Three Days And Three Nights;
Jesus' Burial and Resurrection

Perhaps confusion over the two methods of calculating the days of Jesus' burial was one reason certain churches in the centuries after Christ so easily adopted the notion that small parts of days must be seen to exist between Friday evening and Saturday evening. Gentile churches often used the Roman method of counting days from midnight to midnight. Instead of automatically seeing what a Jew would, that the first day of Jesus' burial extends from evening to evening, a person raised under the Roman method might think that from the time of Jesus' burial until midnight would be part of a day, and that from midnight forward began another day altogether.

Drawn out explanations have had to be employed to justify calling only a few hours a "day". These explanations can have validity in people's minds only if certain evidence, like the Bible expression "after three days" is thrown out, or overlooked as though it cannot be taken at face value. It has come to be common for proponents of that idea to simply assume that "after" can be dispensed with. They just state that all the Jewish expressions of time referring to Jesus' burial mean the same thing. Then they resort to the one that has the most give to it as defining all the rest.

In an attempt to offer proof of that method, similar phrases from Jewish literature, or from the Old Testament (OT) are sometimes offered for comparison. These have questionable value. The best way to understand the NT is to compare the writings found there with each other. Ancient records cannot settle a matter. People change over time in the way they perceive time and in the way they use expressions from the past. Americans are only a few hundred years from the King James Bible and several changes in word meaning have occurred. Sometimes words and phrases even reverse their meaning over time. Many years went by between the writing of the OT and the writing of the NT and we cannot easily know what changes might have occurred in the way people used expressions about time.

Then too, passages from the OT have to be interpreted. If we cannot understand a more modern culture like we find in the NT, what makes us think we can better interpret what is more ancient and in some ways more primitive?

Another mistake in that kind of comparison is that the people who use it generalize far too much. Even if there proves to be a case where an expression is used in a certain way, that does not prove it must always be used in that way; Or, that it is ever used that way in the New Testament. In order to force that interpretation onto the NT, it must be proven that the expression must always be used in that way. If it can be shown that the same expression is used in more than one way, it looses its force as a proof text for other passages. In that case, it is just another piece of evidence to muddy the water.

Verses from the OT that are used as proof texts for the part-day theory are hardly ever clearer or more convincing than the NT verses they are supposed to shed light on. Some have no value at all as a guide to understanding what Jesus meant by "the third day". I will give an example: Esther 4:16; 5:1. It is asserted by the people who advocate a Friday Crucifixion that since Esther went to the king "on the third day", this proves a part-day theory. She was ending a "three day" period of fasting. Now, can anyone really say at what time on the third day Esther presented herself to the king? Does anyone even ask that question? Do they look before they leap? Since she was wanting to charm the king, what time of day would make the most sense? I would say she went to the king late in the evening of the third day. Not forgetting that she was a Jew and her day ended in the evening, her fast was already ended. If we pretend that she went on Wednesday evening we can used the timeline above to see how that works out. Count forward three evenings and she went to the king immediately at the end of her Sabbath day. Whatever day of the week she actually began her fast, the result would be the same. It was three evenings after she started fasting.  If anything, the example from Esther may prove the opposite of what it is usually offered to  prove. In the chart below, I have presented a piece of evidence from the OT: 1 Samuel 30:12. It too is a comparison used by partial day theorists to justify themselves but it does not prove their point. I have included it here to show how desperate those people are.

Above, under the timeline from the New Testament, I made a second timeline. I named it the Roman Catholic view, because it seems to have been the Roman congregations which did the most to establish that Friday crucifixion view in early church history. If this timeline were correct, Jesus' body would have been burried only one full night and one full day. What happened to the other two days and two nights? They must be realistically accounted for but the Roman Catholic scenario simply throws them out.

That is obvious! Jesus predicted that his body would be buried for three days. Yet the timeline shows that a Romanist can rightly claim only 24 hours -- from Friday evening to Saturday evening. Even if he (incorrectly) includes the 12 hour period from Saturday evening until sunup on Sunday morning, he still has accounted for only 36 of the 72 hours of Jesus' burial. Remember that in some places in the New Testament, we are even told that Jesus would not arise until "after three days". In all probability, the expression means that there were more than three days between Jesus death and resurrection. If so, we have a perfect fit, for there was 3 hours between Jesus death and his burial.

