Common Jewish Idiom?

reply to post by rstrats

You have a question directed to you in post #15.

I don't have an answer because I don't know what calender you are talking about.
Do you mean the Jewish custom of numbering the days of the week?
If so, then correlating Jewish to Roman days of the week, you would have:

Sun. = 1st day
Mon. = 2nd day
Tues. = 3rd day
Wed. = 4th day
Thur. = 5th day
Fri. = 6th day
Sat = 7th day

what I posted earlier:

Friday, starting thursday evening = 1st "day and night".
Saturday, starting Friday evening = 2nd "day and night".
Sunday, starting Saturday evening = 3rd "day and night".

of Jesus' prediction or "sign" of three days and three nights. It gets confusing because of the difference in calculating the days from how the Jews did it then, to how we normally do it in the western world today. Hopefully this little chart I modified will help.

jmdewey60,

re: "I don't have an answer because I don't know what calender you are talking about."

I'm referring to the calendar that the Messiah would have been using when He said that He would be in the heart of the earth for 3 days and 3 nights.


re: "Hopefully this little chart I modified will help."

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand your chart.

reply to post by rstrats

. . . I just don't understand your chart.

I started out with someone else's chart and added more information. The X's were in there already and looking at it now, they seem to be in not the best exact spots.

The important thing, which I should have labeled, is that the taller vertical lines represent the midnights, and the shorter vertical lines represent the noons.
I should have made my own lines to represent the sundowns.

ETA: Too late to edit my earlier post so below is the updated chart with those changes. Oops, silly me, the earlier chart was off a whole day. Fixed now, sorry for the goof.

So Jesus was dead less than two days if you define a "day" as 24 hours.
But he was dead on three consecutive days as calculated by the Jews at that time.
Which was a day and a night, starting with the evening at sundown.
So it looks like to me at least that Jesus was saying it right when he said something about a sign of three days and three nights.

jmdewey60,

re: "So Jesus was dead less than two days if you define a 'day' as 24 hours."

For the purpose of the OP, I don't.


re: "But he was dead on three consecutive days as calculated by the Jews at that time."

Agreed.


re: "Which was a day and a night, starting with the evening at sundown."

Except with a 6th day crucifixion there is one calendar day without any part of a night.

reply to post by rstrats

Except with a 6th day crucifixion there is one calendar day without any part of a night.

What are you calling a "calender day"?
If you mean according to the Jewish system, the sixth day did not end before Jesus was dead.
It would have ended at sundown on Friday.
He was already taken off the cross and placed in the tomb at that time.

jmdewey60,

re: "What are you calling a 'calender day'?

The period of time from one sunset to the next sunset.


re: " ...according to the Jewish system, the sixth day did not end before Jesus was dead."

I'm afraid I don't see your point with regard to my comment: "...with a 6th day crucifixion there is one calendar day without any part of a night."

reply to post by rstrats


The whole day is a "day and a night".
Any part of that day counts as a day.
So that particular day becomes the "day and a night" by the terminology Jesus was using.

A gospel is not an objective history that you can use to determine if the story is internally consistent.
The gospel was written for the purpose of demonstrating its correctness.
So it is not going to have Jesus saying something that was not somehow true within the world created inside the gospel.

jmdewey60,

re: "The whole day is a 'day and a night'. Any part of that day counts as a day."


I wrote in post #6: "As regards the Jewish practice of counting any part of a calendar day as a whole day I would agree, but when nights is added to days to yield a phrase "x' days AND "X" nights it normally refers to a measurement of time where day refers to the light portion of a 24 hour period and night refers to the dark portion of a 24 hour period. No one In the history of apologetics as far as I know has ever presented any historical documentation that a phrase "x" days AND "x" nights was a unique first century idiom of Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek which could mean something different than what the phrase means in English. If you have such documentation, I would very much like to see it. That is what I am asking for in the OP."

reply to post by rstrats

Lack of evidence is not proof of the negative when it comes to things that were two thousand years ago.
You would have to produce positive evidence that the contrary was true.

What I was saying in my last post was that the "documentation" is built into the gospel.

jmdewey60,

re: "Lack of evidence is not proof of the negative when it comes to things that were two thousand years ago."

So if there is no evidence that Matthew 12:40 is using common Jewish idiomatic language, why try to insist that that is what it is doing? What is there in scripture that makes it absolutely necessary to assert that?

reply to post by rstrats

. . . why try to insist that that is what it is doing?

I'm not.
I'm arguing that the gospel was not written so that it could be proven false using its own internal evidence.
The writer of the gospel would have been doing the opposite, to insert internal evidence to prove its correctness.
Those people were not stupid to destroy their own credibility themselves.

jmdewey60,

re: "I'm not."

How else do you get around Matthew 12:40 if you don't say that Matthew 12:40 is using idiomatic language where 3 nights actually means 2 nights?

As for the rest of your last post, I have no idea about what you are saying.

reply to post by rstrats

How else do you get around Matthew 12:40 if you don't say that Matthew 12:40 is using idiomatic language where 3 nights actually means 2 nights?

By asking why the writer of the Gospel was making Jesus a liar, when he is writing a book about him proving that Jesus was truly the Messiah.
Answer: he wouldn't.
So then you must understand the book itself, regardless of idioms or not, is assuming that is the way people would describe days, to say "day and night" to mean a 24 hour unit, whether it contained that many hours or not.

jmdewey60,

re: "By asking why the writer of the Gospel was making Jesus a liar..."

What the heck are you talking about? Where have I done that?

reply to post by rstrats

What the heck are you talking about? Where have I done that?

I'm saying that is a step you might want to take in order to understand what the writer of the Gospel is saying about Jesus.
Is he on purpose making a situation where Jesus turns out to be a liar?
If not, then according to the gospel writer, Jesus was using a terminology that works out for what Jesus was saying to be true.

jmdewey60,

re: "Is he [Matthew] on purpose making a situation where Jesus turns out to be a liar? If not, then according to the gospel writer [Matthew], Jesus was using a terminology that works out for what Jesus was saying to be true."

And I'm suggesting that that the Messiah's terminology meant that He would be in the "heart of the earth" for at least a portion of each one of three daytimes and at least a portion of each one of three night times. However, 6th day crucifixion proponents say otherwise. I'm simply looking for them to provide writing that supports their position.

reply to post by rstrats

I'm simply looking for them to provide writing that supports their position.

What is supporting your position that there has to be a "part of a night" to make it a "day and a night"?
Other than what you think makes sense to you, looking back at it two thousand years later.
I doubt that you could find any references anywhere, that are that old, of a "day and a night" being used as a term to describe multiple consecutive days, other than in Matthew itself.

jmdewey60,

re: "What is supporting your position that there has to be a 'part of a night' to make it a 'day and a night'?

My belief that the Messiah knew how long He was going to be in the tomb, and if He knew that only 2 nights were going to be involved, that He wouldn't have said that it was going to involve 3 nights. Also, Luke 24:21 indicates that the crucifixion could not have occurred any later than the 5th day of the week.

Why don't you want to except Matthew 12:40 for what it says? What is there in scripture that makes it absolutely necessary to find a way to make 3 nights mean only 2 nights?



re: " I doubt that you could find any references anywhere, that are that old, of a 'day and a night' being used as a term to describe multiple consecutive days, other than in Matthew itself."

Doesn't have to be multiple consecutive [calendar] days; one calendar day would be sufficient.

reply to post by rstrats

Doesn't have to be multiple consecutive [calendar] days; one calendar day would be sufficient.

That's just hypothetical until you find an example of that.
You do know that the Great Library of Alexander was burnt, right?
That doesn't leave very much literature from the first century AD.