treis

This is simply the number three. Like our own word, it counts people, days, objects, and measures, and the New Testament uses it that way throughout, from three measures of flour to three men at a door to three days in the grave.

What gives the word its weight is not the math but the places it lands. A few set phrases lean on it. "Two or three" is a standing legal formula: a charge must be confirmed by two or three witnesses, and Jesus borrows it for settling a dispute in the church and for the promise that he is present where two or three gather in his name. And "three days," or "after three days," recurs around the death and resurrection: three days and three nights, the temple raised in three days, the Son of Man rising on the third day. These are real, frequent uses of the number, but they are still the same number three counting the same way. The significance lives in the events the number describes, not in any second meaning hidden inside the word.