Did the Resurrection Really Happen on Sunday?

Some theologians seem to want to chide those who fail to take Holy Saturday seriously enough.  For example, TitusOneNine quotes an essay which notes:  “Lewis worried that even Barth jumped too quickly to Easter, to confidence that the battle against evil and death is already won and had indeed been won from all eternity."

The gospels leave open the possibility that Jesus might actually have been raised on Holy Saturday, which by Jewish reckoning started at sundown on Good Friday.  Look at the gospels:  Three of the four report merely that some number of Jesus's women followers went to the tomb on Sunday morning, there to find it empty.  (Matthew embellishes the tale by claiming that, as the women approached the tomb, an earthquake struck, and an angel descended from heaven to roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb.)

Holy Saturday, of course, was a Sabbath.  Matthew 12 reports that, on an earlier Sabbath, Jesus healed a man with a shriveled hand on the Sabbath.  The Pharisees immediately challenged him, asking, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?"   Jesus fired back at them:  "If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?  How much more valuable is a man than a sheep!  Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." 

If God had likewise lifted Jesus "out of the pit" on the Sabbath, instead of holding off until the start of the work week, such a deed would have been an echo and a ratification of Jesus's teachings.   While at least some of the first Christians began celebrating the Resurrection on Sunday, neither they nor we can be sure that it didn't happen the day before earlier — on Holy Saturday, the Sabbath.