Sadducean Difficulties

S. Mark xii. 18–27

The chief actors in the last scene were Pharisees; in this they are Sadducees. It has been a common practice to condemn both in the same breath and in unmeasured terms; but such a course is hardly justifiable. The Pharisee, whichever way we look at him, has something reprehensible in his character. The Sadducee, on the contrary, though holding doctrines from which the Christian instinct naturally recoils, has in him much that may enlist our sympathy. Modern writers speak of him commonly as a freethinker, or sceptic, or infidel; he met with a more generous reception at the hands of our Lord. It is quite true that Christ condemned Sadducean tenets, and warned people against them, but there is none of the scathing denunciations with which He repelled the hypocritical Pharisee. He read their hearts, and saw that many of them were honest men with honest doubts, to whom the common arguments appealed to by their brethren carried no conviction.

In illustration of this contrast of treatment we need refer only to the controversy about the Tribute-money, and to this on the Resurrection. Of the Pharisees in the former He asks indignantly, “Why tempt ye Me, ye hypocrites?” To the Sadducees in the latter He offers the firm but gentle remonstrance, “Do ye not therefore err?”

Now, the Sadducean tenets were, for the most part, negative. They are well summed up by S. Paul in the words, “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit.” It was on the first of these questions that they engaged in dispute with our Lord in the Temple. They disbelieved in the immortality of the soul, but the point on which they raised the present controversy was the resurrection of the body. It was provoked, no doubt, in a measure by the strong materialistic views held by the Pharisees, who even disputed whether a man would rise in the very clothes in which he had been buried; and we cannot but think that they wished to expose their rivals by the somewhat coarse and grotesque form in which they shaped their inquiry. They appealed to a law * which had received the sanction of Moses, and been generally recognised as Divine.

Seven brethren in succession, they imagined, had married the same woman. If, as common Pharisaic teaching implied, even physical human relationships would be reproduced in the risen life, “whose wife shall she be of the seven?” They thought that if they could show that a restoration of these earthly conditions in another world was simply impossible, the whole theory of the resurrection would fall to the ground. Jesus might have replied that by the Jewish law she was the real x wife of the first, and if marriage ties were to be preserved hereafter she would continue so; but He chose rather to give a full and complete answer to the whole question. He told them that they erred in their general denial of the resurrection through ignorance of Scripture. There were many passages in which it was taught with unmistakable clearness; it may be He had in His mind such a confession as Job had made: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God;” or the words of the Psalmist: “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption;” or of Isaiah: “Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise;” or of Daniel: “Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Why He did not actually quote any of these, but referred to another, in which the doctrine is only taught inferentially, we shall see presently.

Then, having charged them with going astray through ignorance of what was revealed on the fact of the future life, He went on to show that they were in no less error from an inability to recognise the power of God, Who might reproduce the old relationships in the other world, but under new and altered conditions. Marriage had been instituted to provide for the continuance of the human race: it was “the counterpoise of death;” but just as there was no death among the angels, so would it be with risen men and women hereafter; “neither can they die any more.”

“Marriages,” says S. Augustine, “are on account of children; children on account of succession; succession on account of death; where therefore there is no death, neither is there any marriage.”

Our Lord did not teach, as has been hastily assumed, that there would be no reunion in the future world. He does not say that husbands and wives will be no more to each other than those who have been bound merely by common friendship. That tie, which was held so sacred, so transcendently superior to every other, that it was selected to typify Christ’s union with His Church, must have some recognition in the perfect state; but Christ leaves no doubt that all that is “of the earth earthy” will have passed out of it when we meet in heaven. Where love is purified from all carnal alloy, where envy and jealousy have been wholly cast out, there will be nothing even to make such a reunion as the Sadducees sneered at, only under conditions of which they took no cognisance, incompatible with perfect happiness.

