In a comment, elsewhere in this blog, Jos Verhulst points out
The 3-shaped bloodmark on the forehead is interpreted as a literal reference to the number three (9:40). However, Hindu numerals did not yet exist at the first century.
No, “9:40” is not a biblical chapter and verse number. I say that after a few frustrating minutes. It is a red line, time line for the YouTube video, Solid Proof Turin Shroud is 1st Century! in which the voiceover tells us:
The number 3 has significance. On the forehead of Jesus of Nazareth, on the Shroud of Turin, you see 3 written in blood . . .
- that represents the Holy Trinity
- Jesus died at 3 pm
- Jesus was in the tomb for three days
- Jonah was in the belly of the whale for 3 days
There is an issue. As Jos points makes it clear. Hindu numerals (and Arabic numerals derived from them) did not exist at the time of Jesus’ burial. In fact, if this big three interpretation is solid proof of anything then it is solid proof that the shroud is medieval, at least from the 7th or 8th century on.
Kind of looks like the 3 in the Devanagari strain.
And while we are talking about 3 days, let’s ask ourselves the question that Daniel Burke asked for Religion News Service during Lent this year. He does a great job of covering all the bases:
But if Jesus died at 3 p.m. Friday and vacated his tomb by dawn Sunday morning — about 40 hours later — how does that make three days? And do Hebrew Scriptures prophesy that timetable?
Even Pope Benedict XVI wrestles with the latter question in his new book, Jesus: Holy Week, about Christ’s last days. “There is no direct scriptural testimony pointing to the ‘third day,”‘ the pope concludes.
The chronology conundrum is “a bit of a puzzle,” said Marcus Borg, a progressive biblical scholar and co-author of The Last Week, a book about Holy Week.
But Borg and other experts say the puzzle can be solved if you know how first-century Jews counted time, and grant the four evangelists a little poetic license.
For Jews of Jesus’ time, days began at sunset, a schedule that still guides Jewish holy days such as Shabbat. So, Saturday night was Sunday for them.
Ancient Jews also used what scholars call “inclusive reckoning,” meaning any part of a day is counted as a whole day, said Clinton Wahlen of the Seventh-day Adventist Biblical Research Institute in Silver Spring, Md.
Using these counting methods, a backward calculation from Sunday morning to Friday afternoon makes three days.
Besides, the four evangelists were likely not counting time literally, according to some scholars.
“Expressions like ‘three days’ and ’40 days’ are imprecise in the Bible,” Borg said. For the evangelists, “three days” means “a short period of time.”
Ben Witherington, an evangelical scholar of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., agreed.
The phrase “three days,” is a colloquialism comparable to “directly” in Southern-speak, meaning “after a little while,” he said. It’s anachronistic to expect the evangelists to monitor time like modern-day men, Witherington said.
“The Gospel writers didn’t walk around with sundials on their wrists the way modern scholars walk around with wristwatches,” he said. “They were not dealing with the precision that we do.”
But precision, especially when it comes to the Bible, has been a hallmark of faith for many Christians — especially those who equate truth with historical facts.
Most troubling for these believers is Jesus’ own prophecy, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, that he will rise from the dead after “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Trying to reconcile that prophecy with the Holy Week calendar, ancient Christian theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Cyril of Jerusalem counted the eclipse of the sun after Jesus’ death as a night, said the Very Rev. John Behr, dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y.
Didascalia Apostolorum, a third-century Christian treatise, took a more radical approach. It proposes that Jesus and his apostles followed a different calendar than other Jews and celebrated the Last Supper on a Tuesday, meaning the crucifixion happened on a Wednesday. Some fringe Christian denominations still promote that theory.
Others dismiss historical revisions and say Jesus simply misspoke.
“To be technical, Jesus made a false prophecy, and that’s not something most Christians would want to put that way,” said Robert Miller, a professor of religion at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa.
But the point of Jesus’ prophecy is to draw a comparison to Jonah, who was willing to die to save his shipmates (and spent three days in the belly of a big fish), not to set a timetable for the Resurrection, said Witherington.
Martin Connell, a scholar at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., calls the chronology conundrum a “never-ending question.”
So unsettled is the evidence, and so elastic, that the debate will likely always continue,” Connell said.
The Apostle Paul wrote that the third-day Resurrection accords with the Hebrew Scriptures.
Some scholars, such as Wahlen, think Paul is pointing to a passage in the Book of Hosea, which says God will “heal” and “restore” Israel after three days.Benedict says that theory “cannot be sustained.”
There may be a very practical reason for the Resurrection to have happened in three days after Jesus’ death, scholars say.
First-century tradition held that only after three days could you be sure someone was dead; after four days the spirit was presumed to leave the body.
Need we say more? Probably! Maybe Jesus didn’t misspeak. Maybe someone wrote it down wrong.
And was it a whale or a fish?
