“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” ~Matthew 12:40
Two thousand years after the fact it pays to think more like the first century authors of the New Testament than those focused on investigating matters from the vantage of a 21st century detective.
The first century scripture authors did not divide days at midnight like we do, but at sundown. In other words their day ended at sundown. According to the first century Hebrew mindset part of any day counted as a complete day of 24 hours.
That Jesus was buried on Friday evening and resurrected into new life on Sunday morning, He was in the tomb “three days and three nights” by Jewish calculating. According to our 21st century computing He was in the tomb only one full day: Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
Interpreting scripture must always be measured against the norms of the times when the events took place; and when they were placed on parchment while also noting the particular cultural interpretation of those events, by the witnesses who dictated their recollections to the scribes who wrote what we today call the New Testament.
In conclusion we can understand that because of the first century Jewish usage of counting any part of a day as the whole of the day, the terminology "three days and nights" is an reckoning drawn from Jewish cultural tradition of the first century.
end
Responses
« Back to index | View thread »