What Happened On Saturday?

[Neon Genesis]

I know some Christians believe Jesus went to hell on Saturday to rescue Adam and Eve but if there was a historical Jesus, what really happened on Saturday and why do the gospels never write about what happened on Saturday? Why is there no record of what the disciples did during this time? The gospels are just silent about Saturday.

[Ouroboros]

Yeah, why? Why was it necessary to be dead for two nights? Why not 40 nights? Or one night? What mystical thing (besides references to Pinocchio in the whale, sorry, I mean Noah, no, Lot, damn, who was it? Ah, yes, the Jonah's brothers... damn, wrong again...) is there with dead "3 days and 2 nights"?

[dagnarus]

I know some Christians believe Jesus went to hell on Saturday to rescue Adam and Eve but if there was a historical Jesus, what really happened on Saturday and why do the gospels never write about what happened on Saturday? Why is there no record of what the disciples did during this time? The gospels are just silent about Saturday.

 

I would guess the issue is that the gospels were primarily theological books, not historical, therefore if there was nothing of any real theological importance happening to the disciples on the Saturday, they wouldn't really have any reason to write about it. After all Jesus is the main character, and he was kind of dead at the time, so probably not up to anything all that interesting, at least, not in the physical sense.

[Neon Genesis]

Yeah, why? Why was it necessary to be dead for two nights? Why not 40 nights? Or one night? What mystical thing (besides references to Pinocchio in the whale, sorry, I mean Noah, no, Lot, damn, who was it? Ah, yes, the Jonah's brothers... damn, wrong again...) is there with dead "3 days and 2 nights"?

That's also a good point. What's the theological significance of being dead for three days and two nights? Wouldn't seven be a more likely number to use since seven was a number symbolizing perfection in the bible?

[dagnarus]

Yeah, why? Why was it necessary to be dead for two nights? Why not 40 nights? Or one night? What mystical thing (besides references to Pinocchio in the whale, sorry, I mean Noah, no, Lot, damn, who was it? Ah, yes, the Jonah's brothers... damn, wrong again...) is there with dead "3 days and 2 nights"?

That's also a good point. What's the theological significance of being dead for three days and two nights? Wouldn't seven be a more likely number to use since seven was a number symbolizing perfection in the bible?

 

Well first there is the Jonah and the fish story which they are tieing the whole resurrection thing into, and also if my religious training was correct, I believe that after 3 days is when the body starts to rot and smell, so he would have had to be resurrected before that set in, also new testament you have father, son, spirit, so again that's 3. There's plenty of reason's for 3 days really.

[StevoMuso]

Yeah, why? Why was it necessary to be dead for two nights? Why not 40 nights? Or one night? What mystical thing (besides references to Pinocchio in the whale, sorry, I mean Noah, no, Lot, damn, who was it? Ah, yes, the Jonah's brothers... damn, wrong again...) is there with dead "3 days and 2 nights"?

That's also a good point. What's the theological significance of being dead for three days and two nights? Wouldn't seven be a more likely number to use since seven was a number symbolizing perfection in the bible?

When I was a believer I got into Biblical symbolism in a big way. Jesus said He would be dead 3 days and 3 nights (not 2). The way I explained this discrepancy back then was that Jesus was crucified over Passover (He was the Passover Lamb), a Jewish prophetic day, and NOT over Easter which was a pagan festival. This meant that the Passover Sabbath took place that year on the Wednesday. Jesus died at about 6 p.m. and spent Wed, Thurs and Friday nights in the grave and was raised from death at 6 p.m. on the Saturday (exactly 3 days and 3 nights). The Bible says that the women went to His grave on Sunday morning BEFORE the sun came up which meant that He was already up and about the night before.

 

Weird how we tried to make our beliefs make sense in those days, and how we also tried to separate the pagan solar-god symbolism from the Jesus myth.

 

Other cool symbols: 666 (mis-copied from the original 616 - yup, they got it wrong, hehe) is the number of the Beast or Man (this one we know), 777 is the number of Jesus the man, and 888 is the number of Christ the Messiah.

[Ouroboros]

Well first there is the Jonah and the fish story which they are tieing the whole resurrection thing into,

Which leads to two follow-up questions:

1) why was Jonah in the fish for three days? What is the significance of three in that scenario?

2) why was it important that Jesus (kind-of, missed it with one day) had to be dead the same amount of time? And since the time doesn't line up perfectly, the number 2+3 must be from something else.

