I like to compare the Sadducees with Unitarians. In the mid-1700s, many Puritans in northern New England decided to reexamine their Christianity in the light of “modern thinking” and get rid of anything in it they couldn’t believe; anything which sounded too much to them like superstition or myth. They didn’t believe in miracles, couldn’t fathom the Trinity, doubted Jesus being God, thought hell and certain commands and practices barbaric; so out they went. And what’s left? Unitarianism: A religion with one God. But he doesn’t do anything. If he works at all, it’s only through science. Jesus is nice, but equal to any great thinker. Maybe you go to heaven when you die; some Unitarians still hold to the afterlife, but it’s the only supernatural thing they permit themselves. If that.
Sadducees are the ancient Unitarians. In the second century BCE, in the light of advanced, enlightened Greek philosophy, certain Jews simply ditched everything in the Hebrew religion they could no longer believe: Out went all the confusing books written after Deuteronomy. Out went miracles, angels, resurrection—’cause Plato taught we become pure spirit after we die, and humans have always liked that idea much better. Any miracles in their truncated bible were explained away as ancient superstition. Yes, they had anti-supernatural snobbery back then too.
Sadducees were a minor denomination till Judea’s priest-king Yohanan Hyrcanus (164-104BCE), who grew tired of the Pharisees trying to boss him around, quit them and joined the Sadducees, along with the rest of his family and the bulk of the temple’s priests. Imagine what’d happen if the U.S. Congress had it up to here with the Christian Right, and converted en masse to Buddhism. Well, that’s how big the shake-up was then. But the fallout wasn’t just political: The family which ran the nation didn’t just join a denomination which didn’t believe their LORD interacted with humanity in any miraculous way. These people were running the temple—the very symbol of how God did interact with humanity.
Well you can’t fire kings, except through assassination. Which sometimes happened. But even so, all the leading priests, and their successors, were Sadducees. And that was the situation in Jesus’s day: The guys who ran the temple were Sadducees. Common priests, like Zechariah might believe differently about God, but their bosses were Sadducees, and that was that. It wasn’t a big sect, but because the leading priests were in it, it was a mighty sect.
Getting into it with Jesus.
We don’t bump into the Sadducees much in the bible. Whenever Jesus interacted with religious people, ’twas nearly always Pharisees. They were the only denomination with synagogues, and that’s where Jesus taught. But every denomination went to temple, and Sadducees ran it. So at some point, when Jesus taught in temple, they got into a discussion about the resurrection: Sadducees didn’t believe in it, but Jesus is the resurrection.
Sadducees, who say there’s no resurrection, came to
Jesus . They were asking questions, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote us that when a brother died and left behind a woman, yet hadn’t produced children, then his brother ought to marry the woman and raise up seed for his brother.“There were seven brothers. The oldest took a wife, didn’t produce children, and died. The second took her—and died, leaving behind no seed. The third likewise, and all seven, producing no seed. Last of all, the woman also died. “In the resurrection, whose woman is she? Seven people had her has wife.”
Jesus told them,
“Here’s why you’re confused: You’ve not experienced the scriptures, nor God’s power. Once people are resurrected from the dead, they don’t mate; they aren’t married. They’re like the heavenly angels instead.
“As for the dead being raised: In the book about Moses at the bush, when God told him, ‘I, Abraham’s god, Isaac’s god, and Jacob’s god’ —don’t you remember he’s not the god of the dead, but the living? You’re greatly mistaken.” —
Levirate marriage.
The Sadducees’ story of the seven brothers strikes us as utterly weird, because this isn’t a custom our culture practices. It’s called levirate marriage (not from Levi, Moses’s ancestor, but from the Latin word levir/“brother-in-law”): When a widow marries her brother-in-law. It predates the bible, but in Deuteronomy, Moses spelled out how the Hebrews were to practice it.
When brothers live together, and one of them dies and has no son, the dead man’s woman mustn’t be sent away, to
marry some strange man. Her brother-in-law will come to heraid , and take her as his woman, as brothers-in-law should. The first boy she begets will inherit the name of his brother, who died. His name won’t be wiped out from Israel.If the man doesn’t want to take his sister-in-law, his sister-in-law will go up to the elders at the
town gate and say, “He refused to do as brothers-in-law should, to continue his brother’s name in Israel. He won’t consent to do as brothers-in-law should.” The town elders will summon and speak to him.
If he standshis ground and says, “I don’t want to take her,” his sister-in-law will approach him in the sight of the elders, pull his sandal from his foot, spit in his face, and respond saying, “This is what you do to the man who won’t build his brother’s house.” Israel will call him beit khaluch-ha-na’al/“the house of the pulled-off sandal.”—Moses,
Obviously this isn’t the norm for our culture. Not that brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law don’t marry, but nowadays it’s out of love, not obligation. (And a lot of Americans find it creepy, ’cause they’re family and it borders on that whole incest taboo.) But the reason Moses took this ancient social custom and put it in the Law, was to create some sort of social safety net for widows. Because men, not women, inherited property back then, if a man had no sons his brother—not his wife—inherited his property, and his wife was left destitute. This system guaranteed she wouldn’t be.
Well, unless the brother refused to do his duty. Since the only punishment for not doing your duty was a public shaming, I expect if a brother was greedy enough (or the woman was obnoxious enough) he’d be willing to accept embarrassment. But I’m not sure how consistent the Hebrews were at practicing this deterrent. Read Ruth: Boaz went to negotiate with Ruth’s late husband’s next-of-kin for her. The other fellow didn’t seem to worry much about passing the buck to Boaz: He pulled off his own sandal and handed it over. The author interpreted this as how people usually did things back then. So while levirate marriage was practiced, don’t assume it was always practiced. The Law described how people were meant to behave, just like the Sermon on the Mount describes how we Christians ought to act… but notice the way we put the Sermon into practice, and never assume the Hebrews were any better at keeping the Law.
