Was the Crucifixion Wednesday or Friday?

Now, this afternoon we're talking about the resurrection. I was on the way driving in going, what in the world am I going to start off with? Because there are so many issues to address. There's the issue that is very common these days of what day was the crucifixion, how long was Jesus in the tomb, at what time did the resurrection take place?

And we will address those things. Then there's the issue of, for example, what Jehovah's Witnesses believe, that Jesus Christ was raised only spiritually from the grave, that he was not raised physically whatsoever.

There's the Muslim claim that Jesus did not really die on the cross. All these things that we're going to try to get around to addressing depending on the phone calls and how many people call and which direction they're taking the conversation.

But one of the first things I figure we had to address right off the bat was the fact that of all the claims of Christianity, the resurrection is the one that mankind has seemingly dedicated the most time to trying to figure out a theory to explain away the miraculousness of the resurrection.

Now, of course, there are some people who don't even believe that Jesus Christ ever existed. They don't believe that he ever lived. But they are, fortunately, in the vast minority these days because there's plenty of evidence that he did indeed live.

Even the Jewish people accept that he lived, that he was a teacher, and that the stories we have from him are at least generally accurate in what they have to say. But, given that Jesus lived, then you come up with basically a humanistic attitude toward the resurrection.

That is, obviously, there's no way if one rejects the fact that miracles exist and that miracles can happen, there's no way for the resurrection to have taken place. There must be some naturalistic explanation for the resurrection.

And a number of theories have been put forward. Undoubtedly, one of the most popular theories is the swoon theory. Ever heard of the swoon theory?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

You've heard of the swoon theory.

There's a big difference between death and swoon.

Yes, a very big difference between that. So people can understand what the swoon theory is. The swoon theory is basically that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross, but he swooned. He simply passed out.

And the guards, whoever was mistaken, they thought he was dead. He wasn't. They took him down. In the coolness of the tomb, he revived and came out of the tomb and convinced his disciples he was alive.

And then, generally, as people would say, sometime later, who knows, when he was 67 years old, he died a natural death, and that was it. And this was the beginning of Christianity. Well, the swoon theory has so many holes in it, it's almost unbelievable, just to start off with, what the swoon theory has to say.

First of all, you've got a person who was crucified, and the gospel narratives tell us what happened relevant to the whipping, the scourging, the loss of blood, the nailing of the hands and feet to the cross, the piercing of the spear into Jesus' side, the fact that the Roman guards standing there could tell the difference between a person who had passed out and a person who was dead.

They were trained to know that. If they messed up, it would be their life, so they obviously knew what was going on. So that doesn't obviously jive with the swoon theory whatsoever. Then you have Jesus being wrapped in a burial cloth, laid in a cold tomb.

How that's supposed to revive someone, I'm not sure. It's sort of hard to breathe when you're wrapped in a burial cloth. You do not have any medical attention being given to him whatsoever, so it would be much more likely that he would die rather than simply revive from some coolness of a tomb.

How he managed to get out of the burial cloth, the Gospels tell us. One of the Gospels tells us that the burial cloth that was wrapped around him just basically collapsed, that it hadn't been unwound and then wound back up.

It just basically collapsed itself.

Was that burial cloth similar to mummification, Jim?

Well, there's a lot of questions about that. Of course, if you believe that the Shroud of Turin is correct, then that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense because the Gospels tell us that there was a wrapping around the face that was taken off and laid aside, but there would seem to have been a wrapping.

Same with Lazarus. Lazarus had, he said, release him from those burial clothes. He was bound by them. He was just some loose thing that was just sort of laying on him. He could have loosed himself from it, but obviously there needed to be something more than that.

That's one of the reasons I don't accept the Shroud of Turin as being the actual burial cloth of Jesus because it doesn't really jive with what the Gospels themselves say concerning him. But anyhow, how he managed to extract himself with hands and wrists that would have been basically obliterated by the nails, how he managed to stand up on feet that had just been recently nailed to a cross, then, in his weakened condition, managed to roll away a very heavy stone from the entrance of the tomb, fight off the Roman guards who obviously would have attempted to keep him in there or sneak by them or something like that, if they're Roman guards.