There is absolutely no recorded Bible statements whatever to support the supposition that the time of Jesus burial should be extended beyond the evening that marked the end of the Jewish Sabbath. The women came to the tomb on Sunday morning, but the Bible does not say Jesus arose then. What is consistent with the evidence is that Jesus arose just as the Sabbath was ending. With that in mind, we have no need to take the evidence in any way except what is most obvious. Whatever accommodation we might have to make will be slight, not gross. We can make any necessary adjustments using minutes, or even seconds, rather than the long hours and days that are missing from the Roman view..

I have expressed extreme disappointment with people who hastily throw out the word "after" from the expression "after three days". If that word was necessary to complete a thought in other places that deal with time, why not in this case? Compare Revelation 11:11, where the word can only mean after a specific time has elapsed. If we throw out the word there, the passage becomes meaningless. The reference is to the two witnesses. When they have preached for three and a half years, they will be killed. Then "after" a specific period, they will be resurrected: "And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them."

Here is my main and final argument. People who attempt to prove "three days" does not mean three days using parallels in the OT between that term and "the third day" leave the reader hanging. They do not follow their logic using the other New Testament expression "after three days". They cannot because there is no place in the entire Bible where this term is used in a way that makes the time period in question less than three days.

When ambiguity exists in written expressions people are asked to believe based on the authority of the interpreter. However, there is no ambiguity in the words of Jesus concerning the time between his death and resurrection. The following chart, "'After Three Days', 'In Three days', 'Three days' and 'The Third day'",  shows that "after" always has the same decisive meaning when used with time that it has when used with events. One thing must follow another. Notice on the chart that "after two days" means during the third day. That gives us a clue to the Jewish mind of the first century, evidence that cannot be defeated. Using that clue, "after three days" can only mean that more than three days is indicated. In this case, the writer is including more than the period of time between Jesus' burial and resurrection.

Matthew 27:63-64 is used by some to try to show that "after three days" can mean the same thing as "the third day". If that were true, both expressions would be violated. To avoid that kind of conflict, we need only read the entire passage. In doing so, we can find out why Matthew would use the two different ideas.

Here is the setting: Some Jews were pleading with Pilate because of Jesus' prediction that he would be raised "after" three days. That explains verse 63. They not only knew when he was crucified, they also knew when his resurrection was predicted to take place, more than three days after he had died on the Cross.

To understand why those Jews changed their terms, we take into account what Matthew told us in verse 62. He informed us that these Jews were talking to Pilate on the day that followed the "preparation". A preparation was a day when Jews prepared for the next day, so that they could rest that next day. They would rest because it was a high day, and no normal business would be conducted. These Jews were actually pleading their case before Pilate after this high day had arrived. This was the day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

When they came in to Pilate's courtroom, Jesus had already been buried for 12 hours. There was only two and one-half days left before he was to be resurrected.

So why did these Jews come to court on a day of prescribed rest? They came because they were worried. Overnight they had been fretting about what might happen if the body of Jesus was stolen from the tomb by his disciples. If that should occur, the hundreds of people who were depending on that resurrection to stabilize their faith would gain a victory over the ruling Jewish elite in Palestine. These rulers came to Pilate to persuade him to authorize some Roman soldiers to guard the tomb until the Sabbath day, "the third day", was finished: "Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day," they pleaded before Pilate (verse 64). They wanted to assure that Jesus' body would remain in the tomb to the end of the full three days, which was still 60 hours (2 1/2 days) away.

The task of a conscientious Bible student is to harmonize the evidence with as little violation as possible. That is what I have done on this page. Using the Bible language in as literal a way as possible does not require massive distortion of any available evidence. That makes this view far superior to the view of those who have opted for a Friday Crucifixion and Saturday burial and then must support that view by the suppression, distortion and attempted confusion of available evidence.