Dead people walking through the streets of Jerusalem—that was the last thing that happened. But before that, the earth split open. Before the earth split open, a veil that not even two teams of oxen could tear was ripped apart on its own. Before the veil was torn, three hours of darkness covered the earth in the middle of the day. And before all of that, a man said a single word from a cross, a word that had been waiting fourteen centuries to be spoken.
Nine things happened within hours, each one more violent, more supernatural, and more impossible than the last. And when you put them together, when you see them in order, you discover something most people never notice: there is a pattern, an escalation, as if the entire universe was reacting to one single thing—that Jesus of Nazareth had just died.
The reaction started in the sky, came down to the earth, penetrated the rocks, opened the tombs, defeated death, and ended in the heart of a Roman soldier who did not believe in anything. But let us go in order, because the order changes everything. And there is something about the ninth thing, the last one, that connects all the previous eight in a way nobody expects.
It is twelve noon, the sixth hour in the Jewish calendar. Jesus has been on the cross for three hours. Golgotha, “Place of the Skull” in Aramaic, is a bare rock outside the walls of Jerusalem, chosen by the Romans so that everyone passing by could see what happened to anyone who defied Rome. The sun is at its highest point, and suddenly, without warning, it disappears. Matthew 27:45 says, from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. Mark 15:33 confirms it. Luke 23:44 does too.
We are not talking about a cloud; we are talking about three hours of total darkness in the middle of the day. And here is a fact that destroys any natural explanation: the Jewish Passover was always celebrated during a full moon. During a full moon, it is astronomically impossible for a solar eclipse to occur, period. This was not a natural phenomenon, and we are not talking about just any day. It was Passover. Jerusalem was packed. The historian Josephus says that during Passover, Jerusalem’s population could multiply by five or six—tens of thousands of people who had come to celebrate the liberation from Egypt, and at noon, they were plunged into darkness.
Imagine that: you are on that hill, you have been watching three men die on Roman crosses for hours, and suddenly the light disappears, not gradually, but all at once. And it does not come back. It does not come back in five minutes, it does not come back in an hour; it stays dark for three hours in the middle of the day. For people in the first century, the sun was the most predictable thing in the universe, the one thing that never failed, and it just failed.
And notice something almost nobody connects. Amos 8:9 says,
“I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.”
A prophet wrote that more than seven hundred years before Christ, and at Golgotha, it was fulfilled word for word. And there is something rarely connected: the ninth plague of Egypt was exactly this darkness. Exodus 10:22 says there was darkness over Egypt for three days, and after the darkness came the death of the firstborn. Now, at Golgotha, three hours of darkness, and after the darkness, the death of the firstborn—only this time, the firstborn was God’s. The pattern of the Exodus was repeating.
But what comes next has no precedent anywhere in the Bible. After three hours in darkness, Jesus said a single word in Greek: tetelestai. It is translated as “It is finished,” but that word carries a weight you do not see in English. It was an accounting term. When someone paid off a debt in the Roman world, the creditor would write “tetelestai” on the document. It meant debt paid, account closed, nothing more is owed. It was the word a slave heard when their freedom was purchased, the word a soldier heard at the end of their service. And it is the word Jesus chose as his final declaration. He did not say “It is over” with resignation. He did not say “I give up.” He said, “It is paid,” as if he was closing a transaction that had been open since Genesis 3.
And Luke 23:46 adds something that completely changes the tone:
“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
After three hours of darkness, after the most gut-wrenching cry ever heard on that hill, Jesus dies saying,
“Father,”
not “My God,” like in the previous cry.
“Father,”
as if something had been restored in that last second.
There is something more about that tetelestai worth pausing to think about. In the Greek papyri archaeologists have found in Egypt—tax receipts, purchase contracts, legal documents from the Greco-Roman world—tetelestai appears again and again, and it always means the same thing: paid in full, no remaining installment, no next payment, no future supplement, finished, closed, sealed. When Jesus uses that word, he is not describing his defeat; he is signing off on the closing of an operation that started in Eden. And that operation had a price, and the price had just been paid—complete, whole, without remainder.
