Sunday Morning Greek Blog

In this post:

• I address discrepancies between the NIV (2011) and its precursor, the TNIV vs. the NIV (1984), ESV, NLT, and several other translations regarding how many days passed between Cornelius praying for someone to come to his home and Peter’s arrival in Acts 10:30.
• I also briefly address a couple ridiculous comments on this passage by Steve Wells in his Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (SAB) that smack of cultural insensitivity and reveal that he missed important contextual clues in analyzing the passage.

The Background

Our Saturday morning men’s group at the church I attend has been reading through the New Testament following the scheme in Tyndale’s The One Year Chronological Bible. We’re not reading through it following the calendar; we’re only reading it on Saturday’s together, so it’s been a slow process, but helpful in getting the big picture of Scripture, especially as it related to the parallel accounts in the Gospels.

This morning we were reading in Acts 10, Cornelius’s plea to God for someone to come explain the Gospel more fully to him and his household in Caesarea and Peter’s response to that call. In Acts 10:30, the NIV (2011) says this:

³⁰ Cornelius answered: “Three days ago I was in my house praying at this hour, at three in the afternoon. Suddenly a man in shining clothes stood before me.^[1]

No sooner had I finished reading this, several men in the group spoke up and said their version said “Four days ago.” In the grand scheme of things, this little discrepancy doesn’t have a lick of theological impact on the Bible or on any of our lives, for that matter. But it does present itself as a teaching moment on how the first century believers counted time, so I wanted to share a brief insight on this.

The first part of Cornelius’s response in Greek looks like this, followed by my literal translation:

Ἀπὸ τετάρτης ἡμέρας μέχρι ταύτης τῆς ὥρας ἤμην τὴν ἐνάτην^[2]

From the fourth day until this hour, being the ninth [i.e., about 3:00 pm]

The phrase in Greek that I have translated “From the fourth day” is somewhat idiomatic, and it does not actually contradict other translations directly, and can in fact be shown to represent the narrative in chapter 10 about the event. I’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to show that the crucifixion story may lend itself to such a discrepancy if we don’t understand how the Jews count.

Counting the Days: Jewish Reckoning of Time Forward

Most of us know that Jesus died on a Friday afternoon and was raised on Sunday morning. His prophecy about himself is consistent that he would die and rise again “three days later.” But if we think about in how we moderns look at that, we might come up with two days. The time period between Jesus death and resurrection was less than 48 hours, that is, less than two full days. But for the Jews, Crucifixion Day was Day 1, even though the day was more than half over by that time. Interestingly enough, Jesus died at 3:00 pm on that Friday according to Mark’s Gospel. The Sabbath (and the next day) would begin at sundown that evening, so all of Saturday is silent to us in the Scriptures. That was Day 2. But by Sunday morning, Day 3, sometime after the sun had set and Sunday had begun, Jesus had risen and was no longer in the tomb. From our perspective, we might say, “But Jesus only died two days before he rose!”

When Jesus speaks of rising again, the Gospel writers are not consistent with the temporal preposition they use, even within the same Gospel. Some have “in (ἐν) three days,” while others have “after (μετὰ) three days.” There was even one occurrence of διὰ (“through”) being translated as “in.” The first preposition, although commonly translated “in,” can also mean “within three days” or “when the third day arrives.” So Jesus rising on Day 3 of his crucifixion and burial fits perfectly in that scheme. The same goes for “after.” “After the third day dawns, I will rise again.” The third preposition, found only in Mark 14:58 in these parallel passages, implies that “during” that three-day period, he will rise, similar to a meaning of “within” from the first preposition. Therefore, there is absolutely no contradiction here with how the events unfolded and Jesus’s prophecies about himself.[3]

Counting the Days: Jewish Reckoning of Past Time

Getting back to the Acts 10:30 passage now, it should be easy to see why the discrepancy exists among the various translations. To make it clear how time transpires in this passage, let me put it in “weekly planner” format, and for ease of argument, we’ll take Day 1 as Monday (thanks to my friend Jerry who pointed the textual clues out during our discussion):

Monday, 3:00 pm. Cornelius is visited by an “angel of God” (Luke’s words) while he’s praying, or at least in a prayerful state of mind. (Acts 10:3; see also 10:22 for the servants’ description as a “holy angel,” and 10:30 for Cornelius’s own statement that he was praying when he had the vision.)

Tuesday, noon. One of Cornelius’s soldiers and two of his servants are approaching the city; Peter goes up to the roof to pray, gets hungry, and sees a vision. (10:9)

            Evening: Cornelius’s men are guests of Peter that afternoon and overnight. (10:23a)

Wednesday morning: “The next day Peter started out with them….” (10:23b)

Thursday, 3:00 pm: “The following day he arrived in Caesarea” (10:24, 30).

In our modern parlance, if we were speaking on Thursday about something that happened on Monday, we would most likely say “Three days ago.” But counting backward in this story follows the same principles as counting forward in the crucifixion story. Thursday is the fourth day since Cornelius had his encounter with “a man in shining clothes,” the being Luke described as an angel in the opening paragraph (I’ll come back to that point in a minute). When the Greek text says “From the fourth day,” Cornelius is counting Thursday as Day 1, and Monday as Day 4 in the past.

The other interesting bit about this opening phrase in vs. 30 is that the participle for “praying” is in the present tense. Because Cornelius uses the “from…until” construction in what he says, it’s quite possible he’s not only saying that he was praying when had the vision on “Monday,” but that he’s continued praying “until” the time Peter arrives, fulfilling his prayers.

Wells’s Absurd Absurdity

For whatever reason, Wells, in his SAB seems to think it’s funny that Cornelius, a Roman gentile described as a devout man of faith and prayer, would receive a visit from an angel telling him how he can learn more about what the death and resurrection of Jesus means. Not only that, he’s told to reach out to Peter, who was the leading apostle at the time. (See his sidebar comments throughout chapter 10.) Cornelius is getting first-class service, and Peter is getting a lesson on what the next step of his ministry will be: reaching out to Gentiles, especially in the area around Jerusalem and Capernaum.

He also seems to think it’s funny that Cornelius refers to the angel as “a man in shining clothes.” In context, Luke knows what Cornelius saw and has the cultural and religious background to interpret it. The servants, who may have been Jewish or at least Samaritan, would have also recognized who Cornelius saw. But as a Roman Centurion, Cornelius may not have had the frame of reference to comprehend what he had seen. Additionally, the story about Paul’s encounter with a bright, heavenly light and the voice of Jesus on the road to Damascus may have reached his ears already, so perhaps Cornelius thought this was something similar. Maybe he didn’t know if it was an angel or Jesus himself, so he offers Peter a “just-the-facts” description of what he witnessed. Such cultural insensitivity toward a man who came from a pagan background into faith is just downright mean and nasty on Wells’s part.

Conclusion

As I said above, the issue of whether the passage should be translated “three days ago” or “four days ago” is extremely minor in the grander scheme of biblical inerrancy and translation fidelity. But I do hope you found the discussion enlightening. I’d love to hear your comments.

Peace to all!

Scott Stocking

My opinions are my own.

---

^[1] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

^[2] Aland, Kurt, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger, Maurice A. Robinson, and Allen Wikgren. 1993; 2006. The Greek New Testament, Fourth Revised Edition (with Morphology). Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.

[3] This also debunks Steve Wells’s contradiction #384 in his SAB. The “false witnesses” are not “false” because they supposedly made up something Jesus never said; they’re false because Jesus wasn’t speaking literally of the physical Temple made of stones and timber, but of the temple of his own body. They’re false because they tried to twist his words.