What Is the Sign of Jonah in Matthew 16? Jesus’ Death and Resurrection

The sign of Jonah is Jesus’ own death and resurrection. When the Pharisees and Sadducees asked him for a sign, he refused them any “but the sign of the prophet Jonas” (Matthew 16:4). Matthew 12:40 explains it: like Jonah in the fish, the Son of Man would be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Jonah had gone down before him. From inside the fish he prayed, “out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice” (Jonah 2:2), and God brought him up onto dry land and sent him to a city that repented. Jesus went down into death itself and rose again. That was the only sign he offered the people who demanded one, and it is the sign we are still given.

“The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven” (Matthew 16:1). The two parties disagreed on much, including the resurrection of the dead, which the Sadducees denied (Matthew 22:23). Here they came together, and Matthew says they came “tempting,” that is, to test Jesus.

Jesus first speaks about the weather. His questioners can forecast fair or foul weather from a red sky at evening or morning, “but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” (Matthew 16:2–3). Then he answers their request:

“A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.” (Matthew 16:4)

Jonas is the Greek form of Jonah, and the King James Version keeps it in the New Testament. Matthew 16 does not explain the sign. Matthew 12 already had, when the scribes and Pharisees made the same demand. Mark’s account of this scene is shorter still: “There shall no sign be given unto this generation” (Mark 8:12), with no mention of Jonah at all.

The rest of Matthew 16 spells out what the sign means. After Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, “from that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matthew 16:21). The leaders who asked for a sign from heaven would receive one sign only: his death and his rising.

In Matthew 12:38 “certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees” say, “Master, we would see a sign from thee.” Jesus gives the same answer as in chapter 16 and then explains it:

“For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.” (Matthew 12:40–41)

The comparison has two parts. Jonah’s three days inside the fish point to Jesus’ three days in the tomb. The repentance of Nineveh points to the failure of his hearers, who had a greater prophet in front of them and did not turn. The book of Jonah calls the creature “a great fish” (Jonah 1:17). The King James Version says “whale” in Matthew 12:40, but the Greek word there, kētos, means “any sea-monster or huge fish” in the standard Liddell–Scott Greek lexicon.

Luke reports the saying in a different setting, before a growing crowd, and puts the weight on Jonah himself: “For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation” (Luke 11:30). Luke does not mention the three days. He sets the Ninevites beside the queen of the south, who “came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon” (Luke 11:31), and ends with the Ninevites: “behold, a greater than Jonas is here” (Luke 11:32).

John Calvin, commenting on Matthew and Luke together, held that the likeness between Christ and Jonah “does not hold at every point.” He took the single point to be that Jonah came up from the sea to preach to Nineveh, and that Christ likewise would be his hearers’ prophet “after that he is risen from the dead.”

Jonah the son of Amittai was a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel from Gath-hepher. 2 Kings 14:25 records a prophecy he gave in the reign of Jeroboam II. Nineveh was the oldest and most populous city of the Assyrian empire, on the east bank of the Tigris opposite modern Mosul in Iraq. Babylonians, Scythians and Medes sacked it in 612 BC.

God sends Jonah to “cry against” Nineveh, but Jonah “rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD” and boarded a ship at Joppa (Jonah 1:2–3). A storm follows, the sailors throw him overboard, and “the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17). From inside the fish he prays, “out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice” (Jonah 2:2), and the fish “vomited out Jonah upon the dry land” (Jonah 2:10).

Sent a second time, Jonah obeys. His whole recorded message is eight words in the King James Version: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4). “The people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them” (Jonah 3:5), and “God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (Jonah 3:10). Jonah was angry, and admitted he had fled in the first place because he knew God to be “gracious” and “merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness” (Jonah 4:1–2). The book ends with God’s question about “that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle” (Jonah 4:11).

Jesus had already healed a blind and dumb man possessed by a devil, and when the Pharisees heard of it they put it down to Beelzebub (Matthew 12:22–24). John Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew 12, called the demand for a sign one made “after so many miracles, as though none had been wrought.” He drew the contrast with Nineveh: “the Ninevites without signs believed, while these, after so many miracles, grew worse.”

Calvin made a similar point. Scripture does not condemn every request for a sign: Gideon asked for one and received it (Judges 6:17), and Ahaz was rebuked for refusing to ask (Isaiah 7:10–13). What Jesus condemned, in Calvin’s reading, was ingratitude toward the miracles already given and the use of a demand as a pretext for unbelief. Chrysostom read the word “adulterous” in the same saying as unfaithfulness to God, the charge the prophet Ezekiel had brought against Israel.

Most Christians hold that Jesus died on a Friday afternoon and rose early on Sunday. That spans parts of three days but only two nights, which seems at odds with Matthew 12:40.

