The only religious meeting recorded as occurring on the first day of the week was that held at Troas. (See Acts 20:6-13.) The context shows that it was an evening meeting, after the Sabbath,—Saturday night, as we would call it, for the Bible reckoning is from evening to evening. It was the last time the believers were ever to see the apostle's face, and as they lingered after the close of the Sabbath, he held an all-night farewell meeting, breaking bread with the believers, and leaving at daybreak Sunday morning for the eighteen- or twenty-mile journey afoot, across country to Assos. And while he spent the first day traveling afoot, his companions were journeying by boat.
Conybeare and Howson (of the Church of England), in that standard work, "Life and Epistles of St. Paul," tell the plain fact of the inspired record, save that manifestly they should not have applied the title "Jewish" to God's Sabbath; for it was not the Sabbath of the Jews, but "the Sabbath of the Lord thy God:"
"It was the evening which succeeded the Jewish Sabbath. On the Sunday morning the vessel was about to sail."—Chapter 20, p. 520.
Describing the road between Troas and Assos, they add:
"Strength and peace were surely sought and obtained by the apostle from the Redeemer as he pursued his lonely road that Sunday afternoon in spring among the oak woods and the streams of Ida."—Id., p. 522.
Once again the "first day of the week" is mentioned, in 1 Cor. 16:2. But that scripture says no word of any sacredness of the day or of any religious observance of it. The apostle was gathering a fund for the poor at Jerusalem, and asked every believer to "lay by" something every first day of the week, so that the money would be ready when he came. As Dean Stanley (Church of England) comments:
"There is nothing to prove public assemblies, inasmuch as the phrase παρ εαυτω ('by himself, at his own house') implies that the collection was to be made individually and in private."
And Neander's Church History says:
"All mentioned here is easily explained, if one simply thinks of the ordinary beginning of the week in secular life."—Vol. I, p. 339 (German ed.).
To meet the emergency of need in Judea, these believers were asked to look over their business affairs at the beginning of each week, until Paul should come, laying aside a gift as God had prospered them.