A Small and Stubborn Heart: The Story of Jonah       The Biblical book of Jonah tells us the prophet Jonah's message (destruction of Nineveh if the people did not repent), but also tells us of Jonah's smallness of heart.           Jonah prophesied some time before 732 BC. Other biblical and apocryphal books (2 Kings, Tobit, and 3 Maccabees), Jesus, and Josephus, a Jewish historian of the First Century, all understood Jonah to be a historical person relating actual events.       Jesus said, "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Mt 12:40). People tend to assume that Jonah was alive during the three days leading some to scoff and claim the book is fictional (although there is an 1896 incident where a person did survive being inside a sperm whale). However, Jonah's prayer in chapter 2 says th...