Good Thursday?
 

Last night I was going through each holy day in my head when it dawned on me there is a problem with our current belief of when things happend.

In Mathew 12:40 Jesus says he will be in the ground 3 days and 3 nights. It is a very clear statement, 3 days and 3 nights.

Our current belief puts the last supper on Thursday, Crucifixion on Friday and resurection on Sunday morning. If you do the math quickly you can see that Friday night to Sunday morning is not even close to 3 days and 3 nights.

This poses a problem because Jesus was taken off the cross in a hurry because it was a preperation day and the Sabboth was to follow. Now the Sabboth is a saturday in jewish culture. This means Jesus died on Friday.... or did he? Could it be that an annual sabboth day was being refered to and not a normal Sabboth day? This is supported by John 19:31 where it describes the sabboth day as a "high" or "special" sabboth day. Was passover on a Tuesday, crucifiction on a wed, special sabboth thursday, normal sabboth saturday, and resurection saturday evening (but no one noticed until Sunday morning)? This is a possiblity. Or maybe it was bumped forward so passover was on wed, crucifiction on thursday, special sabboth friday, sabboth saturday, resurection sunday. Something is wrong with our current celebration of holy days. Has anyone else looked into this? I have emailed my pastor and am waiting for a response. It isn't very important but is interesting to say the least.




Mathew 12:40 For as Jonah was thee days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

John 20:1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the enterence.

John 19:31 Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabboth.

Now i'm totally confused, if it was all done on the thursday then it would work out right. Crucifixion on the thursday evening would then give the whole 3 days and 3 nights thing the time scale to work with, rising again sometime sunday. Lets us know what your man says.

Edit: [it doesn't really matter anyway, all this time business, because it's not as if jesus died on this particular day and rose on the other day, as easter is at different times each year. All we know for certain that easter falls around pagan time of celebration and follows it closely, always on the first full moon of the summer equinox or easter if you will]

I've never understood the sunday thing....heck even calendars list the following monday as Easter Monday

you're not the first, nor the last to note that discrepancy.

frankly, i think this is important for a certain crowd, who focus on prophecy/fufillment when reading Hebrew Scripture. I honestly don't think any of that apologetics goes one inch towards proving Jesus is the Christ. lining up a stray verse from Isaiah to a parallel in mark isn't really meaningful to me. Nor is making the Jonah connection literal in the timing.

measuring the timing does not make this thing work...if that makes sense.

to me it isn't a question of if what jesus said is correct. To me it is only a matter of realizing our traditions may not be fully correct. I'll just look at Good Friday as a day of celebrating jesus on the cross not actually the day jesus was on the cross.

What I find interesting is this is such a simple thing obviously in the time of Paul this must have been noticed yet nothing was said to address this. This means to me that it was easily explainable for the time. This suggests a simple answer to my question and not something complex like 26 hours in 3 days.

There's way more than you ever wanted to read about this at The Good Friday-Easter Sunday Question. The short answer on that page appears to be
I'd thought about it before as well, but never went further to try to research it for myself.

and I found this site as well, which pretty much reminds us that the hebrew day is different, and goes sunset to sunset, not midnite to midnite and a few other things, like the high day sabbath being different that redlemon mentioned

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/bb980603.htm

it also has a chart illustrating the Six Days Before Passover in Hebrew Time and "Three Nights and Three Days Jesus was in the heart of the Earth"

I was reading the site that Redlemon supplied....it says something completely different from mine :crazy:

mine definately says he died on friday with charts and stuff to prove and...and RL says it was on Wednesday.....now Im really confused

Shani,

I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Numbers are very important in the bible in almost a numerology sense.

Three, seven, forty...all very important and they are used frequently as allegory.

from my youthful bible study days...

forty meant many... almost uncountable or unotable in amount.

the three and seven... i don't recall as clearly but also was not an exact number.

The problem with this diagram is it only shows 3 days not 3 nights. Jesus said 3 days and 3 nights.

If you read the whole page it very plainly explains that...Im not good a sumarising or I'd do that hehehe

its got to do with their days starting at a different time and that he rose on the 3rd day but thats the best I can do....since the new day starts at 6 pm and he was buried before then, they count friday as a day and nite...it made sense when I read it lol

shani's on point.. the issue is the difference of today's culture saying a day vs. biblical times saying a day.

