What If Jesus is Wrong?

The entire earth was covered with water.  Head down to Lake Texoma in the great state of Texas - you will see a 4 ft thick layer of limestone full of sea fossils.  This layer of limestone runs over much of the earth.  It just happens to be the same layer of limestone that dinosaur fossils are found in, as they were covered up quickly with mud, so we have a record of their existance.  And it just happens to be the same layer of limestone that a human finger and hammer were found in, meaning they all existed at the same time. 

Still don’t believe in a young earth?  Then how do you explain finding a T-Rex bone full of soft tissue?  Of course, they are still reporting it is 68 million years old…yeah, right. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/scientists-recover-t-rex-soft-tissue/

I will agree that Jesus never invalidates the testimony of Scripture, and he speaks of those OT events without any tangents about whether or not they are historical accounts.  Nowhere does Jesus say, “We can ignore this or that because that part of Scripture is unreliable.”

But for discussion’s sake, let’s throw in a third option:  Jesus used parables and reveals divine truth via stories.  The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Finders of Lost Sheep/Lost Coin, to name just a few, do not hinge on the historicity of their characters or events.  That’s not even relevant to truth he is teaching.  He could have invoked the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah and Jonah knowing them to be venerable stories, pointing to the character and plan of the Father.

I don’t think that this position necessarily does violence to Christology or Scripture.  In dealing with the Law, Jesus says, “You’ve heard that it was said… but I say to you…”  Anything he says, be it an interpretation of Law or prophecy, or a teaching via a story, carries authority because of who he is, the Christ.  More than this, he makes himself known through and in all the Scriptures, as he did on the road to Emmaus.

This third position doesn’t have to overthrow Christology or Scripture, but of course it can be (and too often is) used to do just that.  As Matt+ said, the lazy and prevalent approach is to say that Biblical stories are “fanciful tales that communicate perhaps a ‘spiritual’ truth.”  That’s not true to what Jesus is doing, even with his stories.  He is not communicating vague “spirituality” or moral nuggets - he is revealing the plan and purpose of God, fulfilled in himself.  All of the literary forms in the Bible serve this reality.

I don’t like to be summarily dismissive of the views of others. However, there are times when it’s appropriate to ignore speculative stuff like this and move on, rather than taking the time and energy to argue over something for which there’s really no answer.

This is one of those times.

When some bozo wants to “reject the historicity of the biblical records of” this or that, well, OK. The devil is at work, distracting him from what matters.

Hi Timothy,

The problem with this third option is this: No one in 1st century Galilee or Judea would have understood the accounts referred to above as parabolic. The extant rabbinical lit from the 2nd century treats these events as historical.

So, if Jesus knew or believed them to be parabolic and his audience incorrect in their assumption that they are historical then he would fall prey to option #1 - promoting an historical falsehood. A “noble lie”.

I see your point, Tim (#2), but when metaphors or “stories” are used in the parables, it is clear what they are (i.e., I am the door). But when Jesus is referencing historical accounts, it’s hard to take your third option as valid. And the fact that Jesus’ references were almost off-hand, by-the-way language adds force that they were not figures of speech. Just like it would be extremely stretching it to suggest Paul’s logic in 1 Cor. 13 about resurrection was somehow only a generality about life and nature instead of the actual Resurrection of Christ and for us to come. Matt is an awesome apologist for the faith and he hit the nail on the head. Let them call us fundamentalists if they choose, but it would be better to err to the right than to die on the left.  - Ed

#5 I would rather err on the side of defending historical reliability, too, given the slippery slope down which one can tumble into willful Biblical ignorance and heresy.

But you’ve really shifted my position - I did not lump stories and metaphors together.  There is a big difference between “I am the vine, you are the branches” and “There was a rich man who…”  And I’m not following your connection to Paul’s resurrection arguments in I Corinthians 15.  Paul is clear that the resurrection is a fact, and that the message he preaches (and its consequence in our life) relies upon that fact.  He uses some illustrations from nature to help us get at the mystery; he does not use the mystery to give thematic generalities to natural phenomena.  I get that.

#4, in Mark 7, John 7:22 and other places, Jesus’ perfect submission to the law is not submission to standing rabbinic interpretation, or the public acceptance of those teachings which would be expected at the time. 

