The passage has been brought up by some advocates of praying to saints. I discussed the passage in a post a few years ago.
Keep in mind that Jesus' opponents often accused him of things they and he disapproved of (Matthew 11:19, 12:24). They heard him say "Eli, Eli" (Matthew 27:46), so they had to come up with an explanation. The idea that Jesus' enemies, in the process of misinterpreting what he said, would only attribute to him something that they thought was an acceptable practice, thought was accepted to some significant extent among the Jewish people, or thought Jesus had approved of in the past is ridiculous. It would be like taking 11:19, in the same gospel, as evidence for Jewish and/or Christian support of gluttony and the abuse of alcohol. And the absence of any condemnation of prayer to saints in Matthew 27:47 doesn't tell us that the individuals who made the comment held a positive view of the practice. A lack of condemnation could be a result of agnosticism about the practice or a result of expecting the audience to recognize the problematic nature of the practice without having it explained to them (as in 11:19 and 12:24). Besides, if the individuals who made the comment about Elijah were Romans, what's the relevance of whether they approved of praying to people who are in the afterlife? What Matthew 27:47 tells us is that the concept of prayer to saints was known at the time, but it doesn't tell us whether the concept was viewed positively, neutrally, or negatively or who viewed it that way.
If the passage reflects some degree of Jewish acceptance of prayer to saints, something I see no way to argue for from the passage itself, it falls into the category I discussed in a post earlier this year. Ancient Jewish support for praying to beings other than God was accompanied by Jewish opposition to the practice. That opposition seems to be older, Biblical, and the view that was the dominant one among Christians during the earliest generations of Christianity.
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