Mark 12:18-27

The Question of the Resurrection-Life. The Pharisees having withdrawn in confusion, the Sadducees (mentioned here only in Mk., cf. pp. 619f., 624, 637) bring forward a scholastic problem designed to show that the strict carrying out of the Levirate law (p. 109, Deuteronomy 25:5 *, Ruth 1:11 *) would produce an absurd situation in a future life, and therefore the Law does not contemplate a resurrection. Jesus answers that they have not understood the Scriptures, nor the power of God which raises men to a life of a different order from the present. The resurrection-life of the just needs not to be continued by marriage. They are like the angels a comparison which trenches on another Sadducean denial; for the Sadducees did not believe in angels (Acts 2:38). The argument from Exodus 3:6 embodies a somewhat Rabbinic interpretation of the passage, but it rests on the feeling which does not allow the faithful to admit that a good God ceases, through the death of those who have served and loved Him, to be their God, or that He abandons them to nothingness. Those who have lived for God can never be dead for Him (Loisy). It used to be supposed that Jesus argues here from a passage in the Pentateuch in order to impress the Sadducees, but the idea of the Fathers, that the Sadducees recognised the Pentateuch only as Scripture, is now abandoned (HNT).