But I don’t want to be argumentative, because Jesus speaks of OT events as though true.  And the Flood is an important historical antecedent because it expresses covenantal promises. To dismiss it as a story would be to do violence to the revelation carried in Scripture.

I think the extent of my argument would be, “It is possible that Jesus understood as parabolic a couple of the OT passages he cited.”

Hi Timothy…of course it is possible that he considered them parabolic…but if so he is then guilty of promoting a false belief….see my post above at #4

The reason I brought up rabbinical understandings is not because I would suggest that Jesus always follows the Rabbis…far from it…but because every piece of evidence we have tells us that these stories were understood in their historical sense. If they were not historical and Jesus knew that and then taught in such a way that the common erroneous opinion would be confirmed, he is implicated in promoting a false belief…ala option #1 above.

Timothy, my thought about the resurrection was that, as you wrote, Paul taught it as fact. And likewise Jesus was acknowledging the historical events of Noah, Jonah, and Sodom and Gomorrah by referencing them. Sorry, I didn’t mean to lump your ideas together. I suppose the stories of those days were the media of early history before tweaking and emails and TV, and were mostly verbal. But I think the ancients were meticulous and accurate. We all agree here, it’s just sad that so many in the Church have such an extremely lower view of the Word of God. - Ed

Except that Jesus was not debating or teaching about the historicity of the Sodom and Gomorrah details or Jonah in the fish.  He was teaching in the rabbinic style, citing well known stories without debating their factual basis, to say “It’s gonna be bad for those who do not listen to the Good News” and “I will not give you the signs you demand - I will ‘do a Jonah’ instead.” 

He’s using well known “events,” whether literal history or traditionally respected stories, to lay a foundation for what he is going to do.  In the case of Jonah, historicity hardly matters because what Jesus is setting up had, at the time, no concrete reference points.  His resurrection would be something new altogether.  He’s not making a “scientific” argument of some sort, asserting that because a guy lived three days in a fish, he could come out of a tomb after three days.

I’m thinking now of the “Woman who had seven husbands” debate.  Jesus’ didn’t say, “C’mon, guys, you know there was no such woman.”  It wasn’t relevant.  They were not false for invoking a story, a normal way that rabbis would teach/debate.  They were wrong because they did not understand the resurrection life to which Scripture was pointing them. 

But, look, I’d rather just fold and say, “Hey, these OT passages are historic,” because I’d rather err in that direction than get onto the slippery slope.  I still don’t think the two categories you posit are the only possiblities, they certainly don’t harm the Gospel.

My Dad is an amateur Biblical Archeologist, having come to the love of this science late in life.  But in the last 20 years, he has consistently affirmed in all his studies that Scripture becomes MORE true in archaeology year after year, sometimes even stories that Biblical scholars have set aside as “too fanciful or literate” for their studies and tastes have ended up being proven (or nearly so) by hard archeological evidence.

I"M current fascinated by the story of DoggerLand, which is a city discovered by sonar on the bottom of the North Sea!  Worth checking out….

mrb

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  That is the key.  Whether in 6 calendar days 6 thousand years ago or 4.5 billion years ago is not the key issue for me; those are the mechanics of how He did it..  God created science as well.  And he has given us the ability to unlock the secrets of science.  To reject what we learn from scientific discovery is to reject the gifts that God has given us.

With respect to #1, there is ample evidence that the earth is very ancient, and that the limestone layers over Texas got there when Texas was under an ancient sea.  The swamps and marshes bordering the sea gave us the oil and gas that is such a large part of the economy here.  There are mountains of evidence of that.

Hi Timothy,

you are making a category error. The example of the woman with seven husbands was a well known hypothetical in Jesus’ day. And, of course, people were generally able to tell the difference between parable and history.

But as I noted, no one thought the Flood etc were parabolic. So to teach as he did about those events, knowing the events did not happen, would be not only a lie - a noble lie perhaps - but a lie all the same, it would also constitute promoting a false belief.

Again…both would fall under option #1 above

Dallasite, I tend toward the Old-earth position (while rejecting Darwinism) at the same time, if we believe it is possible for God to have created Adam in his maturity…and not as an infant we must at least allow for the possibility that God created a mature cosmos too.