There is a more clear, more significant discrepancy in the bible concerning the crucifixion and that is that John places Jesus as having died on the day BEFORE the Passover feast and the others place him dying the day of. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus eats a Passover meal before he dies. However, he does not do so in John - the last supper is eaten before Passover begins. In John, the process of Jesus crucifixion begins at noon on the day of preparation for Passover - the time when the Jewish priests begin slaughtering the lambs for passover, creating an effective metaphor in the story. This discrepancy is only really a problem if one insist that the bible is literally true though. Looking at it from a more literary standpiont, the choice of John to have Jesus crucified while the passover lambs where also being slaughtered fits quite well with the overall portrayal he makes of Jesus and his meaning.

Anyway, that's basically just the reader's digest version, but I think it's an even greater discrepancy in terms of importance. To me, it is one of the clearest examples that the bible was not written with literal interpretation in mind. This says nothing about the bible's signifigance in terms of finding Truth. I think it simply points one toward the proper way in which to consider it.

EDIT: Regarding the link Shani posted, the major flaw with it is that it does not take into account this discrepancy. It states, "preparation day and the day of the Crucifixion" which shows it is going by John's description, but it is impossible for the crucifixion to have been on preparation day according to Mark, Matthew, or Luke, because it is very clearly shown that the meal eaten in those accounts is a Passover meal.

Excellent links, Redlemon and Shanifaye

Discrepancies in the Bible are everywhere. The first few chapters of Genesis are full of them. The Nicene Creed says "On the third day he rose again..." and that could mean literally that Sunday was the third day of the death event. Three days was the number of days Jesus said it would take to destoy and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, which is a direct metaphor for resurection, echoed again from the Old Testament. Numbers have holy significance that is historical, three, and forty, and others, as Lebell also mentioned.

None of the discrepancies bother me. To me that's not seeing the forest for the trees.

uhm... is this philosophy or bible class?

I don't divorce the two at all. Religion is a valid source of knowledge.

If you don't like the discussion, that's why God gave you a back button :D

Totally true. Another thing to add is that John was written some 100+ years after the events and 50+ years after the others. Quibbling over little things like dates are pointless because the things in the Bible are not there to record what happened like a newspaper. If you want that, simply go find the Roman records of the Crucifixion and figure out the date there, taking into accountthe recentering of the Gregorian Calendar of course. Want another Date discrepancy, how about the time between the Annunciation and Christmas, now there's one that should really throw you for a loop, unless you know when the actual Birth was, which then makes a lot more sense.

But the idea that the Bible isn't pure fact shocks people, many of which are the same people that go nuts about "discovering" the "lost gospels." Of which there are tons, most of which are crap, none of which are believed to be "inspired" by the Church, be it Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox. The problem also permeates the so-called religious "leaders" that protest Dan Browne on the grounds that Jesus didn't have kid's in the Bible.

Not true, hilbert. John was written, according to most estimates, around 90 CE. That makes it less than 60 after the event, and less than 30 or so from the synoptics. But it's pretty clear that John is more symbolic in tone than the synoptics, so he's probably doing it for symbolism.

I was under the impression that "Preperation day" was any day before a Sabboth. The reason it was called preperation day is because no work (not even lifting a pen) could be done on a sabboth. So on the day before a sabboth everyting had to be done in preperation for the sabboth.

I think this is important for a certain crowd, who focus on prophecy/fufillment when reading Hebrew Scripture.

I find it strange.

It has been 2000 years since the time in which this event was supposed to have taken place.

The Catholics celebrate it on a day determined by the phases of the moon, and the seasons of the year.

The "same day" won't occur again. Even if it was "January 1st", it isn't the same day.

It can't be an even number of years: the the lunar part make sure of that.

So what does it matter if there are 2 or 3 or 4 or 10 days between the celebration of Jesus's Death and the celebration of Jesus's Ressurection?

Christmas is just a Celebration of the Birth of Christ, not Jesus's Birthday. The same is true of Easter and the celebrations thereof.