Was JESUS Really Three Days and Three Nights in the Heart
of the Earth ?
by Reuben A. Torrey
M a t t h e w , in the twelfth chapter of his Gospel and the fortieth verse, reports Jesus as saying: “ As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale [sea monster (ASV marg)], so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” According to the commonly accepted tradition of the church, Jesus was crucified on Friday, dying at 3 P.M. or somewhere between 3 P.M. and sundown, and was raised from the dead very early in the morning of the following Sunday. Many readers of the Bible are puzzled to know how the interval between late Friday afternoon and early Sunday morning can be figured out to be three days and three nights. It seems rather to be two nights, one day and a very small portion of another day. The solution of this apparent difficulty, proposed by many commentators, is that a “ day and a night” is simply another way of saying “ a day,” and that the ancient Jews reckoned a fraction of a day as a whole day, so they say there was a part of Friday (a very small part), or a day and a night: all of Saturday, another day, or a day and a night; part of Sunday (a very small part), another day, or a day and a night. There are many persons whom this solution does not altogether satisfy, and the writer is free to confess it does not satisfy him at all. It seems to him to be a make shift, and a very weak makeshift. Is there any solution that is altogether satisfactory? There is. The first fact to be noticed in the proper solu tion is that the Bible nowhere says or implies that Jesus was crucified and died on Friday. It is said that Jesus was crucified on “ the day before the sabbath” (Mark 15:42). As the Jewish weekly sabbath came on Saturday, beginning at sunset the evening before, the conclusion is naturally drawn that as Jesus was crucified the day
before the sabbath, He must have been crucified on Fri day. But it is a well-known fact, to which the Bible bears abundant testimony, that the Jews had other sabbaths beside the weekly sabbath which fell on Saturday. The first day of the Passover week, no matter upon what day of the week it came, was always a sabbath (Ex. 12:16; Lev. 23:7; Num. 28:16-18). The question therefore arises whether the sabbath that followed Christ’s crucifixion was the weekly sabbath (Saturday) or the Passover sab bath, falling on the 15th of Nisan, which came that year on Thursday. Now the Bible does not leave us to specu late in regard to which sabbath is meant in this instance, for John tells us in so many words, in John 19:14, that the day on which Jesus was tried and crucified was “ the preparation of the Passover” (ASV), that is, it was not the day before the weekly sabbath (Friday) but it was the day before the Passover sabbath, which came that year on Thursday. That is to say, the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified was Wednesday. John makes this as clear as day. The Gospel of John was written later than the other Gospels, and scholars for a long time have noticed that in various places there was an evident intention to cor rect false impressions that one might have received from reading the other Gospels. One of these false impressions was that Jesus ate the Passover with His disciples at the regular time of the Passover. To correct this false im pression John clearly states that He ate it the evening before, and that He Himself, died on the cross at the very moment the Passover lambs were being slain “ between the two evenings” on the 14th Nisan (Ex. 12:6, Hebrew, and ASV marg). God’s real Pascal Lamb, Jesus, of whom all other pascal lambs offered through the centuries were only types, was therefore slain at the very time appointed of God.
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