There are some who feel that they're temple guards. But even the temple guards themselves were under the same strictures that the Roman guards were. In the Mishnah, we read that the temple guards, if they ever were to fall asleep, would receive a whipping and their garments would be burned.

So obviously they would not try to fall asleep either. But whoever the guards were, and they're most probably Roman guards from what Matthew has to say about him, managed to slip by them or fight them off or something like that, walk the determined distance into Jerusalem to find the disciples, and then have completely healed scars to show the disciples somehow managed to show up inside of a locked room.

I mean, I think we've made it pretty obvious so far that the swoon theory just doesn't hold any water whatsoever. It has no way of jiving with the facts that we have them. About the oldest theory that has been put forth to explain the resurrection away is the theft theory.

And that is the disciples stole the body of Jesus and then to have a job, I guess, after the death of Jesus, they started preaching the resurrection and started their own church. Well, this one, of course, we're even given the origins of this one by Matthew.

Because Matthew tells the Jewish leaders, approached the guards and gave them money and said, this is what you're to say, and if it comes to the governor's ears, we will intercede for you. Well, the reason that they had to say this was that if the guards admitted to having fallen asleep, if they were Roman guards, they were subject to the penalty of death.

And so, obviously, the Jewish leaders would have had to have interceded on their behalf to keep them from dying. And since this is found even in the New Testament, it's not too surprising to find it common today.

It has been brought up numerous times. Refuting it is rather interesting because, first of all, just on a very psychological basis, this band of disciples, as we see them presented, and, of course, someone who believes in this would say, well, that's their writings.

They must be saying it that way. Well, Luke wasn't one of them. And you'd have to assume that all of them are lying. This band of disciples, from all the evidence we have, were a very downtrodden, downcast group of people who were not out to go stealing bodies, fight off Roman guards, or anything of the kind.

These were not trained soldiers who'd slip past Roman guards and rob tombs. They had no reason to do it. They were not inclined to deceiving people in the first place. There's no evidence that they were.

There is no way to explain the fervor with which they proclaimed the gospel by saying that they themselves were well aware of the fact they were lying to people. The Jews themselves did not react in such a way as to accuse them of having stolen the body.

They circulated the story, but whenever Paul or Peter or these others actually confronted the Jews, the Jews were not recorded as having accused them of doing that because it would have been folly for them to have done that.

There were over 500 people that had seen Jesus alive after his resurrection, alive at that time. So the theft theory dies for lack of support. It's just simply some way of getting around the clear evidences presented in the New Testament about the resurrection.

There's nothing in the New Testament that would support it. There's not even anything really within the secular time period that would say, yes, the disciples were this great A-Team group of individuals that came running in with their M -16s and stole the body.

What they did with it, of course, is not known. The Jews later on in later history would accuse them of that after the witnesses were dead. But when the witnesses were alive themselves, we don't have any evidence that they talked about that.

So the theft theory, that's a very difficult word to say. The theft theory simply does not jive with the facts as we have them. But very briefly, I'd just like to point out that another theory that has been given is the hallucination theory, that the appearances of Jesus Christ were mass hallucinations.

Why the Swoon Theory Fails

We're going to go to Phoenix, and one of our faithful callers is standing in a phone booth. Hello, Edwina. Hello, Edwina, can you hear me? Hello, Edwina, can you hear me? Okay, you're on the air.

Oh, hi. Can you hear me all right?

Yes.

I just want to ask a question about in Luke 24, verse 13, where Jesus was walking with those two men along the road.

Yes.

And it said that they couldn't recognize him.

Uh-huh.

Why was it that they couldn't recognize him?

Okay, I just happened to have my Bible open to that passage. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus encountered two disciples, and he walked with them. And it says in verse 16, but they were kept from recognizing him.

And later on, it's in verse 31, it says, then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. It's very clear that a power was acting upon them to keep them from recognizing him.

It was not that he was unrecognizable, but that there was a power, God's power working on them to keep them from recognizing him until the purpose that he wished to work in their lives was accomplished.

So it wasn't that Jesus was some different person or was appearing in different forms and things like that and confusing people, but it was the fact that Jesus himself was exercising a power to keep them from recognizing him.

They were kept from recognizing him by the power of God itself.

Oh, okay.

Okay?

All right, thanks. Okay, thanks a lot, Edwina. Bye-bye.

Bye.