And it was at that exact instant, the instant Jesus exhaled for the last time, that a chain of events began that no human being could have caused. Matthew 27:51 says, and behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. That line is so well known that maybe it does not hit you anymore, but it should, because when you understand what that veil was, how big it was, what it represented, and how it was torn, you will understand why this was probably the most revolutionary event of the nine.
Some people hear the veil was torn and picture a shower curtain. Nothing could be further from the truth. The temple veil was not a little curtain. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who lived in the first century and saw the temple with his own eyes before Rome destroyed it in AD 70, described this veil. According to his writings, it was approximately sixty feet tall—that is a six-story building. And according to rabbinic tradition recorded in the Talmud, in the tractate Shekalim, the veil was so thick that it took teams of priests to move it. Some rabbis said that not even two teams of oxen could have ripped it apart pulling in opposite directions. It was woven in a process involving eighty-two maidens. It was not fabric; it was a structure.
And Matthew does not say it was torn from bottom to top, as if someone had pulled it; he says it was torn from top to bottom, as if someone from the other side had ripped it open from inside the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence was supposed to dwell. That veil existed for a very specific reason: it separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place. Only one person could enter the Most Holy Place: the high priest, and only one day a year, the Day of Attonement, Yom Kippur. Anyone else who crossed that veil died—not as a metaphor, literally. Leviticus 16:2 says,
“Tell Aaron your brother not to come at just any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, before the mercy seat which is on the ark, lest he die.”
That veil was the barrier between God and humanity, and at the exact moment Jesus dies, it tears. It does not fall, it does not stain, it tears from top to bottom, as if God himself was saying,
“The barrier is over.”
The author of Hebrews explains it in Hebrews 10:19-20: we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the veil, that is, through his flesh. The implication is brutal. For fourteen hundred years, only one person could cross that veil once a year with animal blood, trembling with fear. Now, anyone can enter at any time without a mediator. Hebrews 4:16 puts it in two words that would have horrified any temple priest: boldly to the throne of grace. Boldly, just like that.
The theological implication is enormous, but the practical implication for the people that day was probably terrifying because the veil was inside the temple, and the temple was full of priests. It was the hour of the evening sacrifice. There were people inside when it happened, priests who saw with their own eyes how a veil that needed entire teams to move tore itself apart from top to bottom without anyone touching it. And what I just told you is only three of the nine things—three—and each of the remaining ones is harder to explain than the last, because what happened to the earth is something no priest, no Roman, and no spectator could ignore, and they did not even have time to process it.
Matthew 27:51 continues, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split. Now, Palestine is a seismic zone. There is a major geological fault, the Jordan Valley Fault, which is part of the Great Rift Valley that runs from Syria to Mozambique, so earthquakes were not unknown. But what makes this earthquake different is the timing. It occurs at the exact instant of Jesus’s death—not an hour before, not a day later—at the exact moment, and it was strong enough to split rocks.
And there is a connection to the Old Testament that completely changes the perspective. When God revealed himself to Moses at Sinai to deliver the law, Exodus 19:18 says,
“Mount Sinai was completely in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and the whole mountain trembled greatly.”
The earthquake at Sinai accompanied the delivery of the law; the earthquake at Golgotha accompanied the fulfillment of that same law. God shook the earth when he gave the rules, and he shook the earth again when his Son finished keeping every single one of them. Fourteen hundred years separate both earthquakes, but the message is the same: when God acts, the earth knows it.
And there is something that is not mentioned much but completely changes the picture. Matthew says the rocks were split, not just the earth shook. The rocks broke, literally. And here is something interesting in the Old Testament: when the Bible talks about God splitting rocks, it is almost always connected to giving life. In Exodus 17:6, God tells Moses to strike the rock and water will flow from it for the people. In Numbers 20:11, Moses strikes the rock, and abundant waters gush out. The rock splits, and life comes out. Now, at Golgotha, the rock split when Christ dies, as if creation itself was repeating the pattern—from the split rock, life comes forth.
