Wade, you made some good points and a couple of questionable ones.  First of all I wasn’t implying that “Good Friday’ is a heresy as it has no major effect on Christian doctrine.

 Concerning Justin Martyr, he was believed to have been born around 100 A.D.  He spend a good deal of his life as a Philosopher before becoming a believer in Christ.   That would make it 130 to 140 A.D. (at the earliest) that he became a Christian.  That’s 100 years after the crucifixion/resurrection of Christ so there were no eye witnesses to tell their stories and everyone knows how facts get jumbled in the telling in a relative short time, let alone 100 years.  I haven’t read the writings of Justin Martyr.  Did he claim to have talked to disciples of the Apostles ?

As for the ‘it’s both day & night in the heart of the earth’ argument … come on now … you can’t be serious !  Jesus said “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. He was the King of the Jews, and he told his disciples that they would sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes.  Do you think that Jesus had any time in mind other than the time that applied to Israel ??   I think NOT.  Beside that, the term for ‘heart’ here means ‘the midst’ or ‘surrounded by’ (as in a tomb), not that he was literally in the center of the Earth.

Having said all this, the ‘third day’ phrase used in several scriptures can’t be ignored.  There is also the phrase ‘after three days’ used in Mark 8:31, and I still believe that ‘three days and three nights’ is 72 hours so there is an interesting dilemma.  Perhaps God didn’t want his people setting new ‘Holy Days’ and purposely made dates and times ambiguous.
 

If there exists a reliable calendar of the first century it would be possible to check the years 29 through 33 A.D. to see if either a Thursday Passover or a Saturday Passover could be ruled out during those years.  That might settle things.  I’m not dogmatic about a Wednesday crucifixion, it’s not important in the ‘big picture’ of Christ.  Still, it seems to me that being in the grave Saturday night & Saturday (Jewish reckoning) and the scriptures pointing to the tomb being empty already Sunday night, that only leaves Jesus in the ‘heart of the Earth’ one night and one day (two nights and one day at the very most if you count part of Sunday night).

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