#impolitedotco

My friend and colleague Richard Gaywood asked a very good question:

Even a religiously tone-deaf person like me recalls from school assemblies that Jesus rose after three days and three nights in the tomb. And I also know that we mark his crucifixion on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday… …which is only a day and a half. Uhh, what?! Please to explain! (I found a page through Google that suggests there were annual ‘high’ Sabbaths that means Jesus was crucified on a Wednesday. Is that right?)

Jesus crucified on a Wednesday?! Never heard that one before. I’m not sure how that is supposed to help with the 3-days-until-Sunday problem. Are we supposed to count Thursday (1), Friday (2), Saturday (3)? That’s actually “4 days and 3 nights” at which point it starts to sound like a vacation package instead of, you know, being dead.

Not to mention that if Jesus died on a Wednesday then why do we celebrate it on “Good Friday”?[1] Which just goes to show you that you should never believe anything that you read on the Internet about religion.

Jesus’s death and Passover

Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th, but we don’t have any specific Biblical reason for assigning that date.

However, when it comes to Easter, we can be a lot more specific. All four of the Gospels place Jesus’ death right at the time of the Jewish festival of Passover.

Why do I mention this? Because the Bible clearly mentions Jesus’ death as taking place near “Passover” (an annual event) and “the Sabbath” (a weekly event). There’s absolutely no reason to think that the Biblical writers would have used “Sabbath” to mean some sort of “high Sabbath” because they would have just said “Passover” which is what they did say.

But there’s actually even more evidence to suggest that this wasn’t any other day of the week.

Right before “the Sabbath day”

If you look at Matthew 27–28, Mark 15–16, Luke 23–24, and John 19–20 (that is to say, each of the 4 gospels considered to be official and canonical), it is pretty clear that they are all referring to “the Sabbath” as in “on the 7th day” aka Saturday.

According to all four of the gospels, Jesus died around 3:00 p.m. on the day before the Sabbath day.

The Sabbath day is Saturday, therefore, Jesus died on Friday.

So we have established two of the three days involved. But when did they realize that Jesus wasn’t in the tomb? We celebrate Easter on a Sunday, but could it have been on a Monday or a Tuesday instead?

Well, no. Here again we find agreement between the four gospels that the events took place “on the first day of the week.”

(Don’t just take my word for it, those four links at the beginning of the section also include the references to Easter morning.)

The Sabbath (Saturday) is the last day of the week, Sunday is the first day of the week. There’s really no getting around the timeline of Friday afternoon to Sunday morning.[2]

So how is that three days?

“On the third day”

First we need to look at a slight-but-important difference in wording. The Bible does not say that Jesus was in the tomb for three days and three nights.[3]

What the Bible actually says is that Jesus rose “on the third day.” That might seem like a minor difference, but it’s actually quite important. The easiest way to verify this is to search for the phrase ‘third day’ in the Gospels which will turn up about a dozen references like this one from Luke 24:6–7:

Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, • that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

Now, to be fair, I should also point out that if you search for the phrase “three days” in the Gospels you will find some references like this:

Then [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:31)

and

for [Jesus] was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” (Mark 9:31)

That makes it sound like “day of Jesus death plus three days” but this is most likely just a stylistic difference, found only in the Gospel according to Mark. After all, Mark wrote all of this after the fact (that is to say, the Gospel of Mark isn’t his diary, it’s recollection), and Mark’s gospel agrees with the others that Jesus died Friday afternoon and the tomb was empty before dawn on Sunday.

There’s also the Nicene Creed, a summary of Christian belief, which dates from 325 A.D., and makes it more explicit:

[Jesus] was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day …

“On the third day” is the Biblical answer to when Jesus rose from the dead.

Blame the Jews

It is factually (and morally) wrong to blame “the Jews” for Jesus’ death,[4] but it is accurate to “blame the Jews” for the weird time-keeping we’re about to run into.

You’ll remember that Jesus was a Jew, as were all of His original Apostles. Judaism doesn’t consider the days to start and end at midnight. Instead, days start and end at sunrise/sunset.[5]

So:

Jesus died at noon on Friday = First day.

sundown Friday to sundown Saturday = Second day.

sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday = Third day.

“On the third day” means anytime after sundown on Saturday and before sundown on Sunday.

(Is that answer a letdown? I hope not.)

Context is King

Richard’s question is a fairly excellent example of two basic principles of understanding the Bible:

Failure to know/understand the original context can cause confusion and/or misunderstanding of the text.

Occasionally someone will try to claim that the “plain sense” of a Biblical passage (i.e. “whatever it seems to means when I read it from my perspective”) is the most authentic, faithful, or “truest” way of reading the Bible. On the other hand, those who have actually studied the Bible usually agree that one cannot read the Bible without “interpreting” it. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are interpreting, because our assumptions are such a part of us that we don’t even recognize them. After all, what could be more “obvious” than that “three days after Friday” would have to mean “Monday”?

Reading is interpretation. There’s just no getting around it.[6]

Thanks for the great question, Richard.

Oh, Richard also drew my attention to this helpful “infographic” which explains that Jesus was not a Zombie. You should bookmark that and save it for next year for when people start breaking out the “jokes” about “Zombie Jesus.”[7]

Footnotes

Next you’re probably going to ask why we call it “Good” Friday. The short answer is no one knows and anyone who claims to know is a big fat liar. It’s tradition. It is possible that the day was once referred to as “God Friday” but because “Good” over time, but we don’t know. Some people try to argue that it’s “good” because that was the day that Christians believe we received forgiveness for our sins. There’s just so much wrong with that I can’t explain it all in one footnote without getting into some sort of David Foster Wallace-esque length footnotes, probably with additional footnotes of their own. I will simply say that calling it “Good” Friday is tradition in Western Christian churches. Eastern Orthodox Christians call it “Holy Friday” which I consider to be a much better name.  ↩

The Bible reports that the women went to tomb before dawn on Sunday and found the tomb empty. It had already happened.  ↩

You might be thinking of Jonah. In Jonah 1:11–2:15 the Bible describes Jonah as being swallowed by a large fish (note: not “a whale” just “a large fish”) and says “Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (Remind me someday to tell you about Jonah and the problem of Biblical inerrancy.)  ↩

It would be much more accurate to say that Jesus’ death was caused by religious conservatives who manipulated politicians into doing their dirty work for them. Fortunately that doesn’t happen anymore! LOL—wait…  ↩

Don’t sing the song. Really. That song is basically a hate crime. hissssss  ↩

By the way, most of the people who tend to argue for that “plain sense” reading of the text are also most likely to use the King James Version of the Bible, which is the most difficult English translation to read. Why do they cling to that version? Well, they would say that because it’s older it has not been influenced by modernity. I think it’s because the archaic language makes it easier for them to slip ‘interpretation’ into it without being honest about it. The archaic language makes it easier for them to say “Well, what this means is…” which is interpretation.  ↩

Rough Draft

2 of 14 pages I wrote about our topic for today's Impolite Company recording.

Wish Lindsay good luck today. She's going to have to change her bio to "Cheesemonger and Nerd Wrangler."

I was going to say something about "Tj tongue wrestler" as in keeping me from talking too much but then I realized that might not be great imagery. And Gross.

Also if you missed our first two episodes you can get them at http://muleradio.net/impolite or grab the free Mule Radio app for iOS.

Every episode comes with a Double your money back guarantee!