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Resurrection and Afterlife
by N.T.
Wright
Question: What can reasonably be known
about the views of the afterlife and resurrection held by Jesus, the Pharisees,
and the Sadducees? In particular, why would the Sadducees have found Jesus’s
answer adequate in Luke 20:27-40?
Answer: The point about Jesus’ reply to the Sadducees’ question is
- (a)
that Jesus was going back to the Torah itself (the five books of Moses) which
were the only ones the very conservative Sadducees regarded as
really authoritative, and
- (b)
that God defines himself there in terms of his relationship to Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob.
The underlying point is that
God would not define himself in relationship to people who were now
non-existent.
From all that we can work out
(the evidence is found in various places, from Maccabees to Acts
to Josephus to the Rabbis) that the Pharisees in Jesus’ day believed
in bodily resurrection.
That is, that when God’s
people died they would be with God (in some sense hard to define, and they
didn’t try to define it), until the dawn of the ‘new age’ or ‘the age to come’,
at which point all God’s people would be given new bodies to share in that new
world.
The Sadducees, as far as we
can tell, didn’t believe in that eventual transformation of the world or
of human beings; and so they didn’t believe, either, in any post
mortem ongoing existence.
Resurrection was a dramatic
and revolutionary doctrine; the Sadducees, being the conservative aristocrats,
were naturally anxious about it.
Many Jewish debates function
like chess matches: when it’s obvious that one side is in a winning position,
you don’t bother to play out the final moves.
(A glance through Danby’s
edition of the Mishnah makes this point; often, he has to put a
footnote in explaining, for those of us who are struggling to keep up, that the
point just made meant that the argument was basically over.)
What we have in Jesus’
conversation with the Sadducees was of this sort. Jesus pointed out that God
wouldn’t define himself in terms of non-existent people; ‘memory’ is not good
enough to do the job.
But — and this is the bit we
don’t hear, the last moves of the game which all parties in the discussion
recognized — if they are alive this must be because God will in fact raise
them from the dead.
Modern western readers find
this odd because we are mostly Platonists at heart, unused to thinking of
bodily resurrection, content with a vague ‘life after death’.
That is not the point here.
The challenge of reading the New Testament is to get back into the
minds of first-century Jews who really did believe that God created a good
world and that he really would put it right at last — including raising people
from the dead.
For further reading, you might try The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003)
and Surprised by Hope (2007)
both by N.T. Wright.
N.T. Wright, "Resurrection and
Afterlife", n.p. [cited 22 Apr 2019]. Online: http://bibleodyssey.org/tools/ask-a-scholar/resurrection-and-afterlife
N.T. Wright
Professor, University of St. Andrews
Professor, University of St. Andrews
N.T.
Wright is professor of New Testament and early christianity at the University
of St. Andrews. He is an Anglican priest and former Bishop of Durham. His
numerous publications, both academic and popular, include most recently Paul
and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013).
Sadducees Ask About the Resurrection
27 There came to him some Sadducees, those
who deny that there is a resurrection, 28 and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher,
Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no
children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his
brother.
29 Now there were seven brothers. The first took a
wife, and died without children. 30 And the second 31 and the third took her, and likewise all seven left
no children and died.
32 Afterward the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the
woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”
34 And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry
and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered
worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither
marry nor are given in marriage, 36 for they cannot die
anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God,
being sons of the resurrection.
37 But that the dead are raised, even
Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord
the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.
38 Now he is not God of the dead, but of the
living, for all live to him.”
39 Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher,
you have spoken well.”40 For they no longer dared to ask him any
question.
Luke 20:27-40 English
Standard Version (ESV)
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