So maybe Resurrection was a thing about the time/place/culture that we fail to recognize since we dont know the nuances of a culture 2000 years ago. Maybe by Resurrection they meant Jesus’ teachings lived on, not that Jesus actually rose from the dead?
Nuh-uh. The problem with this Rudolf Bultmann-esque idea of a spiritual, ‘Jesus lived on in the hearts of His disciples’-type resurrection is that it wouldn’t explain why Christianity arose in the first place. If the disciples simply believed in a metaphorical resurrection, it wouldn’t explain all the related beliefs: the idea of Jesus being vindicated by God from His shameful death (by sitting Him in His right hand), the idea of Jesus as Messiah and the Lord of the world (the resurrection was seen as God’s ratifying this claim), the idea of Jesus being the ‘firstborn from the dead’ (the Jews believed in a general resurrection of the righteous; Jesus is unusual in that His disciples believed Him to have been raised up in advance, in anticipation of the final resurrection).
N.T. Wright said it best:
You see, it would have been very natural for first-century Jews, especially if they had belonged to a kingdom-of-God movement already, to say of a leader who had paid the ultimate penalty at the hands of the authorities, that his soul was in the hand of God, that he was alive to God, that he had been exalted to paradise, and that be was therefore among the righteous who had been unjustly put to death but who would rise again to rule the world in God’s good time. (This is, of course, exactly what Wisdom 3:1-9
does say?) And if Jesus’ followers had indeed had a sense that he was alive in a nonphysical way, and even that he was still present with them in some fashion, this is how they would have expressed it. But in so doing they would not have been claiming (to stress the point again) that the
eschaton, the longed-for kingdom of God, had now arrived; they would
not have been saying that their crucified leader was the Messiah; and above all they would not have been saying that he had been raised from the dead or that “the resurrection of the dead” had now occurred.
In particular, we have no reason to suppose that after the crucifixion of a would-be messiah anyone would suppose that he had been exalted to a place either of world rulership or divine lordship. Nobody, so far as we know, ever suggested that this was the case after the deaths of Judas the Galilean, Simon bar-Giora, or Simeon ben-Kosiba. Actually, such a suggestion would most likely have been regarded as at best ridiculous and at worst scandalous. The failure of such men to lead a
successful messianic movement debarred them from further consideration as candidates for such a position. Even if someone had made such a suggestion, however, they would not then have gone on to say that this person had been “raised from the dead.” Belief in exaltation
alone would not lead, in the world of first-century Judaism, to belief in resurrection. If, by contrast, we suppose that the followers of a crucified would-be messiah
first came to believe that he had been bodily raised from the dead, then we can trace a clear line by which they subsequently would have come to believe that he must be the Messiah. And if he was the Messiah, then he was also the world ruler promised in Psalm 89 and Daniel 7, and thus he was exalted over the world, and so on. All our texts suggest that this actually was the train of thought that the early Christians followed.
But if you care for a recap: the text doesn’t say “two days” or “seven days,” so obviously, yeah, “three days and three nights.” The only thing to keep in mind is that for the original audience, ‘three days’ does not mean the exact same thing it does to us (= different way of calculating time).
