About Jonah? Sorry, I didn’t think it was relevant. And I also have a mild objection to being asked questions in a manner that reminds me of being in school.
Fair enough.
Which is pertinent I guess as what I know about ol’ Jonah I learned in Sunday School. I think I mentally filed it at the time with other stories such as Adam and Eve and Noah. There was colouring in at some point if I remember.
I guess this is what troubles me. You dismiss religious ideas based upon what you learned when you were a child in school. Do you dismiss every idea that didn’t make sense to you as a child and then never return to it except to dismiss it as a childish idea?
If you think it has any relevance to the resurrection I’d be interested to know. If you think it has none, do you know to what Paul might have been referring when he mentioned scriptural prophesy?
The sign of Jonah is not so much a symbol of the resurrection, but a sign of what the resurrection stood for, the fact that the Chosen People had failed to be a sign for the nations of the Gentiles.
Just as Jonah was sent to a non-Hebraic people, the Ninevites, but refused to go, the Jews were to be a lamp and warning to the Gentiles, but instead took on the culture and practices of the peoples around them and repeatedly abdicated being a corrective influence on pagan practices. Just as Jonah experienced 3 days in the belly of the large fish (a paradigm of death and a cleansing redemption by water), Jesus’ three days in the tomb signaled the fact that he, the Messiah, would take on what his Jewish brethren (and Jonah at first) had failed to do: become the messenger of God to the Gentiles. By resurrecting, Jesus became the new Jonah who would extend God’s saving grace to the Gentiles. The sign of Jonah is not so much the resurrection, per se, as the completion of Jonah’s mission to bring the message of redemption to the Gentiles.
Jesus died and resurrected after three days in order, like Jonah, to complete the mission of salvation to the Gentiles.
The question, then, is whether the first disciples clearly understood the point that Jesus was making by speaking of the sign of Jonah in a corrective sense. Clearly they didn’t because most Jews did not take up the mission to the Gentiles. Most continue to this day not accepting an evangelistic mission. Only a few did and they became the very early Christians. The real sign of Jonah was not accepted. Only the one who spent three days in the tomb went on, through the Church, his Body, to complete Jonah’s task of bringing God’s word to the Gentiles. The Church became Jonah, but only after the resurrection from the tomb.
After the fact, the Old Testament and the book of Jonah, became a very clear and prophetic pointer to the mission of the Church. Yet, that mission did not congeal and become obvious until several decades after the resurrection. Peter and the other Jewish pillars of the Church, in fact, resisted bringing the Gospels to the Gentiles. It was Paul, not the other Apostles that had hung around with Jesus, that understood the real significance of the sign of Jonah.
The question to be asked is how could the Apostles have “concocted” the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies when all indications are that the Apostles were very uncertain of the mission, and uncertain of what the OT prophecies actually meant, but themselves had to come to terms with their mission over the first century and only after all the Gospels were probably written? What many of the prophecies were really about could only deciphered later by the Church Fathers, not so much by the Apostles who were more concerned with getting the actual good news of the Gospels out.
Many of Jesus’ parables were clearly intended to show that God’s purpose was to extend salvation to the Gentiles. For example, the prodigal son represents the Gentile nations and the older brother, the Jews. These parables were not treated as prophetic until after the Church had successfully reached out to the Gentile populations and then they became obvious.
I suspect your response will be that the obscurity, for you, remains. Perhaps, but that obscurity could be the result of your lack of familiarity with the prophecies rather than an inherent problem with them as prophecies.
Do you realize, for example that the place Abraham was to sacrifice his son Isaac became, thousands of years later, the site of the Jerusalem Temple near where Jesus, the Son of God, was “sacrificed?”
Do you realize that Abraham’s “prophecy” that God himself will provide a lamb of sacrifice in lieu of Isaac was not fulfilled at that time because Abraham ended up finding a ram, not a lamb, in the thicket?
Do you realize that the thousands of Passover lambs that were sacrificed at the Temple at the time of Jesus were staked on miniature crosses to facilitate sacrifice? So Jesus was the lamb that God himself provided to fulfill Abraham’s prophetic words? The Apostles could not have made up those coincidences even if they tried.