 

and also if my religious training was correct, I believe that after 3 days is when the body starts to rot and smell, so he would have had to be resurrected before that set in,

Which is kind of funny. God can resurrect Jesus but not fix his rotten flesh and make it new? And yet he did by making Jesus some form of ghost. Jesus walked through walls, and even was shape-shifting so people didn't recognize his face. So how could a little rotting stop the miracle?

 

Still doesn't make sense.

 

If God really wanted to prove that this was some amazing miracle, he should have let Jesus be dead for 40 days, really rotting away, stinky and pieces of flesh hanging loose from his bones, and then KABLAM! Now he's a happy shiny person again. That would have been even more amazing.

 

also new testament you have father, son, spirit, so again that's 3. There's plenty of reason's for 3 days really.

So why not fully 3 days? It was only from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, i.e. about 36 hours.

 

But still, even if he was fully three days, why was it important to be dead for numerological reasons?

 

Do you see the problem? Is the explanation that this number was important because of magical numbers? Through history some religious people have been interested in mysticism and numerology (the belief that numbers have magical meaning). So 7 is important because it represents Heaven. And the number 3 represents God. And us humans have the number 6. And 13 in a bad number, while 12 is a good number.

 

So in essence, those explanations points to mysticism. Jesus was dead 3 days because it was right according to numerological mysticism, not because it had any practical reasons. It was not because it would take three days to beat the crap out of Satan. It was not because it takes one day for the soul to move from the Earthly realm to Hell or Heaven, and one day to come back, which leaves only one day in Hell/Heaven (wherever his soul went for those days).

 

Perhaps Jesus's soul never left Earth? Maybe the belief was that the soul takes three days to leave, and you have to be resurrected before that or else? No. That can't be either, since a bunch of old prophets were resurrected and walked through Jerusalem when Jesus died on the cross... (Which proves that rotten flesh isn't an obstacle.)

 

Crazy stuff...

[Ouroboros]

When I was a believer I got into Biblical symbolism in a big way.

That's interesting!

 

Symbolism and numerical magic in the Bible, yet as Christian we defended the idea that the Bible was literal! Christianity is about symbols, non-actuals, abstract ideas exemplified in stories, and still we didn't see through these smoke-and-mirrors that this is what religion is about: put stickers on things to make them look like something they're not.

 

Jesus said He would be dead 3 days and 3 nights (not 2).

Yeah. But why? If he had said he would be dead for 5 years, what difference would it have made? (Except the long wait.)

 

So 3 must either be rooted in mysticism or have some practical meaning, but the practical meaning has been lost. (Practical meaning in the sense of God's powers being restricted by some fundamental facts about how the supernatural world works and how it ties into our world.)

 

The way I explained this discrepancy back then was that Jesus was crucified over Passover (He was the Passover Lamb), a Jewish prophetic day, and NOT over Easter which was a pagan festival. This meant that the Passover Sabbath took place that year on the Wednesday. Jesus died at about 6 p.m. and spent Wed, Thurs and Friday nights in the grave and was raised from death at 6 p.m. on the Saturday (exactly 3 days and 3 nights). The Bible says that the women went to His grave on Sunday morning BEFORE the sun came up which meant that He was already up and about the night before.

I see. At least the numbers match up with Jonah that way.

 

Weird how we tried to make our beliefs make sense in those days, and how we also tried to separate the pagan solar-god symbolism from the Jesus myth.

Exactly. It seems like this number comes from some deeper belief, a belief which is not explained in full in the Bible. Why doesn't the Bible explain the importance of 3, or 7, or 6, or ...? Most likely because it wasn't supposed to. The Bible was supposed to be interpreted by magicians and mysticists.

 

Other cool symbols: 666 (mis-copied from the original 616 - yup, they got it wrong, hehe) is the number of the Beast or Man (this one we know), 777 is the number of Jesus the man, and 888 is the number of Christ the Messiah.

Right. And it comes from the idea that numbers have magical powers.

 

As I mentioned in the thread by MWC about the fish symbol, there was a group (cult) before Christianity, they were called Pythagoreans, and they believed that mathematics represented symbols for God, and that you could reach God through magical numbers. They had the fish symbol, or a kind of it, and the number 153 (IIRC), which is also used in the Bible in reference to fish. For Pythagoreans, the pure forms were an important aspect of their belief. The circle, the square, the triangle, etc. The triangle also represents the pyramid. A triangle has 3 sides and 3 corners, just like 3 days and 3 nights.