And just before Edwina's phone call, we had been talking about another one of the theories that is put forth to explain away the resurrection, and that is the hallucination theory. And that is that all the appearances of Jesus Christ as we have them recorded in the New Testament were due to mass hallucination.

The disciples so much wanted him to be alive that they all hallucinated that he had risen from the dead. Now, that's rather interesting, obviously, considering the fact that Jesus had to repeatedly appear to the disciples just to convince him of the reality of the resurrection.

Those who are wishing for something so strong that they create hallucinations aren't going to be sitting there going, Well, I'm really not sure. Sort of like Thomas was called Doubting Thomas because he did not believe in the resurrection until he had bodily proof standing in front of him.

People who would suggest this have to assume that all the disciples were under the same mental state, that they are all subject to hallucinations, and not all people are subject to hallucinations, that somehow this hallucination could be agreed upon by a large number of people.

This type of thing just doesn't occur very often at all. 500 people don't normally have the same hallucination at different times, in different circumstances, in different surroundings. Hallucinations normally take place when a person is encountered with a familiar situation that reminds them of something.

You don't have 500 people who would be using the same context and the same situation to remember something like that. It's obviously a very broad attack upon the very credibility of the disciples themselves.

The disciples were a very variegated group of people. They did not come from the same backgrounds. They did not have the same type of mental makeup. Matthew was as different from Simon the Zealot as you could have.

Obviously, people who are that different don't tend to have the exact same hallucination at the exact same time, in the exact same detail. Obviously, these people were in different states of mind. John the Beloved was one who would be more willing to allow for the miraculous to take place.

Thomas wasn't. Mary was weeping. Some were afraid. When you look at the very mental states they were in, they weren't even in the same mental states. You have different people, different contexts, different mental states that simply do not allow for any type of mass hallucination to be taking place.

Finally, the last theory that we'll look at, we'll at least give any credence to anyhow, is the wrong tomb theory. This one's one of my favorites. The women, and John, and Peter, went to the wrong tomb.

Now, of course, the scriptures tell us that Mary and the women followed after and saw the place where they laid Jesus. These people would say, well, they may have seen it, but then in the darkness of the Sunday morning, they went to the wrong tomb.

It was empty and there was nobody there. Maybe they had visions of angels and ran off and started the whole thing. This is how it happened. This can be dealt with so quickly. It's rather well done when I heard someone first do this.

That is, if it's just the wrong tomb, if Jesus died and his body was in the tomb and they went to the wrong tomb, it would have been so easy for the Jewish leaders to have wiped out Christianity. As soon as Peter and John and the others started preaching, they could have just gone to the right tomb, rolled away the stone, taken the dead body out, stuck it on a cart, carted it through downtown Jerusalem, put it back in, and that would have been the end of Christianity.

Obviously, they did not do that. I'm sure if they had been able to do that, they would have done that, but they didn't. Obviously, the idea that the women went to the wrong tomb was contradicted by the fact that they were there when Jesus' body was laid in the tomb.

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who we were told are involved in laying him there, they would have known. As soon as someone told them about the resurrection, they would have gone to the tomb and found it sealed, the guard there, the body inside.

They would have put a kibosh on it, but none of those things happened. Obviously, the idea that the wrong tomb was gone to and this is how the whole thing started ignores the vast majority of the evidence and the context of which we're speaking.

Those are some of the theories that have been raised by folks concerning the resurrection and how to explain away the resurrection. Most people who are coming, for example, from an atheistic viewpoint, not just atheist, but anti-theist, there's a bit of a difference there.

An atheist just simply says there is no God and anti-theist is militant in his denunciation of those who believe that there is a God. I've encountered a few of those in my lifetime. These people probably aren't going to get too much into these theories because they're going to go farther back than that and attempt to deny Jesus even existed.

In fact, during this week on a secular radio station, I heard a program where a guy called in and said that the Dead Sea Scrolls show that Jesus is completely different than the New Testament presents him, that Jesus actually did write things.

There's a Joshua mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls and these people think that that's Jesus and this Joshua wrote things. They identify him as a teacher of righteousness. All these other wonderful things.

This is some of the areas that more of the anti-theists are going into than these theories, which were very, very common back in the last century in the rationalist German viewpoint that came out that time.