And Paul takes this image to another level in 1 Corinthians 10:4. He writes, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. For Paul, the rock in the desert that Moses struck was a symbol of Christ. The rock was struck, and water came out that gave life to the people. Now, at Golgotha, Christ the rock was struck, and from his death came life for all humanity, and at the same time, the literal rocks of Jerusalem split apart, the symbolic and the literal happening at the very same instant.
But what comes next is even harder to process, because up to now we have talked about darkness, sound, and broken stone—extraordinary things, but they still belong to the world of physical phenomena. What follows crosses a line that no earthquake can explain. What follows involves the dead. Matthew 27:52: and the graves were opened.
Here you need to understand something about first-century tombs in Jerusalem. They were not underground graves like today; they were caves carved into limestone, sealed with enormous circular stones. Wealthy families had family tombs with multiple niches, and many of these tombs were located on the hillsides surrounding Jerusalem, including the slopes near Golgotha. Now, when Matthew says the graves were opened, the implication is that the earthquake was violent enough to move the stones sealing the tombs, stones weighing hundreds of pounds, stones specifically designed not to move, and they moved.
But notice the detail: Matthew says the graves were opened, but he does not say the saints came out at that moment. Matthew 27:53 clarifies, and coming out of the graves after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many after his resurrection. That is, the graves opened on Friday when Jesus died, but the saints did not come out until Sunday when Jesus rose—three days with the tombs open, three days with the dead visible but still dead, like a promise half-fulfilled, as if God was saying,
“Wait, something more is coming.”
And when Sunday came, the dead walked out, and Matthew says something that sounds almost surreal: they went into the holy city and appeared to many. He does not say to some; to many—recognizable people, known saints, people the community had buried and mourned, now walking through the streets of Jerusalem, entering homes, being seen by crowds.
Stop for a second and think about what this meant for the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Imagine you are in your house on a Sunday morning. It has been a terrible weekend. The earthquake on Friday has you on edge, the darkness left you sleepless, and someone knocks on your door. You open it, and it is your father—your father, whom you buried two years ago. He is standing, he is looking at you, he is alive.
We do not know how many there were. Matthew does not give a number; he just says many bodies of the saints. He does not say sinners, he does not say random people—saints, people recognized for their faith, and appeared to many, which implies they did not appear to just one person in private. They were seen by multiple witnesses at multiple times. This was not a mystical vision from a single prophet; it was a public event, verifiable dead people walking through the most heavily guarded city in the Roman world.
This is exclusive to Matthew; neither Mark, nor Luke, nor John mention this event. Some scholars wonder why, and the most likely answer is that each evangelist selected the events that best served their audience and theological purpose. Matthew was writing for a Jewish audience, and for a first-century Jew, the resurrection of the saints was the definitive sign that the messianic age had begun. Ezekiel 37 had prophesied that dry bones would come back to life when God restored his people. Daniel 12:2 said it even more directly: and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Now, in Jerusalem, the dead were walking. For a Jewish reader, the message was impossible to ignore: what Ezekiel saw in vision and what Daniel prophesied had just begun to be fulfilled in real life.
And if you think this is the most shocking part, what is coming will take everything to another level, because while all this was happening, there was a medical detail occurring at Golgotha that nobody would understand until two thousand years later. John 19:33-34 says, but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out.
Now, John does something unusual here. Immediately after describing this, he adds in verse 35, and he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you may believe. John knew this sounded strange. he knew people were going to question the blood and water thing. That is why he took the trouble to say,
“I was there, I saw it with my own eyes, and I am telling the truth.”
Why is the blood and water important? In 1986, Doctor William Edwards published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the most respected medical publications in the world, titled “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ.” In that article, Edwards and his colleagues explained that the combination of blood and water flowing from the side of a body is consistent with a pericardial and pleural effusion. In simple terms, the extreme trauma of crucifixion had caused fluid to accumulate around the heart and lungs. When the soldier pierced the side with the spear, that fluid came out first—the water—followed by the clotted blood.