I have long found compelling the argument for the historicity of Biblical events, based on Jesus referring to them as historical. (I may be mistaken, but I think I was first exposed to this argument in God’s Inerrant Word by John Warwick Montgomery.)It has also occurred to me that a minimum requirement for being a Christian is the belief in the Resurrection. St. Paul makes that case. Now, if one is going to confess to believing in a story as outrageous as the Resurrection, why would one feel the need to quibble over a story a plausible as that of Jonah? Having swallowed the camel, why strain at the gnat?

Sorry for the sloppiness… was trying to keep up with this from a work site with plenty of interruptions.

What I’m realizing is that I wasn’t reacting to the historicity argument as much as to the Christology issues.  Here are my problems with the assumptions that are set up:

1) Deuteronomy 18:20-22 says the validation of the prophet is in the outcome - does the word come to pass?  The antecedents are: is it from a false god, and is it not something that God wanted to have spoken?

The three OT passages under consideration all point to things which have come to pass or, if we believe Jesus, will come to pass.  Jonah is a sign of the resurrection; Noah and Sodom/Gomorrah deal with judgment (some of which might already have come to pass in the destruction of Jerusalem - but certainly most of which is still to be fulfilled).

I suppose there is a very casuistic argument to be made that, if Jesus told false stories as true, it was a lie, therefore from the evil one, therefore from a false god.

As to the other antecedent - did God want it spoken? - clearly we all agree that Jesus came to tell us about his new life and coming kingdom.

So, unless we take a fairly tortuous path to saying that if Jesus knowingly used untruths provided by the devil to fool people, then whether or not Jonah is a parable is irrelevant to Dt. 18:20-22, because Jesus spoke the message of God and it was validated when he rose from the tomb.

2) “Keep in mind that Jesus, in his humanity, is not omniscient. He knows only what the Father reveals to him through the Spirit.” This is true to the church’s understanding of his Incarnation and our profession of the his divine and human natures.  But I think we can say with some certainty that familiarity with the inspiration, composition and purposes of Scripture would have been with the LOGOS, who came into the world to preach.  This is why he was questioning the teacher’s in the Temple, why he kept turning the tables on his questioners (including the devil before before going out to preach), and why, in rebutting the “Woman with seven husbands” gambit he said, “You don’t know the Scriptures or the power of God.” 

Yes, we see him constrained as in the example Matt+ gives, not knowing who in a crowd touched him.  But we never see him bested in debates over Scripture.  So I think there is a problem with the assertion that “Jesus never speaks on matters about which he is ignorant” if applied to Jesus’ command of Scripture. 

3) All that being said, my response to the people who trivialize the OT passages as “fanciful tales that communicate perhaps a ‘spiritual’ truth but they probably didn’t really happen” would still be, “Then why did Jesus cite them without qualification?”  The humility needs to be with the one who doubts the historicity of the OT events, not with those who trust them as “the Word of God containing all things necessary to salvation.”

I think Matt’s totally right that all these beliefs are linked.  If you’re interesting in going further with this kind of argument, I recommend checking out Bayes’s theorem, conditional probability, Hume’s argument against miracles, and belief networks.

Basically, you can formalize this kind of argument through Bayes’s theorem by taking the divinity of Jesus as evidence for the hypothesis of the flood or Jonah, etc.  I think it’s a devastating argument to make against liberal Christianity.  That said, Tim is right to worry about vagueness and the limits of our imagination to conceive of possibility especially when considering the Infinite.

However almost like a good moral temptation, this one really brings atheism into view.  Doubt about the flood, Jonah, etc. definitely undermines belief in the Bible and God.  All these conditional probabilities can be just as easily reversed to ask what happens to belief in God if you reject the flood, Jonah, etc.  So one’s trajectory through all these interlocking webs of probability depends heavily on one’s starting point.

Yeah, I hesitated to even engage this thread, because what Matt+ points out is real - once we raise almost any question about the historicity of any passage, even to point out something as benign as “a Psalm is a poem, not a piece of historical research,” somebody will run with it to declare, “See!  The Bible is not history - it’s just some inspirational art from which I draw my truth and you draw yours.”

Even is one thinks Jonah might be a parable, Jesus handled Jonah as sacred writing and a constituent part of the Father’s revealed plan of salvation.

Hi Timothy,

I think the scope of Dt 18 is greater than mere outcomes. I think the greater casuistry would be to say: 1. If a prophet predicts something that doesn’t come to pass he’s a false prophet but 2. it’s okay to know something did not come to pass but speak as if it did.