People had to come up with a rationalistic explanation of all miracles. For example, when Jesus walked in the water, you know what that really was. There was a sandbar there and the disciples were confused and they thought he was actually walking in the water when actually he was walking in the sandbar.

Maybe when Peter got out of the boat, he was also in the sandbar. Then he stepped off the sandbar and started to sink and Jesus reached down and picked him up and he got in the boat. This is how people are trying to explain away all the miracles that occur in the Bible.

That's quite convenient. The storm's just blown over and all this is going on. Jesus just happens to know where that sandbar is and takes him all the way from shore right out to where they are.

There has to be a rationalistic explanation if you deny the miraculous, if you deny the supernatural. There must be a rationalistic explanation. One scholar responds to the resurrections that Jesus performed of Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son as rescues from an early grave.

These people weren't dead. Jesus just resuscitated them. All things like this. That's where a lot of these theories came from. They're a little bit out of vogue these days because people are now getting to the point where they're simply denying that Jesus ever existed.

Go from that way. You don't have to deal with the resurrection. You don't have to deal with the New Testament. Just throw the whole thing out the window and start from scratch. Another aspect of the resurrection that we're going to address this afternoon is the fact that there are some groups that deny the resurrection by saying that Jesus Christ rose only spiritually from the grave.

One of the major groups that does this is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or Jehovah's Witnesses. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus Christ died on a stake. They believe that Jesus did not have a spirit.

No men have spirits, actually. But that Jesus was a man who died on a stake. He was buried. As one early Watchtower Society publication put it, the man Jesus is dead, forever dead. That he was not resurrected physically from the grave, but that he was recreated as a spirit being.

Now, in Watchtower theology, they are teaching that Jesus was created as Michael the archangel, that he then became a man. Michael the archangel is a spirit. Then he became a man, Jesus Christ. Then when we come to the quote-unquote resurrection, then we have Jesus being recreated as Michael the archangel.

This is the Jehovah's Witnesses position relative to the resurrection. What does the Bible say about the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Was it spiritual or was it physical? We're going to address that subject right after we talk to Dell and Glendale.

Dell, can you hear me? Dell, you're on the air.

Oh, hi, Jim.

Hi.

I'm glad you're back on.

We're glad to be here.

I missed you. I want to ask you something. I guess I'll tell you something and ask you. As I was studying about the resurrection, you know, over the last, oh, about 15 years or so, it began to dawn on me how real it was.

Uh-huh.

And what helped me to realize that was to realize I had to live there with him all the time. Telling him he was going to die, and his actual death, and then his burial, and then his resurrection, and then revealing himself to them and crowning it with Thomas, you know, doubting Thomas.

Did you get that impression? Like, step by step, even though he told them they didn't understand until he showed them what happened?

Oh, yes, indeed. In fact, the disciples, as the Bible presents it, were very confused, very flustered. All through the gospel narratives, the writers tell us that the disciples did not understand that the Messiah must suffer and die.

A common Jewish expectation at that time was that the Messiah who would come would be a human conqueror, a military leader. In fact, um, excuse me? And in fact, as I was listening this week to a program where a Jewish person was on discussing his views of Jesus, that was one of the reasons he rejects Jesus is that Jesus died.

I think I heard the same program.

Yes, in fact, a friend of mine was on that program. I had arranged for him to be on that program, Chuck Hoppus. But, um, anyways, this is what they were expecting. They were expecting a military leader, not a suffering servant.

So, by far, Jesus had to, as Luke puts it, by many convincing proofs, prove to the disciples that he was indeed alive from the dead, and that he had indeed been resurrected.

Indeed.

Oh, yes, I noticed it, and it's very clearly presented in the, uh, I noticed it, and it's very clearly presented in the New Testament that Jesus, uh, had to prove his resurrection even to his disciples.

They did not understand it until after the resurrection itself. Okay. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Briefly before we take our break, I was mentioning that the Jehovah's Witnesses deny the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. They believe that he was resurrected as a spirit being, Michael the Archangel, and, uh, go around proclaiming this, uh, in their books, in their literature.

At this time of year, they would probably bring this up if you were talking to Jehovah's Witnesses. But what does the Bible say about the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ? Well, for example, in John chapter 2, verses 19 through 21, uh, Jesus, uh, when talking about the temple, said, destroy this temple, and in three days, I'll raise it up, uh, when talking to the Jews, when they asked for a sign.

