GOOD FRIDAY - OR GOOD THURSDAY?

Jesus said that the son of man, himself, would be in the earth for three days and then rise again.  We read it would be "after three days" (Matthew 27:63, Mark 8:31).  Some feel that nobody was regarded as legally dead until after three literal days.  The three days is taken loosely by the Church for Jesus allegedly died on Friday and was a while in the tomb that day.  He was supposedly all day in it on Saturday.  He was there part of Sunday and by the morning he was gone.  Nobody claims to know when he left the tomb alive!  All the gospels seem to say is that it was found empty on Sunday morning.  It would be a problem if Jesus made a prediction that could not be known to be fulfilled.  It is easy for the gospels to put predictions in his mouth after the events predicted have happened!! 

The gospel of John never mentions that Jesus said he would rise on the third day.  Noticeably, it never says when he rose only that he was seen on Sunday.  In the other gospels, Jesus said he would be dead for three days and  in John you have the story of Lazarus.  Lazarus was dead for four days. Could the Lazarus story be actually the real story of Jesus’ resurrection reworked?  Who knows!

The Christian view is, "The way the Jews reckoned days leaves Jesus being in the grave one day and two nights.  This is not three days but a day and a half!" Whether it is that short or longer the fact remains that there is no way to prove Jesus rose on the third day whatever that means.  When the gospels say that the tomb was found empty on Sunday morning there is no hint that anybody said they knew when Jesus left the tomb.  He could have been gone as soon as the stone was closed.  Thus the prophecy whether it means part of three days or three full days is a trick.  A prophecy that predicts something uncheckable is a fake.  Jesus was definitely a false prophet and the early believers made a slip that showed how gullible the first generation of Christians actually was.  Religion blinded them so they could not see the obvious.  Some would not want to think Jesus was three days in the tomb for it causes problems with his alleged burial cloth the Turin Shroud which shows no sign of a decaying body.  The image is too fresh to match up to being that long entombed.

If Jesus is dead then he cannot help you any more than the gods of the pagans can and thus Christianity is just a cruel trick.  Many say that as Acts says Jesus went up to the sky it follows that he must have died again and for good this time!

Some believers hold that three days means three days so they challenge the idea of Jesus dying on Friday and rising on Sunday.

The Church commemorates the death of Jesus on the cross every year on Good Friday. But many scholars think they got the wrong day and Jesus died on Thursday.

The gospels supposedly say Jesus died on the Friday. The Gospel of John is not reliable for he flatly contradicted the other gospels and said that Jesus was crucified on Thursday and not Friday.

I repeat: The gospels apart from John have Jesus dying on Friday. They say Jesus died the day before the Sabbath meaning the Saturday Sabbath for had they meant any other kind of Sabbath they would have said (Mark 15:42).
 
John denies that the Last Supper if he knew of it was the Passover for the next day he has the Jews being afraid to get unclean for they had to eat the Passover (John 18:28).

John says that the day after Jesus died was a high Sabbath meaning a special Sabbath so it was not an ordinary Saturday Sabbath but one of the other Sabbaths that the Jews kept. The day after Jesus died was the Sabbath of the Passover and then the Saturday Sabbath followed the day after that (see page 101, In Defence of the Faith). Again Thursday is the day we come up with as the day of Jesus’ death.

John says that Jesus died on the Day of Preparation. The Day of Preparation was the eve of Passover. The Passover took place on Friday. Jesus was shown to the people before he was taken straight to the crucifixion site on the Day of Preparation meaning he died on that day (John 19:14).

John and the other gospels say Jesus had to be taken off the cross and buried before the Sabbath but John says that the Sabbath was a high day and a special day (19:31). So it was not the ordinary Saturday Sabbath he means but the special Friday one. He takes pains to show he doesn’t mean the normal Saturday Sabbath.


Christians reconcile the contradiction between John's Thursday and the Friday of the other gospels by saying that John was using another calendar and agrees with the others but just works out time differently.
 
The two calendar idea is wrong. John was writing for non-Jews so he would have used the Roman calendar they used which would have plotted the cross on Thursday.
 
John said that Jesus died on the Day of Preparation which preceded the special day the Passover that fell on Friday meaning Jesus died on Thursday.
 
Some then to keep Friday as the day of Jesus’ death to stay in tune with the other gospels argue that Day of Preparation was just the name for the two feasts together. So both Thursday and Friday were known as the Day of Preparation. This way Jesus could have died the day after the literal Day of Preparation, the Passover day Friday, for common usage fused the two feasts for shortness (page 376, Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties). But John was not writing for Jews and so he would have been specific especially when he was writing in a time that Judaism seemed to be on its last legs. He was writing for people who did not have the synoptic gospels for if they had he would not have fused the two feasts and confused his readers. And when they did not know much about Judaism he would have given the exact day and its right name that Jesus died on so he did mean Jesus died on a Thursday. People do not use popular descriptions that may mislead in reporting things which are very important and the fact remains that the lumping together of the two feasts was not the most popular practice and the Christians have invented the usage to get around the contradiction. Logic says if they were going to use that way of speaking they would have used the main feast for shortness not the reference to Day of Preparation. They would have called the fused two days the Passover.
 
Even if people had been fusing the two feasts and calling both the Day of Preparation we would know what they mean in ordinary language depending on the context but John’s gospel is not a conversation but a record and it would not use that usage or put it in a context so he referred to the real Day of Preparation.
 
Clearly then for John the crucifixion took place on a Thursday. This is indisputable.
 
The research of a physics professor of the University of Tennessee, Dr Roger Rusk, found that the Passover day fell only on a Thursday in the year 30 AD in the span of years that Jesus might have been crucified (page 190, The Vatican Papers). But according to a correct understanding of John’s saying that Jesus died the day before this would require that Jesus would have been crucified on a Wednesday. To me all that would mean is that Jesus perhaps was not crucified in 30 AD and if the gospel says he was it was simply lying and thus showing that its stories about Jesus may all be fantasy.