This past week I was responding to someone in the comments section of my blog and I came across an issue I hadn’t encountered before…
It turns out that some groups will argue that Jesus didn’t die on Good Friday, but on the Wednesday before. I’ve noticed this chiefly among Fundamentalists and Messianic Jews. The case is made from Jesus’ own words in Matthew’s Gospel:
“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Matthew 12:40
It is argued that in order for Jesus’ words to be true, we must work backwards three full days and three full nights from Resurrection Sunday. If we do this, we would conclude that Christ’s Crucifixion took place, not on Friday, but Wednesday:
Some of these folks will say that Christians of past generations simply made a mistake in placing the Crucifixion on Good Friday, but others go further, arguing that this was an attempt to Paganize Christianity (although, as is typical with such assertions, I’m rather at a loss as to what this achieves).
We’re currently going through “Surprised By Joy” at the moment in our book club and I wanted to assemble a workable chronology for the events of C.S. Lewis’ life and the years in which he published…
1898 – Born in Belfast (November 29th)
1905 – Family moves to “Little Lea”
1908 – Mother (Flora Lewis) dies
1910 – Attends Campbell College
1911 – Attends Cherbourg House, Malvern
1913 – Enters Malvern College
1914 – Begins tutoring with W.T. Kirkpatrick in Surrey
1917 – Starts at University College, Oxford
1918 Wounded in action
1919 – Spirits in Bondage: A cycle of lyrics
1923 – Graduated from Oxford University
1925 – Hired as a don in English
1926 – Dymer
1929 – Father (Albert Lewis) dies
1929 – Becomes a theist
1931 – Becomes a Christian
1933 – The Pilgrim’s Regress
1936 The Allegory of Love
1938 – Out of the Silent Planet
1939 Rehabilitations and Other Essays
1939 The Personal Heresy
1942 – The Screwtape Letters
1942 – A Preface to Paradise Lost
1943 – Perelandra
1945 – That Hideous Strength
1945 – The Great Divorce
1949 – The Weight of Glory
1950 – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
1951 – Prince Caspian
1952 – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
1952 – Meets Joy Davidman
1953 – The Silver Chair
1954 – The Horse and His Boy
1954 – Hired as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University
1954 – English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama
1955 – Surprised By Joy
1956 – Marries Joy Davidman in a civil ceremony
1957 – Marries Joy Davidman in an Anglican ceremony
1958 – Reflections on the Psalms
1960 – The World’s Last Night and other essays
1960 – Studies in Words, The Four Loves
1961 – An Experiment in Crticism
1961 – A Grief Observed
1963 – Lewis dies at home (November 22nd)
1964 – Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
1964 – Poems
1964 – The Discarded Image: An introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
1966 – Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
1966 – On Stories: And other essays on literature
1966 – Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
1967 – Letters to an American Lady
1970 – God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
1977 – The Dark Tower and Other stories
1979 – They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
1980 – The Weight of Glory (Expanded version)
1985 – Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis
1985 – C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Children
1991 – All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922-1927
