I recognize that anyone can be mistaken, myself included. And while my Masters Degree is in biblical text, I recognize I do not know everything that can be known. My Greek and Hebrew do leave something to be desired, but I do know enough to be able to run down legitimate, scholarly sources. (And I hope you don’t plan to denigrate scholarship. We are dealing with an collection of ancient documents written in three different languages over a period of 2,000+ years in a variety of cultures--if you were to study Caesar's The Gallic Wars I hope you would defer to an expert in the early Roman period and fluent in Latin. Scholarship is important.).
Your insistence that Jesus’ words could only have been literal prevents you from seeing anything but a literal interpretation. This is classic circular reasoning. To anyone who disagrees with you and suggests an alternative, you merely say, “Well, I don’t see how it can be anything but literal because Jesus says, ’three days and three nights.’"
Just because you say it’s “a literal set of days, not an idiomatic expression” doesn’t mean it is literally three 24-hour days. You are begging the question.
And contra to your comment, it does not follow that “this sign must be literal for it to be the ONLY sign he would give...” How does it being the only sign demand that it must be literal in number? Does Jesus say that? Does the Bible suggest anywhere that Jesus must mean literally three 24-hour days for it to be the only sign?
Jesus was Messiah, but he was also a Jewish Rabbi using typical Jewish terminology and understandings of his day.
“In rabbinical thought a day and a night make an onah, and a part of an onah is as the whole (cf. Strack & Billerbeck, Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash...). Thus according to Jewish tradition, 'three days and three nights' need mean no more than 'three days' or the combination of any part of three separate days,” (D. A. Carson, Matthew, p 302). There is a wide variety of rabbinic traditions regarding how long an onah (day) is--it isn’t as precise as you make it out to be.
Most exegetical scholars hold to the view that his statement is not necessarily literal. Just because you can’t conceive of it as anything but literal doesn’t mean that it is.
