Lactantius — Divine Institutes 4.19

What more can still be said of the Jews’ crime than that they were then blinded and seized by incurable fury—they who, reading these things every day, neither understood them nor could keep themselves from doing them? So, hung upon the cross, he cried out to God with a great voice and of his own will laid down his spirit. At that same hour there was an earthquake, and the temple veil that separated the two tabernacles was torn in two, and the sun was suddenly withdrawn, and from the sixth hour to the ninth there was darkness. Amos the prophet testifies to this: “And it shall be in that day, says the Lord, the sun shall set at midday, and the day of light shall be darkened; and I will turn your feast days into mourning and your songs into lamentation.” Likewise Jeremiah: “She who gives birth is terrified, and the soul has grown weary, and the sun has gone down for her while it was still midday; she is crushed and cursed; I will give the rest of them to the sword before their enemies.” And the Sibyl: “The curtain of the temple shall be torn, and at midday there shall be a dark, monstrous night for three hours.”

When these things had happened, they could not even understand their crime by the heavenly prodigies. But because he had foretold that he would rise from the underworld on the third day, fearing that if the disciples stole the body everyone would believe he had risen and the confusion among the people would grow far greater, they took him down from the cross, shut him in a tomb, and surrounded it with a firm military guard. Yet on the third day, before light, an earthquake suddenly opened the tomb, and while the guards—stunned with terror—saw nothing, he came out of the tomb whole and alive and went into Galilee to seek his disciples; in the tomb nothing was found except the wrappings in which they had enclosed the wrapped body. The prophets had sung that he would not remain among the dead but would rise on the third day. David in Psalm 15: “You will not abandon my soul to the underworld, nor will you let your holy one see corruption.” Likewise in the third: “I slept and took sleep, and I rose, because the Lord helped me.” Hosea also, first of the twelve prophets, testified to his resurrection: “This is my wise son… and from the hand of the underworld I will deliver him. Where is your judgment, death, or where is your sting?” And elsewhere: “He will make us live after two days, on the third day.” So the Sibyl said he would set a limit to death after a three-day sleep: after finishing death’s portion by sleeping the third day, he would return from the dead into the light, first to show the beginning of resurrection to the called. For by overcoming death he acquired life for us. Therefore no other hope of obtaining immortality is given to a human being unless he believes in him and takes up the cross that must be carried and endured.