Cofty is correct.
It is actually Church tradition that Jesus rose three days after his death. It isn’t Biblical. None of the Biblical reports of the resurrection of Jesus ever say anything of the sort that “three days later” Jesus rose from the tomb. Literalist Christians, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, often use the texts of Matthew 12:40 and John 2:19 to support their stand for adopting the traditional view, but these texts are not reporting on the actual resurrection.
The Harrowing of Hell: A Tradition Based on a Jewish Legend
The Christian tradition came first, decades before the New Testament texts included actual resurrection narratives. The earliest composed gospels were “oracle gospels” or written collection of Jesus’ sayings. No narrative of any type was included. The so-called Q source is often believed to be such an “oracle gospel,” and the report of Papias in which he describes the apostle Matthew as having composed a gospel in Hebrew was likely such a sayings-source. The earliest gospel account, Mark, originally had no resurrection narrative as demonstrated in its oldest extant forms.
The original oral tradition came to be known as the Harrowing of Hell. Though viewed as genuine theology in Catholicism, for instance, the story is the legend of Jesus’ trip to the Netherworld after his death on the cross. During this trip, Jesus redeems the faithful people of God who died before his passion and death. The earliest “written” form of this belief comes in the form of primitive Christian sarcophagi art depicting the prophet Jonah and the big fish or whale. The “three days” comes from this Old Testament/Tanakh story.
The narrative of Jonah the prophet is a comedy, not literal history. While possibly the work of the actual prophet Jonah, it is a moral lesson, written in a form not too different from the genre employed by Aesop and his moral tales. Designed to teach the Jewish people that all races are God’s children and to demonstrate the evils of prejudice (shown by the negative attitudes and actions of Jonah), the story of Jonah being in Sheol for “three days and nights” and coming out to preach a message that “saved” the people of Nineveh is understood as a legend among Jews.
Matthew 12:40
It was likely viewed this way too by the earliest Christians. Note that while Matthew 12:40 has Jesus saying he “will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights,” the same gospel reports that Jesus died just hours before the Sabbath began (the day of preparation), was dead during the entire Sabbath (the day after the preparation), and rose the day after the Sabbath. (Matthew 27:26; 28:1) Apparently neither the author nor his audience had yet made a literal interpretation of Jonah’s legend to Jesus’ death or words. In Matthew, the expression at 12:40 is merely an example of Jesus rising after a death-like experience like Jonah’s, one that would end up in people being redeemed by a message to repent.--Note Matthew 12:41.*
John 2:19
John’s account is not literal by any respect. He rearranges the death of Jesus to occur on Thursday, the day of Preparation for the Passover when the lambs were slaughtered for the Seder meal instead of on Friday, as in the synoptics, which is the Preparation for the Sabbath. John does this because in his account Jesus is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) John is concerned with teaching not a literal but a very spiritual account of Jesus. Apparently moving Jesus’ death to Thursday also fit in with the Jonah legend and helped it develop into the “three days” that became a requisite for belief in Christianity. The inclusion of “I believe...He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again,” in the Apostles Creed and “We believe...On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures” in the Nicene Creed are proof of this later more literal view.
Devising a Literal Reading to Cover a Tradition
The literalism of American NRMs (New Religious Movements) that spewed forth from the Second Great Awakening included a lack of academic scholarship which still plagues them today. Groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot honestly reconcile the lack of evidence of “three days” dead in a tomb with the tradition upon which Christianity was built, and therefore texts like Matthew 12:40 and John 2:19 get taught as if they are literal reports of the resurrection. As noted above, they are not.
The Jewish tradition upon which Jonah built his parable of being in the belly of the fish for three days and linking it to being in Sheol is from Hosea 6:2. There the expression “three days” connected to being “raised up” merely means an expectation of “soon.” Of interest is that the mention of Jonah’s experience in the fish’s belly being likened to Sheol comes from the prayer found at Jonah 2:3-10. These verses were likely not written by Jonah himself but composed later by someone who might not have been aware of Jonah’s intentions to teach a moral lesson by means of a humorous and fanciful narrative.
*Footnote: According to the NABRE about Matthew 12:40: “The sign was simply Jonah’s preaching to the Ninevites (Lk 11:30, 32), Matthew here adds Jonah’s sojourn in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, a prefigurement of Jesus’ sojourn in the abode of the dead and, implicitly, of his resurrection.”--Italics added.