Jesus did not "enact" the Year of Jubilee when He began His ministry, He began His ministry in the Year of Jubilee.
There's a difference.
Jesus, near the start of his public ministry, quoted a section of Scripture related to the Jubilee. He stated, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me; for this reason, He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor . . . to send forth in deliverance those who have been crushed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18 - 19).
Jesus was quoting from Isaiah 61, verses 1 and 2. His reference is a Biblical synonym for this special Biblical period.
As written in Leviticus, God Himself established the Sabbatical years (Shemitah) and the Year of Jubilee,
and this was according to God's calendar, not the Gregorian calendar we use today.
The Gregorian calendar and Pagan Assumptions. Named after pope Gregory XIII who reigned over the Roman Catholic church in the 1500s, The Gregorian calendar is a revision of the Julian calendar, which itself was a revision of the pagan Roman/Greek calendars, and it retains the names of the days of the week and months of the year from pagan Rome and ancient Greece.
On many occasions, the Roman Catholic church departed from the Word of God and created its own theology.
The Catholic Virginian said in 1947: “All of us believe many things in regard to religion that we do not find in the Bible. For example, nowhere in the Bible do we find that Christ or the Apostles ordered that the Sabbath be changed from Saturday to Sunday. We have the commandment of God given to Moses to keep holy the Sabbath Day, that is the 7th day of the week, Saturday. Today most Christians keep Sunday because it has been revealed to us by the Church outside the Bible.”
Constantine was the first so-called “Christian” Roman emperor. Though he did stop much of the persecution of Christians as a whole, he did more to introduce sun worship into Christianity than any before him. including changing also the day of Shabbat (Sabbath) from the 7th day of the week to the 1st.
Historian Paul Johnson details some of this influence: “Constantine was almost certainly a Mithraic, and his triumphal arch, built after his ‘conversion’, testifies to the Sun-god, or ‘unconquered sun’. … Constantine never abandoned sun-worship and kept the sun on his coins. He made Sunday into a day of rest, closing the lawcourts and forbidding all work except agricultural labour” (A History of Christianity, 1976, pp. 67-68).
So, a royal decree to rest and worship on Sunday instead of Saturday was made by the Roman emperor, a sun worshipper. Now, thanks to Constantine, Christians were celebrating on the same day the Mithraics worshipped the sun. This is a blatant example of pagan influence in Christian practices.
Christians, now holding services on the venerable day of the sun, became so confused in their worship that, during the reign of Emperor Julian, Johnson notes: “The Bishop of Troy told Julian he had always prayed secretly to the sun” (p. 67). Thus Christianity took on a major facet of pagan sun worship that lives on today due to Constantine’s influence: worshipping on Sunday.
Anti-Semitism and the rejection of the Sabbath
Surging anti-Semitism in post-apostolic times also played a major role in the change to Sunday. The Council of Laodicea in A.D. 365 decided: “Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day, and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ” (Canon XXIX).
So, keeping the Sabbath on Saturday was considered “judaizing,” which was considered a great evil.
Constantine, at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, was reported by the historian Eusebius as saying, “It appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast [Passover] we should follow the practice of the Jews … . Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd.”
Jesus did not "enact" the Year of Jubile... (
show quote)