> Very interesting comments. I seem to remember that in one of the gospels -
> Matthew's I think - Jesus said "As Jonah was three days and three nights
> in the belly of the fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three
> nights in the heart of the earth."
>
> All of the gospels agree on the following - He was crucified on Friday,
> and by early Sunday morning He had already risen.
>
> I make this one day and two nights, so clearly one of the things that
> Jesus didn't need to know was how to count :-)
Actually, some Christians do believe that Jesus was buried for three
literal days and nights. They take the sabbath referred to in the gospels
as being a special sabbath, the first day of Passover, rather than the
regular Saturday sabbath.
In his radio sermon on Palm Sunday 1998 James Montgomery Boice used this
approach to deduce that the Triumphal Entry occurred on the day that the
Passover lambs were driven into Jerusalem.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395