A brother in Christ who read the article pointed out to me, though, that though Jesus was dead, He was not latent! Try to keep in mind that dying is absolutely not like going to sleep and never waking up. When the body dies, it becomes inactive; the spirit of man, however, is eternal. When you die, you will leave your useless body, but the real you will go somewhere else. When Jesus died, He died physically and He also died spiritually; Romans 6:23 says that the proper reward for sin is death. Sin is a spiritual act; the "wages" you earn through sin are spiritual wages... spiritual death. In order to take that punishment on Himself, Jesus had to receive those spiritual wages: spiritual death. But when Jesus left His mortal body on the cross, He had some work to do! Ephesians 4:9-10 says that before Jesus "ascended" (which happened after His resurrection), he "descended" into the Earth. I Peter 3:18-19 says that when Jesus died, he "preached to the spirits in prison"... a phrase that is often taken to mean that Jesus went to the place where people who died before He came to the Earth were ("in prison") and gave them the chance to recieve the Gospel about Himself. Going back to Ephesians, verse 8 of that same passage (which quotes Psalm 68:18) indicates that some of those "captives" followed Jesus out of their "prison" when He was resurrected! That might explain the incidents recorded in Matthew 27:52-53 right after Jesus' death.
The passages I have just shared with you have sometimes been the subject of controversy. Study the Scriptures yourself and make up your own mind about what happened between Jesus' last breath on the cross, and the first time someone saw Him alive again. But the most important things to understand are that Jesus rose from the dead as God's "firstborn"; (Colossians 1:18, Revelation 1:4-5) we are able to rise again to spiritual life from our sinful, spiritually dead state, because Jesus did so! And in order for Him to rise from the dead, He had to have been dead in the first place.
Scripture quotations drawn from The Bible Gateway at Gospel Communications Network.