Also, I think you are arguing against your own premise here:

” So I think there is a problem with the assertion that “Jesus never speaks on matters about which he is ignorant” if applied to Jesus’ command of Scripture.”

First, the Logos is a divine title (John 1:1) and so it is perfectly acceptable to say that he willingly veiled his divine attribute of perfect knowledge even of historical events and trusted his Father to permit him to know all that was necessary.

Secondly, since his words are superintended by God’s Holy Spirit, it is a not at all out of bounds to say that Jesus never speaks on a matter about which he is ignorant. And it is perfectly acceptable to believe that he might be ignorant of historical events. And yet Spirit, through whom he teaches and preaches in his humanity, and who knows all things would not allow him to speak error, especially in relationship to his word.

So it is, I think, impossible to imagine a scenario, given orthodox Christology, in which Jesus would preach about an event as if it were historical to a group of people who believe it to be historical if in fact it were ahistorical.

What do we have to offer the person who wants to love Jesus but has trouble with the whale?

It occurs to me that this whole argument is a kind of cross in which we must bear our intellectual weakness to know God to our full certainty and satisfaction on our terms.  And like the cross or sword of Christ it keeps ratcheting up the pressure separating disciples from the world.  That’s part of the natural order, but I don’t want to force the cross.  It comes inevitably on its own at the intersection between heaven and earth quite strongly as it is.

In other words, I’m fine with the occasional strafing run on the no man’s land between orthodoxy and paganism.  When it comes to senior church leaders in that zone, I’m fine with the occasional multiple nuclear assault.  But now I want to Florence Nightingale the survivors and pull them over the orthodox trench before they hobble off into paganism.

Doubters, if you’re reading this, I don’t know what to tell you.  I struggled mightily with the whole concept of God when I was younger, but I have a weird philosopher’s brain, so once I could accept the existence of God on the front end, the other stuff all fell right into place.  To paraphrase Wittgenstein, all the smaller stuff in the Bible that gives some people trouble like the virgin birth just seemed to me like a sparse theatrical stage that focuses attention on the main characters.  The incarnation of an infinite being is such a unique event that who knows what an account of it should or would look like.

Maybe, the best thing I can tell a seeker who seriously wonders if Jesus was wrong about something or everything is to ask God for help in embracing Christian love and if necessary sacrifice for someone you love five times deeper than you think is humanly possible and then wait patiently to see what happens…

Another thing that helps me when I feel like I woke up on the Marcus Borg side of the bed is to go out there and thump my copy of the Millennium Development Goals but to do it purely for God.  Instead of saying “well this is real; I can get behind this without any complication or doubt,” say “helping homeless people is the most mystical thing I can possibly do and I will participate in it as part of God’s will and for the pleasure of providing something for God’s eyes.”  That dials down the savior complex anxiety for me to make room for more interesting things.

I call this the John 14 approach.

I can’t help but continue to remind myself that without the imperative to bring human souls to salvation, the Church would have been just another social club.

Sometimes it helps me to boil away all the fat, and focus on the core, is not the REASON Christ came to earth to save sinners?  Is not the REASON he founded his Church upon Peter to insure His spirit would have a resting place where the core of his salvific message would be preserved, propogated, disseminated? 

Isn’t everything else window dressing if we allow the above to slip away?

mrb

I cannot believe no one has questioned Matt’s approach that allows Jack and the Beanstalk to possibly be a true story. Everyone knows it was an allegory that spoke of the domineering role of the male and repression of women.

Matt, I don’t view Darwinism as an “ism”, and don’t view evolution as contrary to my belief, and the teaching of Genesis, that God created the heavens and the earth, and all that is in it, up to and including us; after all, God did work his way up to the creation of Man, in Genesis.  I believe it is possible that God used that as a vehicle or mechanism to get us here.  However you look at it, whether created fully formed or as the end product of innumerable events over the millenia, the fact that we are here is miraculous.

