Re: Religion returns to Easter

In article <JxwL1L.8u9@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>I repeat.  It was not a process that took 72 hours to complete.
>It was a process that started on the first day, pretty much hung
>fire over the second day (unless you accept the story of the
>Harrowing of Hell, which I would love to do although it's
>officially apocryphal), and concluded early on the third day.
>PARTS of three different days were involved.

Time counting in ancient Greek and Latin counted the start period
as well as future ones; so for example a festival that we would
call "biennial" they'd call "three-yearly".  (I have in fact seen
an example of exactly this -- if memory serves me right, in 
Euripides' _Bacchae_.)  So he died on Friday, and then Sunday is
the third day after the Friday, because you're counting "Friday,
Saturday, Sunday."

Even with that, I don't see how you can reconcile that with the
Matthew 12:40 reference that Karl Johanson posted.  There just isn't
any way to make it "three days and three nights". 

-- 
   David Goldfarb          |"...at a guess, not more than one in three,
and
goldfarb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  |perhaps fewer, Republicans eat people..."
goldfarb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 |       -- James Nicoll