Relationships and the resurrection.
The Sadducees presented Jesus with this improbable—but entirely possible—scenario: One bride for seven brothers. One by one, they take her in, but no progeny ever comes of it, and they all die. But their question wasn’t about levirate marriage: It was about the resurrection.
People have always assumed when we finally encounter our loved ones after death—whether it’s by resurrection, or some eternal afterlife—we’re just gonna pick up right where we left off. If you’ve seen Titanic (and it’s a 15-year-old movie, so yeah I’m gonna spoil it) the couple, parted by death earlier in the film, are once again reunited at the end, in some sort of creepy afterlife in the no-longer-sunken boat. (Creepy because these are the people they’re spending eternity with? Including her social-climbing mom and her homicidal fiancé? That’s not Paradise; at best it’s Purgatory. But I digress.) Pagans regularly assume that when spouses die, in heaven they just go right back to being couples. When your child dies, you’ll meet ’em again in heaven, and go right back to raising them, for they somehow never got older, though dead for decades. You’ll see your pets again… though I bet you’ve given nary a thought to the thousands of animals you’ve eaten. Imagine how many chickens are up there, vengefully waiting for you….
Anywho. This was the Sadducees’ poser to Jesus: Whose wife is this woman? The first brother’s? The last’s? Whichever brother she didn’t poison? (Oh come on; it had to have crossed your mind.) Whichever brother she lived with longest, or loved her most, or best? Or would it be some kind of weird polygamous setup? This was likely a question the Sadducees had pitched to Pharisees before, and used it to make ’em squirm with inferior explanations. So now they brought it to Jesus, to see what the Master said.
Revelation comes by experience.
Jesus began with the heart of their problem:
The flaw in this interpretation is the Sadducees did know the scriptures. (Well, Genesis through Deuteronomy, anyway.) Lack of knowledge wasn’t the issue. It was a lack of experience. The word Jesus used, which tends to be translated “know,” is eidótes/“having seen”—meaning something you knew by seeing. The Sadducees had knowledge of the bible and God. But they had no relationship with either. The bible was, for them, the rulebook on how to do their jobs as priests, and the source of brain-teasers for visiting rabbis. It wasn’t a lifestyle to practice, and in so following God, they’d actually get to meet him. From what they knew, he didn’t work that way.
From what a lot of Christians believe, he still doesn’t work that way. It’s why they don’t follow him. It’s why they bend the scriptures every which way, hoping to squeeze a few more drops of knowledge out of it if they wring it just right, but they never pursue a living relationship with God, and they dismiss his power as if it doesn’t happen in these enlightened times. Too many Christians share the Sadducees’ unbelief, as well as their lack of experiences. And if Jesus were to visit, they wouldn’t ask him, “Tell us about the Father!” Instead, they’d ask, “Settle this for me”—and ask about all the inane, petty little questions and doubts they’ve had about the scriptures and the cosmos. (That’s what they do to me once they find out I’m a theologian. That, or they tell me their theories, as if they have any good theology to base ’em on.)
The Sadducees weren’t rebuked because they didn’t know bible, because they’d never have found the answer to their question in the bible: Neither the Law, nor the whole of the Old Testament, described how marriage works in the resurrection. If you wanted to know how resurrection worked, you needed revelation. You needed the Holy Spirit to give you the answer. Which is awfully hard to do if you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit—or believe he stopped working back in bible times. It all comes back to experience: If you’ve experienced God, you’ll really know how he thinks. You’ll realize he’s trying to make all things new. You’ll realize he intends to make all relationships new—so in the resurrection, he’s gonna reset all of them. All marriages undone. Parents and children remade as sisters and brothers. Racism, sexism, castes, and economic status abolished. Those of us who experience the power of God realize that’s he’s already doing this. Those of us who don’t, are still trying to cling to the old systems of patriarchy and segregation and materialism and marriage-the-way-it’s-always-been… and trying their darnedest to institutionalize them, and thinking they’re fighting the devil instead of the Spirit.
But since the Sadducees couldn’t see this for themselves, that’s okay. Jesus can work with us at whatever level we’re at. He spelled it out for them: After the resurrection, no more marriage. You know, like the angels. Except the Sadducees, I remind you, didn’t believe in angels. So Jesus was here reminding them about one more thing they were wrong about.
As for resurrection…
Jesus ended with an appeal to their bible knowledge, plus some basic logic:
The reason the Sadducees were greatly mistaken was because they had put all their chips on the bet that there’s no resurrection. And if there’s no resurrection—if this life is the only existence we get—then your sole duty is to enjoy it as much as possible, to eat and drink because we can’t enjoy it once dead. But self-interest doesn’t include loving our neighbors, or even loving God for that matter. And if we’re gonna violate everything God stands for, in the pursuit of enjoying a meaningless life, what good are we for the Kingdom?
Death isn’t the end. Death is temporary. It looks final, but it’s a hiccup in our eternal existence. And if we’re meant to live in the Kingdom forever, get ready: Live in it now. The Sadducees believed in neither resurrection nor the Kingdom. Functionally they were no better than atheists. Sad to say, a lot of Christians repeat their error. And in his teaching to the Sadducees, Jesus was trying to warn them away. God isn’t an interesting intellectual argument: He’s our Father. Know him. Follow him. Let him give you eternal life.