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his statement primarily through a total misunderstanding and inability to perceive the
meaning of it. But that it was a claim of great import they realised!

Indeed even when Jesus was nailed to the cross some of the Jewish priests mocked him,
saying, "You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself!"
(Matthew 27:40). Even some time after Jesus had ascended to heaven the Jews were still
talking about his challenge and imagined that it was Christian belief that Jesus would yet
come to destroy their holy place (Acts 6:14). -- What Indeed Was the Sign of Jonah?

The tremendous attention paid by the Jews to this statement, "Destroy this temple and in
three days I will raise it up" clearly shows how significant it was. Even as these Jews mocked
Him, they were totally unaware that they themselves were fulfilling His prophecy by putting Him
on the tree to die and rise again on the third day. When Jesus said "Destroy this temple," he was
not, of course, referring to the temple in Jerusalem but to His own body. In his gospel, the apostle
John verifies this when he says, "But he spoke of the temple of His body" (John 2:21).

Jesus stated that it was He, the Son of man, who was to be in the heart of the ground for
three days -- and when He addressed the Jews He obviously spoke NOT OF THE TEMPLE in Je-
rusalem which He had just purified by tossing out the money-changers, but of Himself. But why did
He refer to Himself as the temple? It requires only a little understanding on our part about His min-
istry and identity to realize the answer. "The Jews wanted him to prove that he was the Messiah
and to do this they expected him to show by SIGNS that he was greater than all the other prophets.
In his answer Jesus set out to show them that he was no ordinary prophet. The Temple in Jerusalem
contained only the presence of a manifestation of the glory of God, but of Jesus we are told:

'In him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell. He is the image of the invisible God.
For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily' (Colossians 1:19, 15; 2:9)." -- Ibid.

What Jesus was emphatically saying, then, was this: Destroy me, in whom the whole ful-
ness of God dwells bodily, put me to death, and by raising myself from the dead three days later, I
will give you all the proof you will ever need that I am the Lord of this Temple, the house of God.

By virtue of the parallels between John 2:19 and Matthew 12:40 (in both passages a sign is
asked for and given), it is legitimate to conclude that the sign of Jonah is the same in both places --
namely, the sign of the resurrection. This is implicit in the first text, and explicit in the second.

A third reason can be found in the catacombs of Rome where early Christian pictorial rep-
resentations of the sign of Jonah are common. In numerous frescos Christ's resurrection is symboli-
cally represented as Jonah being spewed out of the fish. "In fact," notes Samuele Bacchiocchi, "the
scene of Jonah (known as 'Jonah's cycle' because it consists of different scenes) is perhaps the
most common symbolic representation of Christ's Resurrection" (The Time of the Crucifixion
and Resurrection, chapter 2).

What the Roman catacombs indicate, then, is the fact that the early Christians identified the
sign of Jonah with the EVENT of the resurrection -- NOT with its time element. The apostle Paul

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