This has two enormous implications. First, it medically confirms that Jesus was dead—not unconscious, not passed out, dead. The heart had stopped pumping long enough for the blood to begin separating into its components. Second, John had zero medical knowledge from the twenty-first century. He had no idea what a pericardial effusion was; he simply described what he saw, and what he saw two thousand years later turns out to be medically precise.
And notice something that changes the reading of all this. John does not just describe blood and water as a clinical detail; for him, it has deep theological significance. In 1 text, 1 John 5:6, he writes, this is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not by the water only, but by the water and the blood. The water and blood from Jesus’s side are not just medical evidence; they are the two fundamental elements of the new covenant: the water of baptism, the blood of redemption. Both came out together from the same side, as if in that moment, from the dead body of Christ, the two sacraments that would define Christianity forever were born.
And there is a parallel with the Old Testament that is hard to ignore. When God created Eve, according to Genesis 2:21, he made her from Adam’s side while he slept—from the side of the first man asleep, the first woman was born. Now, from the side of Christ dead, the second Adam, as Paul calls him in 1 Corinthians 15:45, the church is born, the bride is born. From the bridegroom’s side, life is born, from the wound. The pattern repeats, and this time it is not a person, it is a people.
And there is another detail connecting this to something much older. In John 19:36, after describing the blood and water, John writes, for these things were done that the scripture should be fulfilled, “Not one of his bones shall be broken.” That is a direct reference to Exodus 12:46, where God commands that not a bone of the Passover lamb shall be broken. The soldiers broke the legs of the two criminals crucified with Jesus to speed up their death. It was a standard procedure called crurifragium—breaking the tibias with a mallet so the crucified person could not support themselves and would die of asphyxiation within minutes. But when they came to Jesus, he was already dead. They did not break his legs, exactly like the Passover lamb. The prophecy written by Moses fourteen hundred years earlier was fulfilled by a Roman soldier who had never read a single verse of the Old Testament. The soldier was not trying to fulfill any prophecy; he simply did his job, and in doing so, he executed with surgical precision what Moses had prescribed fourteen centuries earlier.
And then comes Zechariah 12:10, “They will look on me, the one they have pierced,” written five hundred years before Christ, fulfilled by a Roman spear in the side of a carpenter from Nazareth.
But of all the events, there is one that is perhaps the most significant, not because it is the most spectacular—we have already seen darkness, earthquakes, the dead walking, blood and water—but this last event matters more than all the previous ones combined because it does not come from the sky or the earth or the tombs. It comes from the mouth of the person you would least expect. Matthew 27:54: so when the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying,
“Truly this was the Son of God.”
The centurion was a Roman officer, a pagan, a man who had probably supervised dozens of crucifixions. For him, this was routine work—another Jewish rebel on another cross. But something happened that afternoon that broke through his indifference. Mark 15:39 adds a detail; it says the centurion was standing opposite him when he said it. He did not say it from a distance; he said it looking directly at the body of Jesus.
And the word Mark uses in Greek to describe the centurion’s reaction is interesting. Having seen the earthquake and the things that had happened, he does not say having seen the darkness, he does not say having seen the veil tear—the centurion did not see those, he was at Golgotha, not in the temple. What he saw was the earthquake, the rocks splitting, and the way Jesus died. Luke 23:47 gives another version of his words:
“Certainly this was a righteous man.”
Mark says “Son of God,” Luke says “righteous.” Both agree on one thing: a Roman soldier, trained to kill, trained to feel nothing in the face of death, breaks his professional silence to make a theological confession about a Jewish prisoner who just died.
Think about what that meant. The high priest, who knew the scriptures by heart, did not recognize him. The Pharisees, who dedicated their lives to studying the Torah, did not recognize him. The Sadducees, the scribes, the experts in the law—none of them. And a Roman soldier, who probably could not even read Hebrew, looks at a corpse nailed to two beams and says what no theologian in Israel dared to say:
“This was the Son of God.”
Sometimes the truth is first seen by the person you would least expect. Sometimes the deepest revelation does not come to the one who studies the most, but to the one who observes the most.
