How could Jesus be three days and three nights in the earth between Friday evening and Sunday morning?

Jews of the time counted any part of a day as a day, and ‘a day and a night’ was a way of saying ‘a day’, as the Old Testament shows. Esther asks the Jews to fast “three days, night or day”, yet she goes in to the king “on the third day” (Esther 4:16; 5:1). The Egyptian found by David had eaten nothing for “three days and three nights”, and in the next breath says he fell sick “three days agone” (1 Samuel 30:12–13). A later rabbinic saying, attributed in the Jerusalem Talmud (Shabbat 9:3) to Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah (about AD 100), states the rule: a day and a night together make an ‘onah’, and part of an onah counts as the whole.

Jesus’ own sayings use the expressions interchangeably. He said he would rise ‘the third day’ (Mark 10:34; Matthew 16:21), ‘after three days’ (Mark 8:31) and ‘in three days’ (John 2:19). His enemies understood him in just this way: they quoted him as saying “After three days I will rise again”, and so asked for the tomb to be guarded “until the third day” (Matthew 27:63–64). On the Sunday the disciples on the Emmaus road said “to day is the third day since these things were done” (Luke 24:21). Part of Friday, all of Saturday and the early hours of Sunday are three days in this reckoning, and the saying was fulfilled as Jesus’ hearers would have understood it.

A Thursday or Wednesday crucifixion

Some Christians take the phrase more literally, as three full nights or 72 hours, and date the crucifixion to the Thursday or the Wednesday. They note that the first day of the feast was itself a sabbath, so there may have been two sabbaths that week, and that the Greek of Matthew 28:1 has a plural, ‘after the sabbaths’ (though the plural is often used of a single sabbath). Most scholars keep to Friday, because Mark and Luke tie the burial to “the day before the sabbath” (Mark 15:42) and the resurrection to the third day (Luke 24:21).

The day of the crucifixion is still discussed among Christians. The Friday view is the long-standing majority view.