And they didn't understand what he was talking about. John goes on to say, he spoke of the temple of his body. And the fact is very clear that Jesus said that in three days, he would raise up his body.

Uh, the body being the body that he was crucified in. But, relevant to what Jehovah's Witnesses were saying right beforehand, we want to uh, define what a resurrection is. The Greek term anastasis, which is resurrection, means a standing again.

And, to qualify as a true resurrection, that which died must come back to life again. Now, in the Jehovah's Witness position, they do not have a resurrection. There is no resurrection, really, in Jehovah's Witness theology.

Because, that which died was a human being, Jesus. That which was raised was a spirit being, Michael the Archangel. That is not a resurrection. And hence, the society, if it were to be honest with itself, would have to say that they believe in the recreation of Jesus Christ, as a new being, Michael the Archangel.

That is not what the Bible presents. The Bible presents the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Physical man died. A human body died on the cross, and a human body was raised from the dead. Now, that human body was glorified, and is far beyond what we can understand as 1 Corinthians chapter 15 says, but it was still the physical body that died on the cross of Calvary.

Now, this can be seen from many ways. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the physical appearances of Jesus Christ after his resurrection were simply the materialization of physical bodies to convince the disciples of the resurrection.

In other words, Jesus had to fool them into believing he had risen from the dead. That is actually deceptive on Jesus' part, but that is what Jehovah's Witnesses are saying. I recall going over to California once, and we had gone over with some friends over to Disneyland.

It wasn't open yet. We were driving around in the area there, and we saw these two gentlemen standing out on a street corner about 8 o 'clock in the morning on a Saturday morning all alone. Nobody was around them.

They were staying. They were holding these magazines out. We were talking, this place is dead. There is nobody there. There were these two guys holding these magazines. I sort of peered through the window, and I recognized them as Watchtower and Awake magazines.

So, we had a radical change in driving plans and hung a Yui in the middle of the street. I and one of the people that was with me got out of the van, grabbed our Bibles, and spent about an hour talking to these two Jehovah's Witnesses on the sidewalk.

We eventually started talking about the resurrection of Christ, and that's what they were saying. We've got to realize that angels can materialize bodies. Since Jesus was resurrected as Michael the Archangel, he materialized a body to prove his resurrection.

That proves nothing. That's deceptive, because if that body had not actually risen from the dead, that's not a resurrection. That, of course, is what they were saying. They were very adamant on that point.

We tried to point at them to Luke 24, beginning verse 36, where it says, while they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace be with you. They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost or a spirit.

He said to them, Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones. You see, I have. When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet, and while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, Do you have anything here to eat?

They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence. Now, you can't get much more straightforward than what Jesus did for the disciples in this situation. They thought they had seen a spirit.

They thought they had seen a ghost. This is what Jehovah's Witnesses are actually saying that they saw, was that Jesus was raised as a spirit and not as a physical being. But Jesus said, Why are you troubled?

Why do doubts arise in your mind? He thought of that as a doubt and not as a true faith at all. The word actually is spirit in the Greek New Testament. The NIV translation is a little unfortunate there.

They thought they saw a spirit. He said, No, you're confused. Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see. A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have. He has flesh and bones and he's saying, Hey, a spirit does not have flesh and bones.

He shows them his hands and his feet. He invites them to examine him. This, of course, is a classic refutation of what the Jehovah's Witnesses teach about Jesus actually being a spirit when he was raised from the dead.

Another passage that is very clear on this is John chapter 20.

Where we have.

An even fuller exposition of the resurrection and Jesus' interaction with the disciples, especially relevant to Thomas himself. Thomas, who did not exercise faith in the resurrection when he was told by the others, himself said, Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand to his side, I will not believe it in John chapter 20.

In verse 26, a week later on the next Sunday, his disciples were in the house again. Thomas was with them this time. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.

Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it to my side. Stop doubting and believe. Jesus knew exactly what Thomas had said even though he was not there a week before him.

Thomas says unto him, My Lord and my God. Jehovah's Witnesses are in a lot of trouble because they deny the deity of Christ. Jesus told him, Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. Jesus had many resurrection appearances where he interacted with the disciples. We are not told a whole lot about exactly what was said during that time, but we know that Jesus opened their minds to the Scriptures so they could understand that what happened to Jesus was what was necessary to fulfill the Old Testament Scriptures themselves.