Our Lord, then, having exposed Sadducean misconceptions as to the mode of the future life suggested by this inquiry, gives a direct proof of man’s immortality. He takes it from the books of Moses. The reason commonly assigned for the selection is a belief that the Sadducees rejected all Scripture except the Pentateuch. But it is pure supposition. Josephus, who is very explicit upon their doctrines, does not even allude to it. Another reason may be easily found. The ground upon which the Sadducees denied the resurrection was that Moses had not taught it. It is quite impossible for us to understand the intense reverence which a Jew, and a Sadducean Jew in particular, felt for Moses. Upon Divine things he was the one authoritative teacher, the one man whose word was indisputable, whose interpretation of the Mind and Will of God claimed an unquestioned acceptance. Prophets may have had dreams, and seers seen visions, but Moses alone had talked with God “face to face.”

Now, the Sadducees argued, Moses said nothing about the resurrection of the body or a future life. The Pharisees answered that though there might be nothing in the Written Word, yet there was abundance in the Oral Law which Moses had received, and wherever the Pentateuch failed, Tradition stepped in to clear up the difficulty.

But this the Sadducee steadily refused to admit. He asked for the evidence of its Divine origin, and he was dissatisfied with that which was produced, as he well might be. The reason why our Lord confined Himself in His reply to Mosaic teaching, even at the risk of being misunderstood, when He had really so many other proofs ready to hand, was that He recognised the Sadducee’s position. In that paragraph 2 of the Second Book which told how God had revealed Himself to the great Lawgiver in the Burning Bush, a declaration of the Almighty had been preserved which taught the truth of man’s immortality. “I,” said Jehovah, “am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Now when He said this nearly two hundred years had elapsed since the last of these had been laid in the grave, and their bodies had long ago crumbled to dust; but if God was when He spoke still their God, they could not have ceased to be, and there must be a sense in which they were alive unto Him — for He is not “the God of the dead, but the God of the living.”

It was an entirely new revelation to them, for though they had read the words again and again, the profound truth which underlaid them had never been brought to light till then. Whether the Sadducees were convinced or not, we are not told; all we know is that their mouth was stopped, that they were completely “gagged,” 3 as the Evangelists say. There is no doubt of the impression produced upon the bystanders. The difficulty had often been a subject of dispute in the schools, but no Rabbi, not even Hillel or Shammai, had been able to meet it as the Sadducees demanded that it should be met. But here was another proof that Jesus taught man “not as the Scribes,” and that “He spake as never man spake;” for “when the multitude heard this,” we are told that “they were astonished at His teaching,” and the Scribes were unable to conceal their admiration for what He had said.

1 To some the argument might appear weak if it rested on a passage which required careful explanation to bring out its meaning. If its bearing on the resurrection had been at all obvious, it would not have been passed over uniformly, as it was, before our Lord drew attention to it.

Note: This was called the Levirate Law, from Levir, a brother-in-law.

Note: It has been suggested that it was a “stock question” for discussion in the Rabbinical schools. Chrysostom, Theophylact, and others, suggest that it was a purely imaginative case; others interpret it as historically true. The Sadducees lay stress upon the woman’s childlessness throughout, lest it should be answered that she was the real wife of the one to whom she bore a child.

Note: This is clear from the fact that to whichever of the successive husbands a child was born, it was accounted legally the child of the first.

Note: He may also have intended to point to those passages which showed that there would not only be a resurrection but a transformation. Cf. Phil. iii. 2i; i Cor. xv. 44. V. IS-27

Note: Josephus says they denied that unwritten Tradition was binding on the conscience.” Cf. p. 147.

Note: “In the Bush “means in the section of Scripture so called, as in Rom. xi. 2, “Of Elias,” A. V., iv ‘HXlq., i.e. probably in the section about him. So 2 Sam. i. was ‘’The Bow.” Gen. i. “In the beginning” was the title given to the paragraph on Creation.

Note: etpl/Auae, i.e. put a muzzle upon them. Cf. p. 96, n. 1.