Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
The Sign of Jonah: how Long was Jesus Entombed?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
The Sign of Jonah
Scribes and Pharisees came to Jesus asking him for a sign that he was really the messiah. In reply, Jesus did not refer to his giving sight back to blind Bartimaeus, a miraculous cure he had already performed in Matthew (Mt 10:46-52), or casting 2000 pigs over a cliff to cure the Gadarene man of an unclean spirit (Mk 5:13), or that he had cured a woman with an issue simply by allowing her to touch his robe (Mk 5:25-34). Instead Jesus replied:
An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Since it was the only sign that would serve for the incarnated Christian God, Christians must regard it as especially telling in the arguments in favour of their belief. What then do they understand by it? Well, Jonah was a prophet in the Jewish scriptures told by God to warn the people of the great city of Nineveh of their wickedness. Jonah was not keen on the task allotted to him and instead took a ship from Joppa bound for Tarsus (Tarshish). The ship encounted terrible weather, and the fearful crew threw lots to let God decide who was responsible, and they came down against Jonah. The crew plainly meant to ditch the source of their misfortune, and so Jonah decided to accept his fate, no doubt thinking that, if he did not, he might have his throat cut and be dumped anyway. So he freely offered to take his chances in the foaming sea. Tossed into the waves, the storm subsided, but Jonah was swallowed by a big fish. Trapped in the creature's belly, he prayed for survival, and after three days and three nights, the animal coughed him up on a beach. Jonah therefore decided it was easier to accept his calling to warn the people of Nineveh than to defy God.
What in all this is the sign of Jonah? Christians take it to be a metaphor of death, and no doubt it was, for the soul in ancient theology remained with a dead body for three full days before it gave it up and departed. But many Christians, these days at any rate, seem to think the bible is literally true, and Jonah did not literally die. Can they be right, then, that the bible is literally true and yet Jonah was taken to have been dead for three whole 24 hour days? Mostly, they ignore the actual circumstances of Jonah who was praying in the belly of the fish and so was not literally dead in the story, and take it that the story is a fairy tale meant to represent death, since no one could actually survive in the stomach of a big fish for three whole days. The point of the sign therefore is taken to be the fact that Jonah was revivified after three days and nights of death. He managed to be saved by God just before his soul departed forever from his body. It was a narrow squeak.
The three days and nights of death are therefore the sign of Jonah, just as Jesus clearly says. The messiah, according to Jesus, would be three whole days—three daylight days and the three nights that complete three full 24 hour cycles of the earth—in the earth! Of course, even small children are today taught arithmetic and can add up. They notice that Jesus was entombed in the earth from sunset on a Friday until dawn on the following Sunday. It amounts to Friday and Saturday night, and the daytime of Saturday. It adds up to one day and two nights. Christian apologists quickly claim that ancient people included parts of a unit as a whole one, so that the short period of Friday before dusk that saw Jesus taken from the cross and placed in the tomb counts as the daytime of Friday, and similarly, the short time after dawn on Sunday when the tomb was found empty counts as the full daytime of Sunday. So, although it does not seem to match the story of Jonah, perhaps we feel obliged to count them as the Christians do giving us the whole of Friday and Saturday, day and night, and the daytime of Sunday.
What though of the night of Sunday? To have been entombed three full days, Jesus should not have been resurrected until Monday. Or, he must have been entombed on Thursday, not on Friday. Neither will do for Christians now, having celebrated Good Friday and Easter Sunday for 2000 years. There is no satisfactory way round the plain truth that Christians think that Jesus met his own criterion as messiah, yet simply first grade mathematics shows it cannot be so. By the sign of Jonah, Jesus was not the messiah. He was actually in the earth only for two nights and a day, and at an extreme pinch for two nights and three days, but there is no way he was in the earth for three nights and three days.
Interestingly, Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christian apologists does not mention the sign of Jonah when he could have done. Apolgists say it was because the statement of the sign of Jonah was an addition to the gospel after the time of Justin (c 140 AD). But why would anyone want to add a sign to the gospels that was obviously wrong? Justin possibly did not want to quote the sign of Jonah because it plainly and obviously refuted his own apologetics.
Christians do not care. Though they treat the bible like an idol itself, they are typically hypocritical about it, ignoring what does not suit them. They never consider that the bible, however sacred they consider it to be is not itself a heavenly book. It is a material book in our imperfect physical world, and can be materially altered. The Devil is said to have all the best tunes, and tricks too, since any miracle of God could be equalled by the Devil, but no Christian would ever consider that the Devil has gotten at their holy faith, via its Holy Book and made it Devilish. It would explain a great deal of bloody Christian history if it were true.
