With reference to the statement that He was to rise from the dead on the third day, it is written in the Memoirs that the men of your race disputed with Him saying: Shew us a sign. And He answered them: An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and no sign shall be given them, save the sign of Jonah. And though He uttered these mysterious words it was possible for it to be perceived by them that heard Him that after He was crucified He would rise on the third day.
And He showed that your generation was more evil and adulterous than the city of the Ninevites, for they, when Jonah preached to them, after being cast up on the third day from the belly of the big fish, that after three days they would all perish together, proclaimed a fast of every single living creature, both men and beasts, with wearing of sackcloth, and vehement wailing, and heartfelt true repentance, and renunciation of all that tended to iniquity, for they believed that God is merciful and kindly towards all who turn away from evil. So that even the king of that city, and his great men, in like manner wore sackcloth, and continued in their fasting and their supplication, and through their prayers their city was not overthrown.
Further, when Jonah was distressed at the city not being overthrown on the third day, as he proclaimed, the gourd was appointed, springing up for him out of the earth, and as he sat under it he was shaded from the heat (now the gourd was a colocynth growing up on a sudden, without Jonah having planted or watered it, but it sprang up suddenly to supply him with shade), and again it was appointed to dry up, at which Jonah was grieved. But by all this God convinced him of being wrongly disheartened at the city of the Ninevites not having been destroyed. And He said:
Thou didst spare the gourd, on which thou didst not toil, nor didst thou rear it; which came in its night and perished in its night; and shall not I spare Nineveh, the great city, in which dwell more than twelve myriads of men, who know not between their right hand and, their left, and much cattle.