Obedience to God:Story of Jonah in the Bible
The story of Jonah as I , an Ahmadi Muslim, understand is that it is very much linked with the story of Jesus and his showing the Sign of Jonah, the greatest sign that he showed to the Jews.
We (Ahmadi peaceful Muslims) prove from the Bible that God did not abandon him and saved him from the ignoble death upon the cross. This can be studied in the light of the facts relating to the period before the Crucifixion, as well as the facts of the Crucifixion itself and after it, as related by the New Testament.
Long before that incident, Jesus promised that no sign would be shown unto the people other than the sign of Jonah.
Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, ‘Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.’ He answered, ‘a wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here.’ (Matt 12:38–41)
So before we determine what happened to Jesus, we must understand what happened to Jonah, because Jesus claimed that the same miracle would be repeated. What was the Sign of Jonah? Did he die in the belly of the fish and was he later on revived from death? There is unanimity among all Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars that Jonah did not die in the belly of the fish. He precariously hung between life and death and was miraculously saved from that situation; while any other person in his place would have died. Yet some subtle laws of nature, under the Divine command, must have conspired together to save him from death. Remember, we are not debating the issue of that being possible or not. We are only pointing out that Jesus, when he pointed out that the like of what happened to Jonah would also happen to him, he could only have meant that what everyone understood to have occurred in the case of Jonah would occur in his case. No one in the entire world of Judaism, whether in the land of Judea or anywhere else the Jews had dispersed and settled, would have received a different message from this claim of Jesus. They all believed that Jonah, miraculously or otherwise, survived for three days and nights in the belly of the fish and did not die in that period for a single moment. Of course we have our own reservations regarding this view. The story of Jonah as told to us in the Quran does not mention anywhere that it was for three days and nights that Jonah suffered his trials in the belly of the fish. However we return to the case in point and try to bring to light the actual similarities which were predicted by Jesus Christ between Jonah and himself. Those similarities spoke clearly of spending three days and nights in extremely precarious circumstances and a miraculous revival from near death, and not of coming back to life from the dead. The same, Jesus claimed, would happen in his case.
http://www.alislam.org/library/books/christianity_facts_to_fiction/chapter_4.html#pgfId-1001073
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I am an Ahmadi peaceful Muslim
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