Christianity - A Journey from Facts to Fiction — Page 70
70 Christianity – A Journey from Facts to Fiction Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, "Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you. " But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 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. The men of Nin´eveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. " (Matt 12:38–41) So before we determine what happened to Jesus as , we must understand what happened to Jonah as , because Jesus as claimed that the same miracle would be repeated. What was the Sign of Jonah as ? Did he die in the belly of the fish, and was he later on revived from death? There is unanimity among all Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars that Jonah as did not die in the belly of the fish. He precariously hung between life and death and was miraculously saved from that situation, while any other person in his place would have died. Yet some subtle laws of nature, under the Divine command, must have conspired together to save him from death. Remember, we are not debating the issue of that being possible or not. We are only pointing out that Jesus as , when he said that the like of what happened to Jonah as would also happen to him, could only have meant that what everyone understood to have occurred in the case of Jonah as would occur in his own case. No one in the entire world of Judaism, whether in the land of Judea or anywhere else the Jews had dispersed and settled, would have received a different message from this claim of