Sabbatarians In Transylvania

This work by Rabbi Samuel Kohn, the Chief Rabbi of Budapest writing in 1894 was published in Hungarian and German. It was never published in English. This English work is a translation from the German by Dr. Thomas McElwain and Bonne Rook of the Netherlands Conference of the Christian Churches of God. The work has a foreword by Wade Cox, Coordinator-General of the Church, which was considered necessary to explain the contextual background of the work, and to isolate some serious errors of fact in the work, which may mislead an uninformed reader.

Bonne Rook also prepared a glossary of terms and the entire work was edited by Wade Cox and published by the church's publishing arm for the commanded Biblical Reading of the Law in 1998 in the USA.

The work is very important to anyone wishing to isolate the early doctrines of the Sabbatarian Church in Transylvania and examine them in comparison with the doctrines of Judaism and also in isolating the errors and the dangers of Judaising within the Sabbath Church. This work shows the original positions and the doctrine of the church at the Reformation and gives an invaluable insight into the forms of worship, the calendar and doctrines of the Sabbath-keeping church at the end of the early Waldensian era.

This work is a must for any professing Sabbath-keeper's library as it provides an insight into the struggles and persecution of the faith during the transition from Catholic to Protestant domination and the influence and fate of the church within the Islamic incursions into Europe. It is most interesting because it is written by a chief rabbi of the area concerned and displays an extraordinary approach. The work is made all the more interesting because of the way the foreword is used to isolate and critically examine the academic approaches involved in the original work. More important to the Sabbatarian faith is the background history given in the foreword that shows the progression of Sabbatarianism from the time of the early church to the time frame of the setting of the book, beginning with the Reformation.