So the Jehovah's Witnesses are in a position that Jesus was raised spiritually and not physically. You might ask the question, What happened to his physical body if he was not raised physically? Well, the publication of the time is at hand.

This is a much older publication. Page 129 said, Whether it, that is Christ's body, was dissolved into gases or whether it is still preserved somewhere as the grand memorial of God's love, of Christ's obedience and of our redemption, no one knows.

So here you are given two possibilities. It was dissolved into gases, and notice there is no scriptural reference there because it is sort of hard to find one because the Bible never says anything like that.

Or possibly it is on display somewhere as a great memorial of God's love, which is just as absurd from a biblical viewpoint. This is about all they can say about the resurrection about the physical body itself.

Here we have.

One of those examples where mankind has got to have a man-made answer for everything. And, you know, Jesus went throughout the land using physical examples to teach spiritual truth. There are many people, even in that day and even in our day, who can't handle those spiritual truths so they've got to have an understanding of their own comprehension to explain away what occurred, you know.

I'm reminded, I can't find it, I was looking for it a minute ago, of the time when the people in Acts had asked, you know, what shall we do? And Peter said, believe in the Lord, that God raised him up from the dead.

And that's the whole miracle of the situation. The resurrection.

Was the central aspect of the preaching of the early churches found in Acts. In fact, Paul almost got laughed off of Mars Hill for bringing up the resurrection of the Greeks because the Greeks, of course, rejected the very idea that there could be anything of a resurrection because they did not believe that the physical body was good.

They were dualists. They felt the physical body was evil. But in the book of Colossians chapter 2, verse 9, we read, for in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form. This was written after the resurrection.

This is a passage that most Christians don't utilize when talking about the resurrection. But after the resurrection, Paul can say in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives or dwells, present tense, in bodily form.

Jesus Christ, you know, frequently we have Mormons say to us, well, what happened to Jesus' body? And I say, well, Jesus has a glorified resurrection body. Well, that proves God has a body. No, it doesn't prove God has a body.

The gospel is not that men can become gods, but that God became a man. That's a unique situation one time where God took on.

The human nature.

In Jesus Christ to provide for our redemption. We do not become gods, but God became a man to provide redemption for us. So there are a number of passages that would very clearly refute the idea that Jesus was simply raised on a spiritual level.

The angel said this is where he was. He is not here. He is risen. The very word resurrection means that which died being raised to life again. And it's very clear that Jesus Christ was raised bodily from the dead, according to the teachings of the scriptures.

But there are many groups today, even Christian groups, they're teaching all sorts of interesting things relevant to the time of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now you have some cults involved with this.

The Worldwide Church of God, Armstrongism, publishes some little pamphlets. I brought some with me today. Here's a pamphlet published by the Worldwide Church of God called The Resurrection Was Not on Sunday.

And they're basically saying that the resurrection took place on Saturday, the day before Sunday. What day was the resurrection? On page 8, for example, I'm looking at this, that Jesus was already risen on that sunrise Sunday morning.

Of course he was. He rose in the grave in the late afternoon near sunset on Saturday itself. And so they say that Jesus was buried late Wednesday afternoon. They place the time of the crucifixion as Wednesday.

And they are literalists. They believe that Jesus had to be in the grave 72 hours. 72 hours exactly. So if he was placed in the grave late afternoon Wednesday, Wednesday to Thursday, Thursday to Friday, Friday to Saturday, he would have had to have been raised on Saturday afternoon.

It's interesting that there are a number of Christian groups that also push the idea of a Wednesday crucifixion. But they still worship on Sunday. They still call Sunday the Lord's Day. And they still say he rose early Sunday morning.

But that would have placed the time beyond 72 hours in the tomb for the Lord Jesus. And I was a little bit surprised a couple weeks ago to get the April edition, April 1987 edition of The Evangelist, the voice of the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries.

And on page 11 of this, under the caption, Brother Swaggart, here's my question. We read the question. It says, Did Jesus really die on a Friday, which we now call Good Friday? If that is the case, how could it have been possible for him to have been in the grave for three full days and nights?