Hi Dallasite,

I agree only with your last clause, “the fact that we are here is miraculous”

I think Theistic Evolution (the view you seem to articulate above) is incompatible with biblical revelation. This article briefly lists some of the difficulties:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2012/04/19/whats-wrong-with-theistic-evolution-2/

Yay, Darwin and modern molecular evolutionary biology!  Boo, God of the Gaps!  Yay, separating Creator from creation!  Boo, pseudo-scientific creationism!  Yay, Laws of Nature and Necessity as gift of freedom!  Boo, tying theology to dead crypto-scientific theories!  Yay, distance between necessity and goodness as the infinite distance between creation and Creator!  Boo, straw man Theistic Evolution!  Yay, Laws of Nature as veil of God!  Yay, divine self-limitation as gift of creation and freedom!

Well, with a stunning argument like that - who could possibly cobble together a response?

Fr. Matt, I really think there is an error in your syllogism here, although it is difficult to put my finger on it. 

You say if there really was not a flood over the entire world (not just a big flood,) and if Jonah really was not three days in the belly of the whale,  (I forget your third illustration right now)  and Jesus referred to these stories, he was “promoting a historical fiction.”  A story is not a historical fiction anyway. 

I don’t think making a reference to the common understanding of a culture is “promoting a fiction.”  Jesus was not addressing whether it was an actual fact that the entire land surface of the globe was covered in water in the flood.  He was saying that in the story, the flood came upon people other than Noah and his family unaware,  and that this is how the second coming and judgement will come upon people.  There is no reason why He should have tried to enlighten them on this point, because it isn’t important from a moral standpoint.  There is no evidence that Jesus made any attempt to enlighten folks that the earth is a sphere, or that the sun is a ball of flaming gas,  or that “paradise” is not actually a physical place in the same material world as this one.  In fact, He said that we will see the Son of Man “coming in glory on the clouds of heaven”  clearly leaving the impression that the clouds in the sky are something one came come on, and making an association between the sky and where Jesus is coming from,  which is certainly not factually true, although it may look like that to us (or it may not.) When he healed a man’s eyes with mud and washing in a river, he didn’t bother to tell him how the miracle worked in terms of making an optic nerve grow when he was born without one, or however this worked in terms of cells and tissues.    I just don’t think Our Lord was concerned with what we would call factual truth in terms of history or science,  except where this impinges on a moral or spiritual truth.  He did correct false beliefs when they had a moral effect, such as the belief that the man or his parents must have sinned for him to be born blind, but he never tried to teach them anything about the possible nutritional or infectious causes of blindness. 

In fact, I don’t think it matters whether there was a flood over the whole earth or not. It only matters that if we have evidence that this could not have been so,  we don’t feel required to ignore such evidence because we think there is a choice between that and faith.  God would never require us to be intellectually dishonest. 

I have no trouble believing in the New Testament miracles, which I see as in another class from your examples.  Perhaps the whale is a similar miracle, but the story doesn’t have that feel to me.  I am relatively indifferent as to whether that element of it is literally and historically true; this really has no influence on my faith or not.  On the flood, though,  I don’t believe there is evidence of that this was the case during the same time period when there were human beings on Earth. (Of course there is evidence that at various earlier time periods some parts of earth which are now above the water were below it,  not just for some weeks but for millions of years.) I also don’t think that it would have been possible for anyone to build a boat at that time which could have held all the species in the world which could not have survived such a flood; think of all the species of insects and worms and land snails, and toads and snakes and newts, there are, not to mention all the mammals.  An ocean liner wouldn’t contain two of each. (and 7 of each of the clean animals).  In fact, all the species could not even have been living in Noah’s general area. Elephants and polar bears?  I don’t think it does people who are not exposed to studying geology (or zoology for that matter) , any harm to believe in a world wide flood,  but I don’t think that if one takes geology and studies the issue, one has to reject evidence to the contrary out of hand,  in order to maintain Christian faith.  OR, in order to think that Our Lord die not lie.  (Or “promote a historical fiction.”) 

Susan Peterson

Don’t just read the scriptures. Study the Word. I encourage us all to read chapter 17 of the Gospel found in the book of John as well as psalm 45. It may be of help; or perhaps NOT.

Hi Susan,

Thank you for your response. Here’s what I would say:

First, the Old Testament accounts of these events are in the genre of historical narrative. Despite the valiant attempts of some (especially in the book of Jonah), there’s nothing to suggest that the author of these works intended his readers to understand the accounts as anything other than true historical accounts.

Second, The same is true of Jesus’ references to them. I quoted Luke’s Gospel above. Here’s Matthew’s:

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. 37 For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

Unless you were trained in various modern scientific theories (as first century people were not) there would be no reason at all to even imagine that Jesus did not believe that these things truly happened.

