In the minds of many devout scholars this miracle has excited suspicion
on several accounts. They say it is contrary to the teaching of
Scripture elsewhere, according to which Christ was the firstfruits of
them that slept. If these dead bodies were reanimated at the moment of
this earthquake, they, and not He, were the firstfruits. To this it is
answered that St. Matthew is careful to note that they came out of
their graves "after His resurrection"; so that St. Matthew still agrees
with St. Paul in making Christ the first to rise. But, then, it is
asked, in what condition were they between their reanimation and their
resurrection? The Evangelist appears to state that they rose from
death to life at the moment of the earthquake, but did not emerge from
the tomb till the third day afterwards, when Christ had risen. Is this
credible? or is it an apocryphal marvel, which has been interpolated in
the text of St. Matthew? The other Evangelists, while, along with St.
Matthew, narrating the rending of the veil, do not touch on this
incident at all. The whole representation, it is argued, lacks the
sobriety which is characteristic of the authentic miracles of the
Gospels and broadly separates them from the ecclesiastical miracles,
about which there is generally an air of triviality and grotesqueness.

On the other hand, there is no indication in the oldest and best
manuscripts of St. Matthew that this is an interpolation; and many of
the acutest minds have felt this trait to be thoroughly congruous and
suitable to its place. If, they contend, He who had just died on
Calvary was what He gave Himself out and we believe Him to be, His
death must have excited the profoundest commotion in the kingdoms of
the dead. The world of living men and women was insensible to the
character of the event which was taking place before its eyes; but the
world unseen was agitated as it never had been before and never was to
be again. It was not unnatural, but the reverse, that some of the
dead, in their excitement and eagerness, should even press back over
the boundaries of the other world, in order to be in the world where
Christ was. The question where they were or what they were doing
between their reanimation and resurrection is a triviality not worth
considering. At all events, they rose after their Lord; and was it not
appropriate that when, after the forty days, He ascended to heaven,
there to be received by rejoicing angels an