A Case for Good Wednesday

Automated system:    Please state when you would like the package redelivered.

Miranda:                      Tuesday.

Automated system:    Did you say [suddenly changing voice] Monday?

Miranda:                      No, who are you?

Automated system:    I’m sorry, we couldn’t identify.

Miranda:                      Tuesday.

Automated system.    I’m sorry. Did you say [changing voice again] Thursday?

Miranda:                      Tuesday. Tuesday. I mean, I literally can’t make it any clearer.

Miranda S2 E6, ‘The Perfect Christmas’ (2010)

 

Calendar, from the Latin Kalends, the name for the first day of the month. Thanks to Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net.

The below is by no means an original theory. Indeed, if I were to present it, or anything similar, as such, I hope that I would be promptly inundated with gentle but firm rebukes that I oughtn’t to think so highly of my own scriptural headcanons considering that all truth pertaining to following God in the present age has already been revealed. On which note, I in seriousness implore you, O Dear and Precious Reader, if you think that I am in any post talking a load of rubbish and that you know better, please don’t allow me to drift onwards in my sorry ignorance; tell me. Granted, it may be that I genuinely completely disagree with you, but equally it may be that I end up being entirely persuaded by your alternative viewpoint, and even thrilled to have such a compelling new set of colours to nail to my metaphorical mast. The latter situation was what occurred when the argument with which this post is concerned was first explained to me, hence my enthusiasm to share said argument with the world (or at least those very few of its inhabitants who enjoy perusing my weekly ramblings), an argument that one might suggest is particularly appropriate for a post published during Easter weekend. For the case I am making is this: Jesus was not crucified on a Friday, but on a Wednesday. I shall now present the evidence.

First, have a peer at Matthew 12:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”¹

Skip ahead several chapters and it becomes obvious that what Jesus is predicting here is the time he will spend buried – ‘in the heart of the earth’ – between his death and resurrection. This, he states, will consist of three days and three nights. So let’s do some counting. The women went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week (i.e. Sunday) – while it was still dark, John specifies, and I’m quite sure we could spend an entertaining afternoon poring over grammars of Greek and debating how to reconcile the varying time-phrases used by each gospel writer, but the point is that they rocked up at the very start of the day and Jesus had already been raised.² So he must have been raised during Saturday night. Counting backwards, then, that gives us Saturday day, Friday night, Friday day, Thursday night, Thursday day, Wednesday night – and that’s the requisite three days and three nights during which Jesus was ‘in the heart of the earth’, meaning he died and was buried on a Wednesday. I mean, that’s just maths, right? And so if we’re going to affirm that when Jesus said something, he meant it, Good Friday is simply a non-starter.

Now, I’m entirely aware that some people would argue to the contrary, claiming that, in ancient Jewish thought, any part of a day or a night could be counted as a whole day and night, and so, in view of the fact that a day was considered to begin when it got dark, Jesus was crucified on a Friday, entombed for a short chunk of that Friday before Shabbat began at sunset, then remained in the tomb for the whole of Saturday and a decent proportion of Sunday, albeit all of it nocturnal – three days and nights. Such an argument is not entirely without justification: a subscriber to it might cite, for instance, the third section of the ninth chapter of Tractate Shabbat in the Talmud Yerushalmi (a collection of various levels of scriptural commentary compiled in Jerusalem), wherein is a gemara that includes the following statement: “Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah says a day and a night are a period of time, and a part of a period of time is as its whole.”³

Personally, though, I don’t really buy that. For a start, I don’t see that there is sufficient evidence to consider this part-of-a-day-as-its-whole idea as representing a turn of phrase so well established and ubiquitous that we can reassess the meaning of Jesus’ words according to it, because frankly, any approach to Jesus’ words that bustles in declaring that he didn’t literally mean what it very much looks as if he meant, on the grounds of Historical Context and Common Idiom and so forth, makes me immediately suspicious. That isn’t to say that I think the conclusions of such an approach must necessarily be wrong, but they will have to work quite hard to convince me. More to the point, however, it seems highly questionable that a period of less than forty-eight hours would have satisfied the Jewish belief that a corpse couldn’t be considered a hundred per cent dead for a full three days after death. Consider this from Genesis Rabba (‘big Genesis’, basically an exegetical commentary on Genesis) 100:7: “Bar Kappara says the whole strength belonging to mourning is not, except on the third (day); for three days, the soul hovers(?) over the grave; there is hope that it is going to return.”⁴ Or, in very similar terms, from Leviticus Rabba (guess) 18:1: “All of three days the soul flies over the body; there is hope that it is going to return to it.”⁵ All of three days, note. And this tradition wasn’t just groundless superstition, either. This from the beginning of the eighth chapter of a minor tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (a collection of various levels of scriptural commentary compiled in, you guessed it, Babylon) called Ebel Rabbati, also known as Semahoth: “During three days before the interment, experts repair to the cemetery and examine the dead whether they are really dead … It happened that one of the dead was examined (and found alive), and he lived twenty-five years after that; and to another one, that he begat five children before he died.”⁶

