There was a special, 3 for 1.
Anyone know the significance of the three days and nights Jesus is dead?
by Crazyguy 23 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Wasanelder Once
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Xanthippe
I’ve come to realize that most dying and rising gods such as Inanna, Jesus and others all were dead three days and nights.
Yes I seem to remember the Hindu god Krishna has a lot of similarities with Jesus but I don't know the significance of the three days.
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smiddy3
The Israelite`s had a thing with other numbers also didn`t they , as well as the number 3.?
Such as 7 , 10 , 12 , 40 , 144 ,all of which feature in numerous scriptures and prophetic writings.
And the WatchTower publications of Jehovah`s Witnesses has also alluded to its members of the importance of these numbers over time.
7,000 years for 1 Creative day.
7. Heavenly completion
6. Earthly imperfection
10. ? { I forget this one }
etc,etc.
Hence their continued fascination with predicting Armageddon / End of the World / Great tribulation and such.
The six thousand years of human existence was first taught to finish in the late 1800`s and later it was revised to end about October 1975.
Armageddon was first taught to happen in 1914 ,then 1918 .
The resurrection of faithful men of old ,Abraham ,Issac ,and Jacob was supposed to happen in 1925 .
None of which ever happened .
The carrot of the New World Of Paradise is forever dangled in front of the gullible Jehovah`s Witnesses and the threat of everlasting destruction keeps them in check.
Not to mention the threat of losing their family and friends and forever being shunned if they ever leave the J.W. religion .
Which is emotional blackmail.
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pale.emperor
Jesus being dead for three days is supposed to be anti-type for Jonah being in the belly of the fish for three days.
Also, saying/doing something three times was used in bible times to signify something that is definite. Saying "i divorce you" three times made a divorce legal etc. So one being dead for three days would indicate that they are indeed completely dead.
Or in the words of Monty Python - passed on! is no more! He has ceased to be! expired and gone to meet his maker! a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! off the twig! kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!
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Half banana
4 hours ago
In the NT Jesus makes it sound like he's the sun.
Indeed he does Acluetofindtheuser!
I see the that the whole Christ story as a vastly elaborated myth which ultimately has at its root an astronomical reality.
It is hard to appreciate this if coming to the subject cold. Much groundwork is needed including a comprehensive grasp of mythology (which I don't have) to be able to trace the individual threads of myth back towards the folk tales many of which are drawn from the zodiacal star stories.
The earth turns in a daily motion and the stars predictably change position on the annual orbit of earth around the sun. Knowing the constellations and stars, and their explanation was a "Bible" before the Bible.
In its simplest form back in pre-literate, pre-scientific times, an explanation was demanded of why things are like they are.Humans are like this. Stories feed on human imagination but for any to endure they must have a have a reference point and structure, this is the difference between stories and myth.
Nothing exists so patently structured and orderly and permanent as the starry canopy, so marvellous and universally recognised that it was branded the home of the gods. This gave the whole world of humanity a common canvas to paint their own cultural mythologies on and is the explanation of why disparate peoples came up with the same ideas about gods, religion and salvation.
I won't rabbit on-- but the universal saviour is the Sun God who daily overturns darkness, however his father is a Sun God as well, which is why there is a troublesome ambiguity in the Bible regarding the identity of the Son and the Father.
Three days dead? I asked myself the same question about six years ago. Well the sun 'dies' in the sense that for three days every year, as it was said to do on 21st December and rose again on the 25th. Which day we know is the birthday of the Sun, and from the fourth century onward, the birthday of Jesus who was conflated with the Sun God in the Catholic faith. (Sol Invictus, the unconquerable Sun) The death of the literal sun was describing the position of the sun's setting and rising as having stopped dead for three days and not moving along the horizon as it normally does for the rest of the year. The idea of "three days dead" based on this perception had already well before the first century become a signifier or accoutrement for a god-man hero in folk tales and heroic literature.
The Christ figure was simply one of many heroic christ myths who all shared the common tropes of solar connotation, sacrificial death, miraculous healing abilities, overcoming death etc. and including going to hell or Hades for three days.
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waton
The significance is, that people take fictional stories too seriously. even today, the characters and words spoken in works of art have crept into the vocabulary, the thinking of society, and fictional stories worked that way in the past too. The sun never stood still, or remained below the horizon in Bible lands. It does though, in the arctic home of Santa Claus.
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OnTheWayOut
Some writers were on a roll with the "3."
Jesus prayed 3 times in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was placed on the cross at the 3rd hour. There were 3 hours of darkness while Jesus remained on the cross. So Jesus was dead for 3 days and 3 nights before being resurrected.
Using "3" quite a bit makes it take on some mysterious importance. -
eyeuse2badub
3 sounded like a good number to the the guy who wrote that part of the Hebrew Mythology AKA the bible!
just saying!
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Half banana
In another sense the sun always stands still, it is us on planet earth who move around the sun. The sun however takes a hundred thousand years to rotate around the Milky Way galaxy.
The key to Crazyguy's question is that the ancients, who were assiduous observers of heavenly bodies, saw the point on the horizon at which the sun rose for each of three midwinter days at the same spot and called it dead-- and on the third day it rose from the dead (Christ and the Sun) and went forth from there. "Things as in heaven also upon earth".
These are among the thousands of points of affinity of the Bible's unoriginal thoughts with universal folk tales from the ancient world. The Roman Church after absorbing and fusing most prevailing religious belief, condemned and destroyed earlier versions so as not to demean its own high status to deliberately obscure the fact that its so called sacred texts or Bible as we know it originated in humble folk tales. It produced the disparaging term paganism (rustic beliefs) to put down the peasants and distance itself from their beliefs even though they were the source material for its own approved holy writings.
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charonsdog
@Smiddy's comment: And the WatchTower publications of Jehovah`s Witnesses has also alluded to its members of the importance of these numbers over time.
7,000 years for 1 Creative day.
7. Heavenly completion
6. Earthly imperfection
I've always had a problem understanding the number of the wild beast of Revelation. It reads that this number is "six hundred sixty-six". And the WT says that "6" stands for earthly imperfection. So 666 would be earthly imperfection three times. But when John supposedly wrote the book, what did the number six hundred sixty-six actually look like? Neither Roman nor Greek numerals would have allowed for three digits of "6". So what the hell significance could "666" have with earthly imperfection cubed?