Happy Good Friday, folks. Or as I like to call it, Pre-Resurrection Logistics Puzzle Day. Today kicks off the great Christian Weekend Countdown, when believers pretend that Friday afternoon to Sunday morning somehow equals “three days and three nights.” And no, we’re not doing interpretive dance math—just basic counting skills and a little skepticism.
Let’s revisit Matthew 12:40, where Jesus allegedly said:
“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Sounds pretty damn specific. Not “a couple of days,” not “a long weekend,” but three days and three nights. If you’re going to predict your own resurrection, you might want to be clear about the schedule.
The Church’s Timeline: A Hot Mess
According to standard church lore:
Jesus died Friday afternoon (Good Friday).
He was buried before sundown (because Sabbath was approaching).
He resurrected Sunday morning (before dawn, just to be extra elusive).
Now I’m no Gregorian calendar apologist, but let’s spell this out:
Friday night – that’s one night.
Saturday day and night – okay, now we’re at one full day and two nights.
Sunday morning – oops, he’s gone before the sun’s even up.
So what we’ve got here is, at most: 1.5 days and 2 nights, generously. Not even close to three days and three nights. It’s the theological equivalent of saying a weekend in Vegas counts as a sabbatical.
Apologetics Gymnastics: Watch Them Tumble
Christian apologists, bless their hearts, have turned “three days and three nights” into a metaphorical origami swan. They argue things like:
“Any part of a day counts as a full day.”Sure, and any sip of wine counts as a bottle, right? This isn’t ancient Mesopotamian IRS math.
“It’s a Jewish idiom, not meant literally.”So Jesus—supposedly God incarnate—knew he was going to confuse the hell out of future generations by being super metaphorical on this one? Matthew sure didn’t treat it like a figure of speech. He compared it to Jonah—who, myth or not, supposedly spent a literal three days and nights in a fish’s digestive tract. No one reads that as “Jonah took a nap.”
“He actually died on a Wednesday or Thursday.”Neat trick, but the Gospels don’t agree on the exact date, and church tradition never backed this up consistently until modern apologists needed a retcon.
(Scholarly breakdowns of these arguments can be found in sources like GotQuestions, Bible.org, and the always-theologically-adventurous Answers in Genesis. Spoiler: None of them actually fix the math without special pleading.)
“It’s Me, Jesus, But Unrecognizable!”
And then there’s post-resurrection Jesus, the world’s worst hide-and-seek champion.
Let’s be blunt: nobody recognized him. Mary Magdalene thought he was the damn gardener (John 20:15). Two disciples walked with him for miles on the road to Emmaus and didn’t clue in until he broke bread like a weird dinner party ghost (Luke 24:13–35). Even his closest friends, people who supposedly spent years with him, needed divine PowerPoint presentations to get it through their skulls.
The excuses vary: “They were spiritually blinded,” “He had a glorified body,” or “It was early and they hadn’t had coffee yet.”
“He was a Time Lord” (that’s me throwing my voice from the back of the crowd)
But the simplest explanation? It wasn’t him. It was someone else. Or it was a story made up after the fact to explain why no one saw him right away—or why the authorities didn’t give a single holy damn about an escaped political prisoner wandering around for 40 days making cameos like a resurrected Where’s Waldo.
The Romans? Silent. The Sanhedrin? Disinterested. The guards who supposedly fled their post at pain of death? Never punished. It’s almost like… no one was looking for him. Because they didn’t need to. Because the guy they nailed to a tree was still very much dead, and what followed was a rapidly growing legend, not a man. That’s not a resurrection—it’s a reboot.
TL;DR – The Resurrection Timeline Doesn’t Resurrect
So here we are again. Another Easter, another round of theological gaslighting where 36-ish hours = 3 days and 3 nights. If your faith needs this much mental acrobatics just to make a calendar make sense, maybe—just maybe—it’s not built on solid ground.
Literalists are stuck defending math that doesn’t add up. Symbolists hand-wave it as metaphor. But skeptics? We just point to the calendar and shrug.
Because if your savior can predict his death and resurrection down to the night count—but can’t actually match it to the weekend schedule—and then returns looking like someone else entirely, you have to ask:
Was it prophecy… or post-production?
Sources:
My own OG blog post from 2006