How Are The Dead Raised?
HOW ARE THE DEAD RAISED?
MATTHEW 22:23-33
The Sadducees didn’t believe in life after death—that’s why they were “sad, you see”!
The Sadducees, the aristocratic party to which most of the chief-priestly families belonged, regarded themselves as conservatives in theology and rejected the Pharisaic “tradition of the elders” (cf. 15:2), sticking to the literal application of the written law. They repudiated the doctrine of bodily resurrection as a post-exilic innovation (cf. Acts 23:8). They understood resurrection (as indeed some of its proponents envisaged it) in terms of a restoration to the conditions of bodily life on earth; hence their improbable story (22:25-27) with the following question (22:28) was intended to expose the absurdity of such a belief. The command of Moses summarized in 22:24 is the law of levirate marriage (cf. Deuteronomy 25:5-10; Ruth 3:1ff.). No doubt the conundrum was one with which they were accustomed to embarrass their Pharisaic rivals. But Jesus assured them that their question revealed ignorance both of the nature of resurrection (as an act of divine power) and of their own Scriptures. Resurrection did not mean the resumption of former conditions of biological life and reproduction, but a new order of existence (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:35ff.), sexless as the angels (22:30).
It is inaccurate to say, as has sometimes been said, that the Sadducees’ canon was restricted to the Pentateuch (this was true rather of the Samaritans); but they would certainly venerate it as supremely authoritative, and Jesus appealed to it rather than to (say) Isaiah 26:19 or Daniel 12:2 (the latter of which they may well not have acknowledged as canonical). Instead of quoting this or that proof-text, he grounded the doctrine of resurrection securely in the being and character of God. The God who could call himself the God of men long since dead (Exodus 3:6) showed by doing so that in relation to him they were not dead: “He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (22:32). “What does not die to God does not die to itself” (Augustine).