As for that which we inspire in thee of the Scripture, it is the Truth confirming that which was (revealed) before it.
— Qur’án (Pickthall) 35:31
Once a text has become sacred in a community that reads prophetically, any new discoveries or revelations in that domain are most likely to appear as fulfillments of scripture. The established text confers authority on the new, while the new text confers new (fuller) meaning on the old. Consider for instance the story told in John 2, when Jesus drove the money-changers out of the temple:
And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.
Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?
Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?
But he spake of the temple of his body.
When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.— 17-22, KJV
First the disciples remember Psalm 69 and connect it with the acts of Jesus; this both fulfills the already-sacred text and confirms the act of Jesus as sacred. (The synoptic gospels also have Jesus quoting Jeremiah and Isaiah at this point.) Thereupon the words of Jesus himself become sacred, which entails that even though they are not rightly understood at the time of utterance, they are ‘remembered’ so that their meaning can be clarified later. In this sense, the sacred text is believed before it is understood, and the ‘intended meaning’ of Jesus’ words is constructed (or reconstructed) from the later events which can be retrospectively mapped onto them.
The sacredness of the text and the meaning of it reinforce each other in positive feedback loops; for instance, the opening of John 2 (‘On the third day’) resonates with the overtones of the Resurrection because the three-day interval is associated with it. Note also that the interval between the death and resurrection of Jesus is given in the Gospels as roughly 36 hours (traditionally, from Friday afternoon to early Sunday morning), so that it takes some creative wording (i.e. counting Friday as ‘the first day’) to reconcile it with the ‘three days’ of which Jesus speaks here. All of this reflects the religious reader’s impulse to fit the historical event to the text and vice versa – a special case of the reader’s motivation to find that mutual fit between text and experience that we call meaning.