And early Christian tradition did something with this centurion: they did not leave him as an anonymous character, they gave him a name, Longinus. The Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint. Tradition says he converted, left the Roman army, preached the gospel, and died a martyr in Cappadocia. We cannot historically verify all those details, but the fact that the early church preserved his memory says something. That moment at Golgotha was not a throwaway line; it was a conversion. Something broke inside that man while the rocks were breaking outside, and he was not the only one.
Luke 23:48 says, and the whole crowd who came together to that site, seeing what had been done, beat their breasts and returned. Beating one’s breast in Jewish culture was a sign of deep mourning and repentance. It was not a casual gesture; it was what you did when you recognized that something terrible had happened and that somehow you were responsible. The same crowd that hours earlier had shouted, “Crucify him!” was now going home beating their chests, not celebrating, not satisfied, shattered.
Luke uses the Greek word theoria to describe what they had just witnessed, which can be translated as “spectacle.” The crucifixion they had demanded at the top of their lungs had become a spectacle of the sacred breaking into the ordinary, and they did not know what to do with it. Imagine being one of them: that morning you shouted “Crucify him!” because everyone was shouting, because the priest told you that man was a blasphemer, because it seemed like the right thing to do. And now you are walking back home through the darkness that just ended, with the ground still trembling under your feet, with the rumor that the temple veil just tore apart, beating your chest and asking yourself,
“What did we do?”
And there is something in this moment that connects to something happening today, because the reality is that there are people who have spent years in a church and never understood what happened on that cross. They have heard the story a thousand times, they know it by heart, but they have never felt it. They have never stopped to think about what it meant that the sky went dark, that the earth shook, that the dead rose. They have turned it into a theological data point when it was a literal earthquake. And sometimes, like that crowd going home beating their chests, you need something to shake you on the inside so that what you have always known in your head finally drops into your heart.
And there is something connecting all of this. Think about it: these nine things are not isolated events, they are a chain, and the chain has a direction. It starts in the sky—the sun goes out. It drops to religion—the veil breaks. It drops to the earth—the ground shakes. It penetrates rock—the stones crack. It opens death—the tombs unseal. It defeats death—the saints walk. It touches Christ’s body—blood and water. And it ends in the heart of a pagan—”This was the Son of God.” From the cosmos to the human heart in hours, without anyone planning it, without anyone coordinating it—every element of creation, the sky, the earth, the rocks, the dead, the blood, and finally a human being saying exactly the same thing.
And Paul understood this better than anyone. In Romans 8:22, he wrote, the whole creation groans and labors with birth pains together. Birth pains, not death pains—birth pains. What happened that Friday was not destruction; it was a birth. The darkness was not a funeral; it was the pain of something new arriving. The earthquake was not a punishment; it was the contraction of a world giving birth to something that had never existed: direct access to God without a veil, without a priestly intermediary, without animal blood.
And Paul goes further in Romans 5:18. He says, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, so also through one man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. One man opened the door to sin in a garden; another man closed it on a cross, and when that door closed, nine things shook.
And there is one more detail, one almost nobody mentions, and when you hear it you will understand why none of this was coincidence because there is a timing coincidence so precise it defies any statistics. All these signs—the darkness, the earthquake, the veil—happened at the ninth hour, three in the afternoon. Do you know what happened at three in the afternoon at the temple in Jerusalem every single day? The evening sacrifice. Every day at the ninth hour, a priest would slaughter a lamb on the temple altar. It was called the tamid, the continual sacrifice. Exodus 29:39 establishes it:
“One lamb you shall offer in the morning, and the other lamb you shall offer at twilight.”
Every day without exception since the time of Moses, morning and evening, one lamb after another, fourteen hundred years of slaughtered lambs. And that Friday, at the exact hour the priest was slitting the throat of the evening lamb on the temple altar, Jesus was dying on the cross less than a kilometer away. The priest held the knife, the lamb’s blood fell on the altar stone, and at that very same instant, a few hundred meters away, Jesus’s blood fell on the rock of Golgotha. The symbolic lamb and the real lamb died at the same time, and it was not coincidence.
