Commenting on this alleged prodigy, the rending of the veil, Strauss says: "Now the object of the divine Providence in effecting such a miracle could only have been this: to produce in the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus a deep impression of the importance of his death, and to furnish the first promulgators of the gospel with a fact to which they might appeal in support of their cause. But, as Schleiermacher has shown, nowhere else in the New Testament, either in the apostolic epistles or in Acts, or even in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in connection with the subject of which it could scarcely fail to be suggested, is this event mentioned: on the contrary, with the exception of this bare Synoptical notice, every trace of it is lost; which could scarcely have been the case if it had really formed a ground of apostolical argument. Thus the divine purpose in ordaining this miracle must have totally failed, or, since this is inconceivable, it cannot have been ordained for this object--in other words, since neither any other object of the miracle, nor yet a mode in which the event might happen naturally can be discovered, it cannot have happened at all" (Leben Jesu, p. 789). 372 Matthew declares that the dead arose on the day of the crucifixion. When did they come out of their graves? Not until after Christ's resurrection, which did not occur until the following week. "And many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection" (Matt. xxvii, 52, 53). "They were polite enough to sit in their open graves and wait for Christ to rise first."--Ingersoll. 373 From what source was Matthew's story regarding these marvelous events derived? From Zechariah: "And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the East, and the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof ... and half of the mountain shall remove toward the North, and half of it toward the South.... Ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah King of Judah; and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear" (xiv, 4-6).