The concept of the need to regulate the weekly Sabbath by the lunar cycles was known very early on within Adventism. An allusion to the idea can be found as early as 1850, a full 13 years before the Seventh-day Adventist Church was formally established in 1863.
Acknowledgment of the need to keep the feasts would have brought with it a knowledge of the luni-solar calendar for calculating those feasts. The effect upon the seventh-day Sabbath would have been quickly realized.
Consistency demands that if the annual feasts are to be kept, then the calendar used to calculate them must also be used to calculate the weekly feast of the seventh-day Sabbath.
In 1938, at the urging of a young SDA pastor J. H. Wierts, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists ordered the organization of a research committee to investigate the calendar issues that were facing some of their doctrines. Grace Amadon sat on that committee as the panel expert.
Grace Edith Amadon (1872-1945) received her education at Battle Creek College where she learned Greek and Latin. She was also proficient in music. In 1893 Miss Amadon was invited by the Seventh-day Adventist Mission Board to go to Cape Town, South Africa, to teach Greek, Latin, mathematics, and music at the Claremont Union College. After returning from the mission field in about 1899, Amadon was in charge of the Battle Creek church school for two or three years. Between 1903 and 1912 she lived in Chicago where she served as a bacteriologist and taught pathology and other science subjects in a Chicago college. After spending more then twenty years caring for her elderly parents, Miss Amadon was invited by the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to join a specially formed research committee in January 1939. Grace Amadon made a distinct contribution to astronomical science by confirming the validity of the time prophecies of the Bible. She made contacts with associate astronomers of the United States Naval Observatory and several of her articles were accepted for publication by scholarly journals.
Miss Amadon wrote extensively to other experts in the ancient sciences and received many letters in answer to the inquiries of this committee. This information (some 6,000 pages) has now been compiled into what is known as the Grace Amadon Collection.
Among other things, what this committee found was that ancient Israel observed a lunar-solar and that the crucifixion Passover did not take place on a friday. When WWII broke out, this committee was disbanded and never reconvened. Later, M. L. Andreasen determined that keeping a lunar/solar calendar would be too confusing (in spite of the evidence that Israel was successful doing so), and the matter was dropped.
SDA's, your denomination discovered the truth about the Creation Calendar decades ago and promptly buried it with no further discussion.
From the papers preserved in the Amadon Collection, it appears that the Research Committee discussed the implications of presenting the Church with the truth of the Biblical lunisolar calendar. In an undated letter to Grace Amadon,
M. L. Andreasen outlined the difficulties that must be expected if they should report the truth: the Biblical week does NOT have a continuous weekly cycle and certainly does not align with the modern weekly cycle.
Because the Biblical weekly cycle restarts with every New Moon, the Biblical Sabbath appears to float through the modern Gregorian week. Sometimes being on Monday; the next month on Tuesday; the month after on Thursday, etc. This is the constant shift to which Andreasen is referring in his statements.
In the end, the difficulties of presenting a new calendar by which to calculate the seventh-day Sabbath seemed overwhelming. Andreasen urged that the resulting confusion would be only detrimental to the Church, and for that reason, it should not be pursued.
It is not speculation to state that Andreasen rejected the Biblical calendar for fear of the consequences. He stated as much himself:
The committee has done a most excellent piece of work. The endorsing, unreservedly, of the plan now before us seems to me, appears in its implications so loaded with dynamite, with TNT, that we might well beware. I would most earnestly warn the committee in this matter. I am afraid that the repercussions of such endorsement at this time will be felt in wide circles. S.: Wierts, letter to Froom, 29. Juni 1945
This is not intellectual honesty! It is intellectual cowardice. The truth remains the same, regardless of the reaction against it. Andreasen was most eloquent in his arguments in favor of staying silent about the effect the Biblical calendar has on the weekly seventh-day Sabbath. He wrote a number of letters in which he urged the Research Committee to remain silent on the subject.
These letters are not available to the general public. Apparently, the Church still considers the content too revealing, too explosive to want it released. Copies of these letters were given to the members of the Research Committee of 1995, but the committee members were not allowed to leave the room with them. We would have made copies of them, but they picked them up before they let us leave the room, recalled one committee member.
The truth may remain buried forever, but when Heaven decides the time has come for the truth to go forth, none can hide it or stop it.