A similar line of reasoning asserts that only those Old Testament commandments repeated in the New Testament are still valid. This careless assumption is based on an argument from silence. Do widely known and practiced truths need to be repeated? The Hebrew scholar David Stern asserts that in most cases “the New Testament does not repeat truths already evident from the Tanakh [the Old Testament]; it assumes them. Sha’ul [or Saul, that is, Paul] assumed them, too” (Jewish New Testament Commentary, 1992, p. 303).

In fact, Jesus Christ Himself observed the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7:2, John 7:10, John 7:14, John 7:37). Would we not expect the same of Paul? The feast Paul wanted to attend in Acts 18:21 may well have been the Feast of Tabernacles. We also see reference to “the Fast” in Acts 27:9, com-monly understood to mean the Day of Atonement, which implies that Paul and other Christians were still observing this Holy Day with fasting.

In Colossians 2:16-17 Paul upholds the biblical festivals as “a shadow of things to come.” Yet in Galatians 4:10 he condemns pagan, astrological superstitions, which are also condemned in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 18:10-14). Supposed Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter were not observed by Paul or other Christians of apostolic times but were later adoptions from pagan religion.

The evidence of the scriptural record leaves two basic questions for those who consider the Bible’s Holy Days obsolete: 1) Why would Paul teach against observing the festivals God gave in the Old Testament when he himself devotedly kept them? 2) Where does the Bible tell us to discard them?

Today people seldom question how biblical injunctions have been replaced with customs from other religions. Long ago, God inspired Moses to command the nation of Israel not to adopt the religious customs of other nations in their worship of God (Deuteronomy 12:29-32). Jesus similarly warned that it’s possible to worship God in vain by following humanly devised traditions (Matthew 15:9).

The clear record of Scripture is that Paul and the apostolic Church continued to observe the festivals of the Bible—and so should we.