Second Chronicles 10:5, 12 clearly says, “Come to me again after three days … So … all the people came to Rehoboam on the third day because the king had said ‘Come to me again the third day.’” Apparently “after three days” means the very same thing as “on the third day” in this text. In fact, the Hebrew Bible provides us with some clues about these sorts of differences. “Jesus is just saying, ‘It will be like the experience of Jonah.’” He writes at Bible History Daily: In fact the phrase “after three days” in the New Testament can simply mean “after a while” or “after a few days” without any clear specificity beyond suggesting several days, in this case parts of three days, would be involved. ”This is just part of a general analogy with the story of what happened with Jonah and the whale, and as such the time reference shouldn’t be pressed,” Witherington explained. That would bring us up to Easter Monday.īut again, that would be a modern way of looking at things, ignoring Jesus’ own purpose in phrasing the prediction in this way. In addition to the various predictions that Jesus would rise on the third day or after three days, one passage - Matthew 12:40 - even speaks of “three days and three nights” in the tomb. In many other parts of the world, people are not all-consumed with clock-watching. One might even qualify this further, specifying that the obsession with precision in time is a characteristic of many First World cultures today. They did not obsess about precision when it comes to time.” “We are very different from the ancients, who did not go around wearing little sundials on their wrists and did not talk about seconds and minutes. ”We are a people obsessed with time-and with exactness when it comes to time-down to the nanosecond,” said Ben Witherington III, Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. The trouble is, says a highly-respected Bible scholar, we are reading the Bible with a 21st-century mindset. Sometimes we read that Jesus rose on the third day other times, that he rose after three days. In one sense, it’s very simple: from Good Friday, when he was crucified, to Easter Sunday, it’s three days, albeit partial days.īut where people get hung up is the apparent contradictions they find in various Gospel accounts. Time-obsessed modern readers have to realize that Bible was written from a different mindset.Ī perennial question surrounding the Easter story concerns the number of days Jesus spent in the tomb before he rose from the dead.
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