We kick off this new feature in which we will answer and/or discuss difficult questions about the Bible. We are most interested in our readers’ input.
In Matthew 28: 38-45, Jesus claimed that, just as Jonah was in the belly of a fish for three days and nights, He would also be in the heart of the earth for three days and nights. He wasn’t. If one calculates the actual time his body was in the grave, one comes out with about 40 hours. At best, Jesus’ body appeared to be in the grave for a couple of days and nights. Is this an error?
The Jewish day begins at 6 AM and the night begins at 6PM. So Jesus rose around the dawn of Sunday. He died on Friday afternoon which was day 1. Saturday was day 2 and Sunday was day 3. Therefore, there are three days involved which fulfills that part of the prophecy.
However, we still have the problem of three nights. If one believes in an exacting literal translation of all passages, then one has a problem. However, if one allows for idiomatic language, there is a solution. From a paper at equip.org we find “Now, the real problem is that most of us are unfamiliar with ancient, and especially Jewish, idiomatic ways of speaking. In fact, in the Gospel of Matthew, besides the expression “Three days and three nights” in Matthew 12:40, we also find the expressions “after three days” and “on the third day” [16:21; 17:23; 20:19; 27:63,64; cf. 26:61; 27:40]. The Jews understood all three of these expressions synonymously. In their terminology part of a day was counted as an entire day.”
We now throw this open for further input. We are particularly interested in seeing how strict literalists would view this prophecy.
Thanks for posting this Dee! Looking forward to what our readers have to add.
Surf and Turf at Ruth’s Chris for all four of us. I thought of you as I ate the succulent lobster.
Another explanation is that the crucifixion may actually occurred on Thursday rather than Friday and that the church has had it wrong all along. There is a great deal of confusion regarding the calendar of the time, and when the passover actually was. So it may be that there were three days and nights. Of course, there was the “night” that occurred at the death of Jesus, and that could also count as a third night.
Great friend, rub it in. I hear you are a husband basher now-tsk, tsk. What are they teaching in schools these days!
Interesting thought. How does that coincide with the Passover supper timing?
And I thought I was a pretty good communicator since I majored in English at Duke…
The timing of the passover is based on the phase of the moon, so it can occur any day. The passover is a ‘sabbath’ ,but it can also occur on THE sabbath. So it is possible for the passover sabbath not to have been on Friday, the start of THE sabbath and still have been on a ‘sabbath’. This is usually how the Thursday reading us justified.
Zeta
I tend to go with the interpretation of the phrase “3 days and 3 nights” as idiomatic, and stick with the traditional dating of the crucifixion as on a Friday. I’ve heard some rather dogmatic arguments for the theory that the crucifixion was on Thursday, but I’ve not been persuaded by them (thus far). I appreciate those who want to take the Bible seriously for what it says, rather than simply dismissing it as somehow inaccurate. But I think that sometimes folks get stuck on literalism because they don’t understand types of literature or literary devices (such as idioms and figures of speech).
I am with Junkster on that. All I was offering was an alternative explanation that I am familiar with and find no basis for rejecting. However, I am among those that think that some things are not worth arguing about, and this is one of them.
Here’s how John MacArthur explains it. I agree.
Another thing is that it says three days and three nights. People always seem to have trouble with that because they say, “If Jonah was there three days and three nights, that’s a 72-hour period, so Jesus has to be in the earth 72 hours. If He rises on Sunday morning, that puts the crucifixion all the way back to the middle of the week, not Friday. There goes the story!”
Well, we don’t really have to do that because the phrase ‘a day and a night’ simply was a phrase referring to a 24-hour period or any part of that period. It was the only way you could refer to a 24-hour period unless you used the obscure term, which is used in II Corinthians 11:25, nuchthemeron, which is very rarely used, to refer to that. So when you refer to a period, the normal way to refer to it would be as a night and a day; that’s what they called a 24-period. The Talmud says, “Any part of one is as the whole.” So Jonah was in the fish some part of three days, as the Lord was in the earth some part of three days, not necessarily the whole 72 hours.
