Count it on your fingers: buried on Friday before sunset, Saturday in the tomb, risen by early Sunday. That is one night, a day, and another night, and Matthew says three days and three nights.
No, he did not spend seventy-two hours in the tomb, and the Gospels never claim he did. He was in it for parts of three days and two nights. Scripture uses “after three days” and “the third day” for the same span, and it shows that way of counting in its own stories.
I came to this question expecting to find a problem with the usual reading. This time the ordinary answer holds, and I want to say so first.
The count that does not add up
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Matthew 12:40 (KJV)
Three days and three nights, twice in one sentence. Mark says the burial happened “the day before the sabbath,” and that the women came “very early in the morning the first day of the week… at the rising of the sun.” Two nights against Matthew’s three needs an answer.
The sentence about Jonas, the King James New Testament’s spelling of Jonah, is an answer to a demand. Scribes and Pharisees had said, “Master, we would see a sign from thee,” and he told them an evil and adulterous generation would get no sign but the sign of the prophet Jonas. He was refusing a demonstration and promising a death.
How the Bible counts days
The Old Testament puts “three days” and “the third day” on one span, in ordinary stories where nobody is disputing the count.
Joseph “put them all together into ward three days,” and then, “And Joseph said unto them the third day.” Esther tells the Jews to “neither eat nor drink three days, night or day,” and she goes in to the king “on the third day.” Hers is the pair with nights in it, and she goes in on the third day, before seventy-two hours could have passed. That is as close as the Old Testament comes to the nights in Matthew 12:40: a span named with its nights, “three days, night or day,” still ends on the third day, not after seventy-two hours.
The clearest one is Rehoboam. In 2 Chronicles 10:5 he says, “Come again unto me after three days.” Seven verses later, “So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam on the third day, as the king bade, saying, Come again to me on the third day.” One appointment, one king, both phrasings, and the narrator sees no difference.
The rule to carry to any “after three days” or “the third day” in the Bible is this: count the days touched, and do not count hours.
Jesus said it both ways
Right after Peter says who Jesus is, Jesus tells the disciples he will be killed and rise. Mark records it as “after three days rise again.” Matthew and Luke record the same prediction, on the same occasion, as “the third day.” When Paul repeats what he had received, Christ “rose again the third day according to the scriptures.”
Jesus’ enemies did the same thing. On the sabbath, “the next day, that followed the day of the preparation,” the chief priests and Pharisees went to Pilate:
Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again. Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first.
Matthew 27:63-64 (KJV)
They quote him as saying after three days, and they ask for a guard until the third day. They were worried about one deadline, and they named it both ways.
The Wednesday reading
John says that sabbath “was an high day,” a festival sabbath. Some readers take that to mean two sabbaths that week, with a burial on Wednesday and a rising at sunset on Saturday, which would be exactly seventy-two hours. A festival sabbath could fall on any day of the week, so the idea is not absurd. It reads Matthew 12:40 at full strength, it has a real verse behind it, and careful readers take it. I do not, for two reasons. It has to assume that Mark’s “day before the sabbath” means the festival and not the weekly sabbath, which is the very point in question. And the disciples on the Emmaus road count the days in a way that fits Friday.
Some popular readings are misreadings. Mary Magdalene as a prostitute is one, made by later readers. This one, Friday to Sunday, is sound.
Counting on the road to Emmaus
On the Sunday, two disciples were walking to Emmaus, and a stranger asked them what had happened. They told him about Jesus and the cross, and before they reached the women’s report of an empty tomb, they counted.
But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done.
Luke 24:21 (KJV)
On its plain reading, that makes Sunday the third day, which fits a Friday. They had no theory to protect, and they were disappointed, and disappointed people do not usually massage the calendar in favor of the story that has just let them down. Count the days the way they did: Friday, Saturday, and “to day,” the Sunday they were walking in.