But those tenants said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours.
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Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
But how will you insure that the inheritance will be yours? Merely because you killed him? Hold on! You in fact did kill him, yet the inheritance is still not yours. Do you not recall the Psalm which says: “I lie down and sleep,” and then adds, “I wake again”? Did you miss that point? While you were gloating that you had killed him, he was sleeping. The Psalm says: “I slept.” Just while they were raging and would kill me, what was I doing? “I slept.” And if I had not willed it, I would not even have slept, for “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again.” So let the oppressors rage. Let the earth even be “given into the hands of the wicked,” let the flesh be left to the hands of persecutors, let them suspend him on wood with nails transfixed, pierced with a spear. The one who lies down and sleeps simply adds: “I rise again.” On Psalm : On the Feast of the Martyrs
From this it appears, that the chief priests and lawyers were not ignorant that Christ was the Messias promised in the law and the prophets, but their knowledge was afterwards blinded by their envy: for otherwise, had they known him to be true God, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory, says St. Paul. For a further explanation, see St. Matthew xxi. (Ven. Bede)