In other words, the idea that he’s referring to parables and that he know’s he’s referring to parables has to be imported into the text externally. It’s an isogetical move…

3rd…its’ an old myth that all ancient people assumed the world is flat. Most didn’t. The bible doesn’t teach it. There is no myth to correct.

Nor does it seem that people would have believed “paradise” is a physical place since Jesus promised the theif he would be there with him “today”. But both of their bodies were buried that day and no one seems to have skipped a beat.

4th…while I generally agree that Jesus’ purpose is not to teach history or science (I definitely grant that point) in this case his whole teaching rests on the events to which he appeals. If in fact the people in Noah’s day were not eating and drinking before they were swept away and were not in fact swept away, then the force of Jesus’ warning is nullified. The modern person, for example, will be able to mock the warning. “Sure Jesus…we’ll be ‘swept away’ just like they were (wink)”...and rightly so because if we are swept away just like they were - and they were not swept away - we have nothing to fear. Or if Jesus rises from the grave just like Jonah emerged from the belly of the fish - and Jonah really didn’t emerge from the fish - then his prediction of resurrection can also be mocked as fable or viewed parabolically - “Sure Jesus - you’ll rise from the tomb ‘just like Jonah’”

Jesus in his humanity may not have known about the rise of modern geophysics and biology, but the Spirit who inspired and superintended his words would be well aware of them (being omniscient) and its difficult for me to believe the Spirit would inspire an illustration so easily dismissed by modern people.

In some ways this is similar to Paul’s references to Adam in Romans 5. What happens if Adam in an ahistorical figure? Paul’s entire argument about the nature of the Fall and the nature of Redemption falls to the ground.

In short, I do think all of these references “impinge on a moral or spiritual truth” and I think rejecting the historicity of these events does significant damage to our Christology for the reasons listed in the article itself.

If Jesus grounding his argument - and the argument he is making in these texts is crucial to his redemptive purpose - on events he knows did not happen then he’s not only promoting a fiction, involved in an historical lie to promote his ministry, but the force of the illustrations themselves is undermined and turned against him. 

But I recognize we may not agree on this.

This article by Joe Carter makes some of the same points…although I think he’s not quite understanding the omniscience question.
http://firstthings.com/blogs/evangel/2011/04/what-did-jesus-know-and-when-did-he-know-it/

I am a believer in young earth creation.  You can’t beat Ken Ham as an apologist for that viewpoint.  His website is <a ref=“http://www.answersingenesis.org/”>AnswersInGenesis</a>

OK, what happened to preview? <lol>  Well, just copy and paste.

oooops! Yesterday evening when I posted that should have been psalm 49. Ok sugarbabies STUDY and show thyselves approved.

[28] eulogos,
You say

He said that we will see the Son of Man “coming in glory on the clouds of heaven” clearly leaving the impression that the clouds in the sky are something one came come on, and making an association between the sky and where Jesus is coming from, which is certainly not factually true

On what do you base your conclusion that Jesus spoke an untruth?Later, you say

I have no trouble believing in the New Testament miracles, which I see as in another class from your examples. Perhaps the whale is a similar miracle, but the story doesn’t have that feel to me.

Ought not Scripture be the standard by which we measure whether our feelings are correct rather than the other way around?

Matt:  You state that “It is, therefore, vitally important to affirm that Jesus’ teaching is always true in every way. Those historical events to which he refers truly took place in precisely the way Jesus describes them and for the purposes and reasons he gives.”

If I understand you correctly, I agree with you.  But this doesn’t really answer the question whether Jesus intends this or that statement of fact He makes to be taken 100% literally.

For example, in Matthew’s Jonah reference, Jesus says (in an obvious reference to Jonah 2:1) :  “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth..”  (Matthew 12:40).  Given what we know about the Good Friday/Easter accounts in the Gospels, don’t we have to conclude that Jesus did not mean “three nights” literally?  And if he didn’t mean that literally, how can we be sure that He is necessarily making a representation about the historicity of the Jonah account?

Hi sclath,

First century Jews counted days inclusively. We don’t. For Jesus and his listeners, any part of one day would be referred to as a full day including both night and day. So Jesus is literally referring to three days and three nights as a 1st century Jewish person understood days and nights.