The Gospels themselves use “three days and three nights,” “the third day” and “after three days” for the same period. Jesus says he will “be raised again the third day” (Matthew 16:21; also 17:23 and 20:19). Mark records the same prediction as “after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). In Matthew 27:63–64 the chief priests remind Pilate that Jesus said, “After three days I will rise again,” and in the next breath ask for the tomb to be guarded “until the third day.” They treated the two phrases as one deadline. On the Sunday, the two disciples walking to Emmaus say, “to day is the third day since these things were done” (Luke 24:21). The book of Esther shows the same pattern: Esther asks the Jews to fast “three days, night or day,” and goes in to the king “on the third day” (Esther 4:16; 5:1).

Calvin explained the phrase as “a well-known figure of speech”: since a day consists of light and darkness, a day and a night together name one day, and “where there was half a day, he puts down a whole day.” A minority reads the words as exactly 72 hours. Herbert W. Armstrong of the Radio Church of God taught in 1954 that Jesus was crucified on a Wednesday and rose late on Saturday afternoon. Robert L. Odom answered him in the Seventh-day Adventist journal Ministry in 1961, concluding that Jesus lay in the tomb for three calendar days, counted from and including the Friday of his death, though not for 72 full hours. Where Jesus was during the time between his death and resurrection is a separate question.

Early Christian writers read Jonah as a figure of Christ and drew on both halves of the saying: the resurrection and the repentance of Nineveh.

John Chrysostom, in Homily 43 on Matthew, said that with this saying Jesus “is striking the first note of the doctrine of His resurrection, and confirming it by the type.” He noted that Jesus said “not, In the earth, but, In the heart of the earth,” so as to point to his actual burial.

Augustine of Hippo wrote in The City of God (Book 18, chapter 30) that “the prophet Jonah, not so much by speech as by his own painful experience, prophesied Christ’s death and resurrection much more clearly than if he had proclaimed them with his voice.” Later in the same book (chapter 44) he treats Nineveh as “prophetically representing the Church of the Gentiles.”

Jerome wrote a full commentary on Jonah. In his Letter 53, in a passage that runs through the minor prophets one by one, he summed up Jonah this way: “Jonah, fairest of doves, whose shipwreck shows in a figure the passion of the Lord, recalls the world to penitence, and while he preaches to Nineveh, announces salvation to all the heathen.”

Cyril of Alexandria, in Sermon 82 of his commentary on Luke, said the sign of Jonah means “the passion upon the cross, and the resurrection from the dead,” and he held up the Ninevites, who had never heard “the predictions of Moses,” as people who still “repented” at Jonah’s preaching.

The major traditions agree that the sign points to Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Catholic and Orthodox churches also build the story into their calendars of Scripture readings.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 994, says that Jesus announced his own resurrection and “speaks of this unique event as the ‘sign of Jonah.’” In the Roman Catholic lectionary, Jonah 3:1–10 and Luke 11:29–32 are read together on the Wednesday of the first week of Lent, a season of repentance.

The Orthodox Church reads the entire book of Jonah, chapters 1 through 4, at Vespers on Holy Saturday, the day Christ lay in the tomb, as one of the Old Testament readings of that service.

Among Protestant interpreters, Calvin’s commentary gives the classic Reformation reading: one point of likeness, Christ as a prophet who speaks after rising from the dead, rather than a match for every detail of Jonah’s story.

Yes, though it is not a church teaching. Carl Jung, in the book published in English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious, treated Jonah in the fish as an example of the “night journey on the sea,” a phrase he credited to Leo Frobenius. In the myths Jung collected, a hero is swallowed by a monster and comes out again, and he set this “Jonah motive” beside “Christ in the tomb or in hell” as images of “the victory over death.” Sigmund Freud rejected Jung’s reading. Maya Balakirsky Katz, in Freud, Jung, and Jonah (Cambridge University Press, 2022), argues that the dispute over Jonah helped end the two men’s collaboration.

Later in the same chapter Jesus says to Peter, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona” (Matthew 16:17). Barjona means “son of Jonah,” the name of Peter’s father, not the prophet. The King James Version gives the same name in John 1:42, “Thou art Simon the son of Jona,” and in John 21:15, “Simon, son of Jonas.” The NIV and other modern translations read “son of John” in those two verses, following Greek manuscripts that have Iōannou, John, instead of Jona.

The men of Nineveh turned at eight words from a prophet who had tried to run away. We have been given more than they were, and Jesus said so himself: “behold, a greater than Jonas is here” (Matthew 12:41).

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• Is Jonah in the Bible? The Prophet Sent to Nineveh
• What Is Holy Saturday?
• Where Did Jesus Go Between His Death and Resurrection?
• What Time Was Jesus Crucified?