The Jewish sacrificial system was designed from the beginning to point to this moment. Every lamb slaughtered in the temple over fourteen centuries was an arrow pointing toward Golgotha. Hebrews 10:1 puts it bluntly: for the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect. Shadow—that is what the temple sacrifices were: shadows, projections, drafts. The reality was the cross, and when the reality arrived, the shadows no longer made sense. That is why the veil tore—not because the temple was destroyed, that would come forty years later with Rome, but because the temple was no longer necessary. Direct access was open. The definitive lamb had died. Tetelestai—paid, no more installments.
John the Baptist had said it months earlier in John 1:29:
“Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
He did not say “a lamb”; he said “the lamb”—the definitive one, the last one, the one that would make all the others unnecessary. Isaiah had prophesied it with chilling precision in Isaiah 53:7:
“He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”
The prophet wrote that seven hundred years before Jesus was born, and it was fulfilled with a precision that defies any statistical explanation.
And when you count the prophecies fulfilled in just those hours, just on the Friday of the crucifixion, the number is overwhelming: the darkness (Amos 8:9), the lamb with no broken bone (Exodus 12:46), the pierced side (Zechariah 12:10), the suffering of the righteous (all of Psalm 22), the blood that takes away sin (Isaiah 53), the lamb silent before the slaughter (Isaiah 53:7), the division of garments (Psalm 22:18). Prophets who lived in different centuries, in different places, writing in different contexts, and all of them pointing to the same day, the same hill, the same man. And when that lamb died, the universe did not stay silent: the sky went dark, the earth shook, the rocks broke, the dead rose, and a soldier who had no reason to believe in anything said what no one else dared to say. Nine things, nine signs, each one stronger than the last, each one screaming the same thing: what just happened on that cross was not just another execution, it was the moment that split history in two.
And perhaps the most striking thing of all is what happened next, because after the darkness, after the earthquake, after the dead walking through Jerusalem, came silence. Saturday—an entire day where absolutely nothing happened. The tombs were open, but the saints had not come out. The veil was torn, but the priests were still in shock. The centurion had confessed, but did not know what to do with it. The disciples were hiding behind locked doors. The women were weeping. Peter was carrying the guilt of having denied him three times. Nobody went out, nobody spoke. Everything was suspended, as if the entire universe was holding its breath, as if everything that had shaken on Friday was now on pause, waiting, but nobody knew what it was waiting for.
And somewhere in Jerusalem, a group of women was preparing spices. Luke 23:56 says they prepared spices and fragrant oils, and they rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment. While the whole world stood still, they were preparing the only thing they knew how to prepare, what was needed to anoint a dead body. They were not preparing a party, they were not preparing a celebration, they were preparing a funeral, because nobody, absolutely nobody, expected what was about to happen on Sunday.
And while those women were preparing spices, the priests had an urgent problem. Matthew 27:62-64 says that the day after the crucifixion, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate and said,
“Sir, we remember, while he was still alive, how that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day.”
Notice something ironic: Jesus’s enemies remembered his promise of resurrection; his disciples did not. The people who wanted him dead remembered his words better than the people who loved him. Pilate gave them a guard, they sealed the stone, they placed armed soldiers in front of the tomb of a dead carpenter. The stone was huge; Mark 16:4 says it was very large. The seal was Roman; breaking it was a capital offense. The soldiers were professionals, trained to stay awake on their post under penalty of death. All of Rome mobilized against the possibility that a corpse might disappear, and three days later, neither the stone, nor the seal, nor the soldiers, nor Rome itself could contain what happened inside that tomb. But that is another story.
What matters today is what happened on Friday, because that Friday, for a few hours, the whole world—the sky, the earth, the rocks, the dead, the living, Jews and Romans—all said the same thing without agreeing to it, without a prior meeting, without coordination. The darkness said it, the earthquake said it, the torn veil said it, the dead walking said it, the blood and water said it, and a pagan centurion put it into words:
“Truly this was the Son of God.”