For example, you might even say, “I went to San Diego and was just there a day.” Does that mean that you got there immediately when the sun rose and didn’t leave until it set? No, if you say you were there a day, we could think you were there 24 hours, or you could have been there two; it could have been just for a part of the day. In other words, the day doesn’t necessarily force you to the 24 hour period, and in this language, neither does the day and night force you to the 24-hour period. It simply is a term to designate any portion of the day.
Hi ARCE:
Orion’s Belt seems to agree somewhat with your explanation.
I hope you understand our intent by this new type of post. We are concerned that many atheists argue these points as “proof” of Biblical inconsistency. They have even started a site that lists all of the supposed “contradictions” in the Bible as proof that the Christianity is in error.
We believe that there are logical explanations. However, unlike those who have commented, there are many in the body of Christ who never give these seeming difficulties a second thought. And when confronted by those outside the faith, will not offer a reasonable explanation primarily because they have never thought about it. This contributes to the problem of those who think that Christians are stupid.
For some,they appear to use what I have titled “The Fred Principle”. If it seems too hard, they can’t, and won’t, handle it.We hope that this sort of post will offer a place to consider “reasons for the hope that we have.”
Anna
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I would say this is the most usual explanation and appears very logical to me. However, it appears to raise a question to those who are Biblical literalists. When do we interpret things literally-like 3 exact nights in the ground, and when do we not?
Hi Orion’s Belt
Hope all is well in your corner of the universe! Please correct me if I am wrong. It is my understanding that the Passover week, in the actual year of Jesus’ crucifixion, Passover fell on a Thursday.You know a lot about this stuff and I would be interested in your thoughts.
Anna,
Nicely done.
The problem with literalists is that they do not allow for idiomatic expressions. When I have a tough day before 5 pm, I can say “what a day” and I surely do not mean the previous 24 hours or even the entirety of the daylight time. The evening may, in fact, make me feel better about the day. And I can also say, in my Grandpa’s day and mean something else entirely.
We make a whole lot out of English translations of Greek and of Greek translations of Aramaic, which was the language of the common people where Jesus walked. We also make a whole lot out of the English translations of the OT; the KJV OT was translated from the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the ancient Hebrew, most of which was put in writing during the exile. We must be very careful at picking out a word or a phrase and making theology out of our modern American English understandings of that word.
Or we can be like a friend of mine who says he believes that if a scribe added a word, that was God’s intent, so even the transcription changes are God’s divinely inspired will for us. To him, all translations are God’s inerrant word and will be perfectly understood, even by a child.
Hi Dee,
I think a lot of confusion occurs because we do not know how to study the Bible. Most people just read it, which of course is good, but when something doesn’t make sense we have to dig a little deeper. The New Testament was written nearly 2000 years ago and times and customs were different than they are today. Good Bible Dictionaries, books about Bible customs and times, Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Greek words, all of these help us to understand what the writer meant and how the reader would interpret the text.
Great discussion everyone! Thanks for your well thought out responses.
Hi dee,
Things are good here – too much work. I don’t have a good answer to your question – there are just too many variables. I actually think both approaches have merit (idiomatic vs. allowing for sabbath to refer to a day other than fri 6pm -> sat 6pm). And I agree that literalists (Atheists or Evangelicals) get way too hung up on trying to put the Bible text in a box (perhaps to prove to themselves they can/can’t really believe it?). The culture just didn’t lend itself to that(they were writing to contemporaries who understood the idiomatic conventions and likely would not have felt a need to include lengthy explanations of common cultural conventions). The purpose didn’t lend itself to that (they weren’t trying to fill us in on all the subtleties of Passover celebration and timing).
Zeta
I want to link to an interesting blog I found. This guy comes out of the SGM movement but writes about all spiritual tyranny and where it comes from and where it is headed. He is edgy so be forewarned.
http://spiritualtyranny.com/
Sorry to be off topic
Thanks for the link Lydia. I already knew about that website, and in the last day or two I read Saturday’s post. Very interesting… I found out about the Spiritual Tyranny website over a year ago when I first began researching SGM.