D.D. 11/15/07
I haven't posted in a while, so hopefully, this post tonight will impel me to more frequent posting. Tonight, I'm going to address something that has been bugging me for a few days. I normally don't have a problem with the Biblical literalism you typically encounter at the average encounter with someone fairly knowledgeable about the Bible in this area of the world. But Biblical literalism can be just flat out wrong when taken out of a historical context and brought to our modern times. To wit - I was having a discussion with a Protestant the other day, who contested the traditional tridiuum (i.e., the three most holy days of the Christian religion leading up to and including Easter Sunday). Their contention was that the traditional events leading up to Jesus' Most Glorious Resurrection could not have happened in the three day sequence as celebrated by the Church traditionally for thousands of years.
Their argument is based on scriptural literalism which speaks of the resurrection happening "on the third day" (Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22, Matthew 20:19, Mark 9:30, Luke 9:22, Luke 13:32, et al.). But the exact verse as quoted by my positor was Matthew 12:20:
For as Jonas was in the whale's belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.
The traditional calendar suggests that Jesus was crucified on Friday (which is why Catholics continue to observe, particularly during Lent, special penance on Fridays) and then rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, two days later. If Jesus was crucified Friday night and then discovered risen Sunday morning, my Bible literalist contended, then the Scripture is not fulfilled. To reconcile this, the literalist suggested from their own hubris not that there must be another explanation, but rather that the traditional teaching on the tridiuum was wrong - and that Jesus was probably actually crucified on Thursday night.
A brief digression - Let me first stop here to say that the reaction in this particular circumstance shows an underlying bias against tradition. Perhaps this is because as scientific people we are taught not to respect the scholarship of historical prior people. For instance, demonic possession never existed - that was just an intellectually inferior people trying to explain epilepsy. In this circumstance, we suppose our superior scientific knowledge today invalidates a historically prior conclusion, because of course they didn't know. Consider the pride in this sentiment. The diagnosis today always trumps the diagnosis then. I'm reminded of the words of Brennus, the great general of the 4th century, who lead the Cisalpine Gauls to a rare sack of Rome. Vae victis. Woe to that pitiful vanquished history.
To continue my digression, we could suppose that the conclusion that the traditional teaching on the tridiuum was wrong because of an apparent contradiction illustrates an inherently present, but not obnoxiously so, anti-Catholic bias still evident in many evangelical Protestants today. Before the barrage of Protestants jump in to say they aren't biased against Catholics, consider as a former Protestant I say this. Protestants still don't quite get Catholics and the y don't really even waste their time thinking about them, so I doubt there is a conscious bias there. Today's evangelicals tend to think of themselves as just Christians with personalized theology - without realizing that this whole notion is Protestant. It's for this same reasons they don't even recognize their own genealogy back to Luther and Calvin - break-aways from the catholic faith. In other words, if you ask a Baptist if they are a Protestant, they will say no. So it's not surprising that all they know is that Catholics are a slightly weird bunch of Christians who are with them on the abortion issue, but whose theology seems a little arcane since the common man was finally allowed access to the Bible in the vernacular. That three-day thing is another goof by a Church that restricted the people from reading the clear text of Matthew 12:20, which says Jesus was in the tomb for three days and three nights. At this point the Catholics are just clinging to a tradition we probably know is wrong.
Still, understanding the cause of the reflexive reaction of our Protestant protagonist does nothing to answer the concern, so back to our conundrum. Let's break it down - from Friday to Sunday is two days, everyone knows that. But something not everyone knows is that the Jews, like the Romans and many others in the classical time counted inclusively. That is to say if you were to ask a Jew living at the time of Jesus how long of a time there was between Friday and Sunday he'd look at you funny and say 'three days - of course, everyone knows that.' After I pointed this out, our protagonist recoiled again. Paraphrasing: Okay - if that's right then that explains the 'on the third day', but that still does not explain Matthew 12:20, which says three days and three nights. If Jesus was crucified on Friday night, then he would have be in the tomb at least until Sunday night - even counting inclusively. Except that the Jews - even the Orthodox Jews to this day - count segments of a day as a full day. Therefore, the portions of Friday, all day Saturday, and the morning of Sunday constitute three days. Naturally, all of this could have been explained by simply trusting the footnote on Matthew 12:30 from the Douay version:
"Three days"... Not complete days and nights; but part of three days, and three nights taken according to the way that the Hebrews counted their days and nights, viz., from evening to evening.
We can trust that tradition got it right, but biblical literalism can be dangerous because it takes a contextual statement out of that context and inserts it into our contemporary assumptions. Just another word of caution for those who believe you can have inerrant words without an inerrant interpretor.