Where Did Jesus Die? — Page 12
? 12 saints are made to pop up like Jonah’s gourd in the night, for no purpose at all but to wither in the morning. 1 No doubt if we take Matthew literally, we have to face all these questions, but the truth is that this verse, as Ahmad the Promised Messiah writes, refers to a vision seen by certain righteous men, and it is well-known that such visions are capable of interpreta- tion, as Joseph interpreted the dream of Pharaoh. It is most interesting that in an Arabic book Ta‘tir-ul-Anam (page 289), on the interpretation of dreams and written over 600 years ago by a leading authority on the subject, Shaikh Abdul- Ghani Nablusi, we read: If anyone sees in a dream that the dead have come out of their graves and have made for their homes, the interpreta- tion of this is: that a great man who is in prison would be released from the prison and would be rescued. Now as this vision was seen at the time of the resurrection, the inference is obvious that his death was only apparent and that in consequence of the swoon which led his persecutors to believe that he was dead his release from the sepulchre in which he had been lodged was effected. In short, this vision seen by certain God-fearing persons revealed to them that Jesus was not dead but was like a prisoner in the tomb from whence he escaped to a place of safety. 1. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine