cy. Luke reports from
the risen Savior the words, "O fools, and slow of heart to believe
all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have
suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" "Thus it is
written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from
the dead the third day." Peter declares that the patriarch David
before "spake of the resurrection of Christ." And Paul also
affirms, "That the promise which was made unto the fathers, God
hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath
raised up Jesus again." One can scarcely hesitate in deciding the
meaning of these words as they were used by the apostles. The
unanimous opinion and interpretation of the Christians of the
first centuries, and of all the Church Fathers, leave no shadow of
a doubt that it was believed that the resurrection of Jesus was
repeatedly foretold in the Old Testament, expected by the
prophets, and fulfilled in the event as a seal of the inspired
prophecy. Furthermore, Jesus himself repeatedly prophesied his own
resurrection from the dead, though his disciples did not
understand his meaning until the event put a clear comment on the
words. He charged those who saw his transfiguration on the mount,
"Tell it to no man until the Son of Man be risen again from the
dead." The chief priests told Pilate that they remembered that
Jesus said, while he was yet alive, "After three days I will rise
again." Standing in the temple at Jerusalem, Jesus said once,
"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."
"When, therefore, he was risen from the dead, his disciples
remembered that he had said this unto them;" and then they
understood that "he had spoken of the temple of his body." It is
perfectly plain that the New Testament represents the resurrection
of Christ as the fulfilment of prophecies, those prophecies having
been so expounded by him.

There are few problems presented to the candid Christian scholar
of to day more perplexing than the one involved in the subject of
these prophecies. Paul declares to King Agrippa, "I say none other
things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should
come: that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first
that should rise from the dead and should show light unto the
Gentiles." It is vain to attempt to disguise the fact that the
ingenuous student cannot find these prophecies in the Old
Testament as we now have it. He will search it through in va