 

Magical symbols and numbers with supernatural powers... just like names, cast out demons in the name of Jesus, just use the magical name Jesus and you can curse the demons.

[dagnarus]

Well first there is the Jonah and the fish story which they are tieing the whole resurrection thing into,

Which leads to two follow-up questions:

1) why was Jonah in the fish for three days? What is the significance of three in that scenario?

 

Wouldn't know, my ancient numerology isn't the best.

 

2) why was it important that Jesus (kind-of, missed it with one day) had to be dead the same amount of time? And since the time doesn't line up perfectly, the number 2+3 must be from something else.

 

Personally, I think the only significance to about the two plus three thing is that the gospel writers made an arithmetic error.

 

and also if my religious training was correct, I believe that after 3 days is when the body starts to rot and smell, so he would have had to be resurrected before that set in,

Which is kind of funny. God can resurrect Jesus but not fix his rotten flesh and make it new? And yet he did by making Jesus some form of ghost. Jesus walked through walls, and even was shape-shifting so people didn't recognize his face. So how could a little rotting stop the miracle?

 

Again, I believe they wanted to tie Jesus's resurrection into psalm 22 I think, where David's body wouldn't be taken by decay or something like that.

 

Still doesn't make sense.

 

If God really wanted to prove that this was some amazing miracle, he should have let Jesus be dead for 40 days, really rotting away, stinky and pieces of flesh hanging loose from his bones, and then KABLAM! Now he's a happy shiny person again. That would have been even more amazing.

 

Why does an all everything God do anything?

 

also new testament you have father, son, spirit, so again that's 3. There's plenty of reason's for 3 days really.

So why not fully 3 days? It was only from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, i.e. about 36 hours.

 

But still, even if he was fully three days, why was it important to be dead for numerological reasons?

 

Do you see the problem? Is the explanation that this number was important because of magical numbers? Through history some religious people have been interested in mysticism and numerology (the belief that numbers have magical meaning). So 7 is important because it represents Heaven. And the number 3 represents God. And us humans have the number 6. And 13 in a bad number, while 12 is a good number.

 

So in essence, those explanations points to mysticism. Jesus was dead 3 days because it was right according to numerological mysticism, not because it had any practical reasons. It was not because it would take three days to beat the crap out of Satan. It was not because it takes one day for the soul to move from the Earthly realm to Hell or Heaven, and one day to come back, which leaves only one day in Hell/Heaven (wherever his soul went for those days).

 

Perhaps Jesus's soul never left Earth? Maybe the belief was that the soul takes three days to leave, and you have to be resurrected before that or else? No. That can't be either, since a bunch of old prophets were resurrected and walked through Jerusalem when Jesus died on the cross... (Which proves that rotten flesh isn't an obstacle.)

 

Crazy stuff...

 

Well my reply was more thinking along the lines of why the gospel writers might put the resurrection after 3 days than the more esoteric, why would a divine immaterial being choose 3 days. Maybe he has OCD? You know step on a crack break your back, resurrect after 4 days everyone pays for their sins? Heck maybe God muck up with the 36 hours thing so Christ death isn't actually acceptable.

[StevoMuso]

Well my reply was more thinking along the lines of why the gospel writers might put the resurrection after 3 days than the more esoteric, why would a divine immaterial being choose 3 days. Maybe he has OCD? You know step on a crack break your back, resurrect after 4 days everyone pays for their sins? Heck maybe God muck up with the 36 hours thing so Christ death isn't actually acceptable.

Since the Jesus myth is taken from pagan solar-religion symbols, the 3 days comes from the time when the path of the sun "seemed to stand still" for three days from the 22 Dec to 24 Dec. By "path" I mean the path the sun follows across the sky making the days shorter and shorter during winter. Because this path seemed to the naked eye not to be moving over those three days, the ancient pagan religions (like Mithranism) said this was the 3 days their god spent in Death (or fighting the god Hades depending on the myth).

 

On the 25 Dec the sun's path starts to move the other way, making the days longer again. The solar religions said this was the day their god "triumphed over death" and the event of this "resurrection" was celebrated a few months later at the Spring Equinox (days finally longer than nights). The longer/warmer days brought new life to the earth (crops growing, livestock breeding) which is why this "resurrection" was said to "bring salvation to Man".

 

Most of us on this ExC forum probably know all this - but it does explain the source of the "3 days" myth very nicely.