The Lord’s Day, is it Sunday?
In Revelation 1:10 the author says, ‘on the Lord’s day’. Some interpret this as being the same as the ‘day of the Lord’, that is, an apocalyptic event. However, this is not clear, as the expression ‘Lord’s day’ was already in use by the early church to mean Sunday.
For example, Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote in the early 2nd century, not too long after Revelation was written, says:
‘[We Christians] who have come to the possession of a new hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day, on which also our life has sprung up again by Him [Jesus]‘
Here he is refering to Sunday, the day of Jesus’ resurrection, as the ‘Lord’s day’.
So here in Revelation, the author may have simply been refering to the day of the week rather than the foretold ‘day of the Lord’, but considering the contents of Revelation, it’s hard to say what he meant. Perhaps it is a reference to a future day of the Lord, or perhaps its not.
We mention this here because we, as translators, had the option of translating it literally or translating it more plainly as ‘Sunday’. Either could be correct.
So we chose to translate it literally and add an [insertion] and a link to this note to explain matters.