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That's an interesting article, but it doesn't seem to address the point of an "onah" as mentioned in the Catholic Answers article. Specifically, this point: ""In rabbinical thought a day and a night make an onah, and a part of an onah is as the whole. . . . Thus according to Jewish tradition, ‘three days and three nights’ need mean no more than ‘three days’ or the combination of any part of three separate days" (Expositor’s Bible Commentary, 8:296)."

The term onah can also refer to the length of the menstrual cycle. Halachically, we assume that the onah beinonit, or "average interval," is thirty days long. So, from that we can see that the period Jonah was in the fish, and the period that Jesus was in the heart of the earth could be described as an "onah" itself, literally a "period of time", but not one necessarily only 72 hours long. It could be also shorter, as the menstrual cycle of a woman can be shorter than 30 days.

The key verse in this whole debate is Mark 16:1.

It says that the women bought the spices after the Sabbath. In the other gospel accounts it says the women prepared the spices before the Sabbath. So how can the women prepare the spices before they bought them if that Sabbath was the same day. So some have argued that there were two sabbaths. The first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread was a Sabbath and the normal weekly Sabbath. So the women bought the spices and prepared them on the same day, Friday, which came after the Sabbath of the Feast and before the weekly Sabbath.

No one in the traditional camp has had an explanation for this contradiction, which is why the dual Sabbath theory still sticks around.

I have been in the dual Sabbath camp for a while, but while going over these passages again, I noticed something that I hadn't seen before.

On the day of His crucifixion, Christ gets nailed to the cross about 9am (Mark 15:25). From 12pm-3pm there was darkness. Sometime after 3pm He actually dies. At evening, which is by definition after 6pm, Joseph of Arimathea asks Pilate if he can take the body and bury it (Matthew 27:57). He wanted to bury the body before the Sabbath. This is something I hadn't seen before. The traditional camp says he was crucified on Friday and buried that same day. The dual Sabbath camp says he was crucified on Wednesday and buried before the Sabbath on Thursady.

Now neither of these can be accurate, because Joseph got Jesus off the cross in the evening, and wanted him buried before the Sabbath, which means that evening could not have been the start of the Sabbath. This more than likely points to Thursday as the day Christ was crucified. Joseph gets him off the cross and places Him in the tomb on Friday, the day of preparation. John 19 makes this pretty clear.

31 Then the Jews, because it was the day of preparation, so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a (BB)high day), asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.
...
42 Therefore because of the Jewish day of preparation, since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

The jews wanted Jesus and the criminals to be off their crosses and buried before the Sabbath. So they had to break their legs (save Jesus), die, be prepared for burial and buried in a 3 hour timespan if the Sabbath were to be the next day, which is highly unlikely.

Now if he is crucified on Thursday and buried on Firday, then he would fulfill the 3 days and 3 nights statement. He would be in the ground all night and day on Friday, all day and night on Saturday, all night on Sunday, and be raised on the third day, Sunday, sometime in the morning around 6am.

This also seems to shoot down the dual Sabbath theory, since if he was on the cross on Thursday, that would mean he was there on a Sabbath day, which was what the Jews wanted to avoid.

Of course, this still doesn't deal with the apparent contradiction with the women and the spices.

JM