Georges Ifrah discusses the origins and forms of Hindu-Arabic numerals comprehensively in Ch 29 of his “From One to Zero”. The essential features are that it is a denary system, with 10 separate symbols including a zero place-holder. The only other system that came anywhere near to it in sophistication, was the Babylonian base-60 system of about 1000 BCE. It found its way into the West, through the Moors in Spain and North Africa, initially by Pope Sylvester around 1000AD, and subsequently by Leonardo Fibonacci around 1200AD. It had earlier spread through South-East Asia, but with symbols particular to local ethnic scripts, and their writing implements. Very likely it entered China through Indian Buddhism, but this is debated.
Syrian bishop Severus Sebokht refers to the superiority of the system in the 7th century, in chastising the mathematical arrogance of the Greeks. The earliest alleged known examples are Sanskrit copper plate deeds from the 6th to 10th centuries concerning properties granted to Brahman religious authorities. Other examples are stone inscriptions, including a date corresponding to 875AD, and numbered verses of a poem.
The ‘3’ symbol on the forehead of the TSM, is the result of a blood-flow across a furrowed brow. Those with a penchant for number mysticism will want to make something of it, but essentially it is merely pareidolia, an accidental pattern. If a Trinity symbol is to be sought, then the Nicene Creed has the Holy Spirit as No.3, not God incarnate.
The book of Jonah is neither an historical nor prophetic book, there are no oracles as in all other prophetic books. Essentially it is a post-exilic satire about a reluctant prophet, the only character in the work, a Jew, who comes out of it badly. It was directed against the exclusiveness of a post-exilic Judaism, with its policy of a pure blood race of Jews that the reformers Ezra and Nehemiah had implemented in the 5th century.
And it’s a fish, not a whale. This should say something to us about the non-literal nature of the work. It is interesting that all other characters in the story (non-Jewish) are made to look good, all except poor old Jonah! Jonah eventually comes to the realization that God was a universal God, and not the sole property of Israel, the essential intent of the story.
I’m no great fan of Marcus Borg, but his solution of the “three days” in the tomb is on the money as far as I’m concerned.
Jesus might well have appreciated the essentially fictional nature of the Jonah story, after all most of what he had to say was expressed in parables. I see no problem in his using it to express its close analogy with his being in the tomb.
I always found Mat.12:40 so remarkably precise, because of the very specific conjunction between the two specifications ‘three days and three nights’ & ‘at the heart of the earth’. Indeed, with a time span of one and a half days at some point on the surface of the earth, will correspond a total of ‘three days and three nights’, as seen from the ‘heart’ of the earth. As seen from the center of the earth, day and night always occur together, in a completely equivalent way. From that very special vantage point, a time span of 12 hours corresponds to ‘one day and one night’. In 24 hours, you wil have a day followed by a night at one side of the earth, together with a night followed by day at the opposite side; so 24 hours 2 days + 2 nights. And so on.
Dan, I know Devanagari (Hindi) and it is a long time that I have not used it. Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, which is said to have come from the Indo-Iranian (Indo-European) group of languages. Tamil is not an Indo-Aryan but a Dravidian language.With migrations and travelling aspects of one culture were absorbed by other cultures.
Pronounciation of some numbers in Hindi:
1 ache ( as in “headache”)
2 dhow
3 theen
4 char
5 paanch
6 chei
7 saath
8 aath
9 now
10 thus ( as in the English “thus”)
The Spanish Jesuit Henry Heras (Enric Heras de Siars) spent forty years studying India’s ancient past, particularly what was found in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa (now in Pakistan), keen on deciphering a mysterious script found there. He believed that there was some link with the Sumerian-Egyptian civilisation and wrote a masterpiece. He also speculated that the “three kings” were from India, having found people in North West India taking gifts such as gold and frankincense when a child was born.
See:
http://indianpost.com/viewstamp.php/Color/Purple/HENRY%20HERAS%20&%20INDUS%20VALLEY%20SEAL
Number 3 can also be holy in Hinduism because of the “Trimurthi”, the deity as creator, preserver and destroyer. The cosmology in that country interested J. Robert Oppenheimer and Carl Sagan, both Jewish atheists, the latter believing that the ancient Hindus had dated the creation of the universe correctly. But surely all this has nothing to do with the 3 seen on the Shroud?
Interesting comments on the numbers, Louis. Not only Dravidian Tamil, but Ifrah tabulates several other examples extending as far as Cambodia, Sumatra and Tibet. On the pronunciation of the numbers, a Linguistics expert would see a few connections with other Indo-European languages, 2 – duo, 4 – quattuor, 8 – octo, acht; etc. The Sankrit examples shown in Ifrah, even more so. I’d maintain the forehead “3” has no numerical significance, a pareidolia resulting from a blood flow over a furrowed brow. Even if David Goulet below finds it a “fun game”.
That’s right, David. There are connections with other Indo-European languages and the Indologist Max Müller saw links with German. You are also correct about the “3”, which seems to be have been the result of a furrow on the forehead.
It’s not a ‘3’! The body would have been viewed not straight on and from above, but from the side. So clearly it is either a lower case cursive ‘m’ or a ‘w’ – depending on which side you are viewing from. The ‘m’ of course stands for ‘Messiah’, the ‘w’ for ‘Wisdom’.
This is a fun game!