In other words, if a corpse got up and started walking about before this three-day deadline, that was totally plausible and with precedent, if a tad unusual. If a corpse got up and started walking about before this three-day deadline, the general consensus would have been that it was never actually a true corpse at all.

And so, if there was even the slightest suspicion that Jesus’ body hadn’t lain there lifeless for the full three days, there would have been ready-made grounds for denying something as utterly unbelievable as a true resurrection. Jesus’ soul was just spending the standard length of time flitting about over its old home, and was coincidentally one of the few that managed to find its way back there. There would have been no need for the chief priests to have made up implausible stories about Jesus’ disciples stealing his body from a sealed and guarded tomb;⁷ they could have claimed, totally credibly, that Jesus had never been totally dead in the first place.

Speaking of the sealed tomb, by the way, do note that Joseph of Arimathea rolled the stone across the entrance, but didn’t seal it, because he was observing the three-day liminal period before Jesus was considered properly dead. The chief priests and Pharisees were the ones who sealed it, because they were determined that Jesus was going to stay in that tomb whatever happened.⁸ (That worked out well for them, didn’t it?)

All right, I’ve made my case. Why exactly does it matter? Well, aside from the sheer peace of mind that comes from a satisfactory explanation of Jesus’ sign-of-Jonah prediction, it matters because it matters that Jesus really was a hundred per cent dead – otherwise, there can have been no real resurrection. And if there was no resurrection, then we, adelphoi, have nothing. There is no precedent for our own transition from death to life. Our faith is futile and we are still in our sins,⁹ because our spirits have not been made alive and we have no prospect of living beyond physical death. The Christian life is a lot of trouble for nothing and we might as well all pack up and go home.

But because Jesus really was dead, it is demonstrated that God can and will bring genuine life in place of genuine death. Because he took the full extent of the punishment, namely death, that we deserved, we can be confident that we will share in his reward of neverending life. Because he who has life in himself became subject to death, he broke its power over us forever. Because he descended to the dead, he opened up the way for all the faithful to enter the presence of God. Because he really died, we are able to really live.

And so a Good Wednesday it really was.

Footnotes

¹ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+12&version=ESVUK.

² You’re looking at Matthew 28, Mark 16 (if you’re a Trinitarian), Luke 24, and John 20. Why not kick off with the Matthew? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+28&version=ESVUK.

³ My own translation; I accessed the original text here: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/b/r/r2109.htm.

⁴ Again, my own (fairly clunky) translation, which is why there’s that question mark hanging out after the verb, because I just can’t figure out which verb it is, though my working theory is some kind of third-person feminine (to agree with ‘soul’) imperfect from an irregular root with a bet and an aleph in it. So I just translated it as something similar to the equivalent word in the next quotation. I am sorry I couldn’t do a better job, but at the same time I don’t think this one uncertainty impinges much on my overall point. You can get the text here, https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.100?lang=bi, if by any chance you fancy a go a besting my translation.

⁵ There is, with this quotation as well as the last, potentially plenty more of relevance either side of the short phrase given, but I just took what I needed and left. Again, original text available here: https://www.sefaria.org/Vayikra_Rabbah.18?lang=bi.

⁶ Someone had already translated this one, much to my joy and relief: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/minor-tractate-ebel-rabbati-chapter-8.

⁷ As they are recorded to have done in Matthew 28 (link in footnote 2).

⁸ Check out the end of Matthew 27: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+27&version=ESVUK.

⁹ I here reference 1 Corinthians 15, which is one of my favourite chapters ever: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK.