Cyril of Jerusalem

In his own words on Jonah

• Jonah 1:17

  They further object: A dead man recently deceased was raised by the living; but show us that it is possible for a man dead and buried for three days to rise again. The testimony we seek is supplied by the Lord Jesus himself in the Gospels, when he says, "For even as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Now when we study the story of Jonah the force of the resemblance becomes striking. Jesus was sent to preach repentance. So was Jonah. Though Jonah fled, not knowing what was to come, Jesus came willingly, to grant repentance for salvation. Jonah slumbered in the ship and was fast asleep amid the stormy sea; while Jesus by God's will was sleeping, the sea was stirred up, for the purpose of manifesting thereafter the power of him who slept. They said to Jonah, "What are you doing asleep? Rise up, call upon your God, that God may save us," but the apostles say, "Lord, save us!" In the first instance they said, Call upon your God, and in the second, save us. In the first Jonah said to them, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea, that it may quiet down for you"; in the other Christ himself "rebuked the wind and the sea, and there came a great calm." Jonah was cast into the belly of a great fish, but Christ of his own will descended to the abode of the invisible fish of death. He went down of his own will to make death disgorge those it had swallowed up, according to the Scripture: "I shall deliver them from the power of the nether world, and I shall redeem them from death."

  Catechetical Lecture 14:7

• Jonah 2:6

  Jonah fulfilled a type of our Savior when he prayed from the belly of the fish and said, "I cried for help from the midst of the netherworld." He was in fact in the fish, yet he says that he is in the netherworld. In a later verse he manifestly prophesies in the person of Christ: "My head went down into the chasms of the mountains." Yet he was still in the belly of the fish. What mountains encompass you? But I know, he says, that I am a type of him who is to be laid in the sepulcher hewn out of rock. While he was in the sea, Jonah says, "I went down into the earth," for he typified Christ, who went down into the heart of the earth.

  Catechetical Lecture 14:20