hostility of Israel against the word of God spoken through the prophets foretold the enmity of the people against the incarnate Word of God in Jesus (cf. Acts 7:52). Israel’s prophets were consistently hated, excluded, reviled, and spurned as evil, according to Jesus’ own testimony, and suffered all these things because they spoke the word of God, which provoked the disobedience of the people (Luke 6:23). When the Word of God became flesh, the persecution of that word in Christ intensified and found