As we ponder Jesus’ confrontation with the Sadducees regarding life in the world to come, we are compelled to ask, “Do I believe in resurrection?” How one answers this question orients how we live today. It is a question that is not so much answered intellectually, though it is not beyond reason, as in the ordering of our loves. Who or what is our true love? Do we find our loves fulfilled in the living God or in the promises of this world?

To answer yes to resurrection is not a polemic against this world or our embodied nature, for the promise of resurrection of which Jesus speaks is not the denigration of our bodies or the rejection of our wholeness but the goal of our being. At some point we will all die; and that reality, and the hope of a future resurrection, does not diminish the importance of this life but makes it all the more significant.

The Sadducees, who answered no to resurrection, have tradition and, it seems, the Torah on their side. Apart from Dn 12:1–4, little is said about resurrection in the Old Testament. The Sadducees, a priestly, elite party, accepted the authority only of the Torah, and they did not find there any claims to resurrection. Indeed, what they found in the Torah was the law of levirate marriage, outlined in Dt 25:5–10. If a man died childless, his nearest male kin was to marry his widow, and the first child born to them was considered the child of the dead man, “so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (Dt 25:6).

The Sadducees propose to Jesus a ludicrous scenario as a means of demonstrating the foolishness of belief in resurrection. A woman was married to seven brothers, one after another, all of whom died childless. “Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman 
be? For the seven had 
married her.” Jesus does 
not dismiss the question
 as foolish or reject it as a carefully designed trap, but
 uses it as an opportunity to teach.

First, Jesus says that marriage is about this world and the things of this world, not about the world to come, so the carefully crafted conundrum is rejected. Second, Jesus draws on a passage from Exodus in which God says to Moses that he is “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (3:15). Jesus understands this as proof of the resurrection, for if God speaks of the current existence of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, this demonstrates that “he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

It is striking biblical interpretation, head-spinning really, for it suggests the untapped depth of Scripture, but it was an essential proof for those who accepted the scriptural authority of the Torah alone.

In fact, however, the majority of Jews in Jesus’ day believed in resurrection, as had been the case since the Hellenistic period. Most groups, like the Pharisees, accepted resurrection, and many texts written in this period speak of it directly and often. But Jesus’ interpretation grounds belief in resurrection not just in a text the Sadducees would accept but, more important, in the nature of the living God as one who gives life to his creation and sustains that life beyond the limits of our understanding: the dead are never lost to God.


This belief and hope are seen in the seven Jewish martyrs of 2 Maccabees, all brothers, and in martyrs today, who offer their lives not out of a lust for suffering or as rejection of this world, but in trust of the living God. As the mother of the Maccabean martyrs says to them: “It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again” (2 Mc 7:22–23). This world and our choices matter, for it is the beginning of a life that God has ordered to go on forever.

This article appears in November 4 2013.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.