Jesus defends the doctrine of resurrection not with a simple proof text, but by drawing a theological conclusion based on the nature of God’s covenant relationship with the patriarchs. He took into account the whole message of the Pentateuch to argue for the resurrection. If the Lord is presently the covenant God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then they are still alive, and there must be a resurrection.

The final week of Jesus’s earthly ministry was an ultimate test of his authority. After his authoritative cleansing of the temple, the religious establishment—threatened and enraged—mounted a series of public attacks designed to discredit him. They challenged his authority, questioned his political loyalty, and finally, in a pivotal encounter recorded in Luke 20, they attacked his theological core. This final challenge, brought by the influential Sadducees, centered on the doctrine of the resurrection, and their crafty question would become the backdrop for one of Jesus’s most profound displays of divine wisdom.

The Challengers: Power, Profit, and Pride

Verse 27 identifies these religious leaders as Sadducees. The Sadducees were a small but wealthy and influential group in Israel. Most of the chief priests of the temple were Sadducees who profited from the commerce that took place there, and they formed a majority of the Sanhedrin, the 70 leaders of Israel. According to the historian Josephus, these men were rigorous enforcers of Jewish law, but they used it to browbeat the people. They saw themselves as “protectors of the pure faith,” but in reality, they used rigid enforcement of God’s law to protect their power and control.

These powerful and oppressive leaders now saw Jesus as a threat. He was attracting large crowds who hung on his words. His disciples had just lauded him as King when he rode into Jerusalem. Crucially, Jesus had just driven the merchants out of the temple, which was a direct threat to the Sadducees’ source of wealth. Envy grew, and as we read in Luke 19:47, they sought to destroy him.

However, they couldn’t simply attack or arrest him because they feared the people who loved Jesus. As aristocrats, they wanted to appear respectable and above the fray. So they began to scheme, devising what they believed were clever and deceptive ways to undermine Jesus’s influence. Luke describes their tactics in verse 23 as “craftiness.” They thought if they could just trap Jesus into saying the wrong thing, they could prove he couldn’t be trusted and destroy his ministry. They used carefully crafted trick questions and spies to try to catch him, but they could not.

The Trap: A Question of Resurrection

While the Sadducees were likely involved in all three challenges, they are explicitly identified here because this challenge was connected with one of their core theological distinctives. Verse 27 tells us that Sadducees deny that there is a resurrection. They were pure materialists who believed there is nothing after this life. They put all their hope in this life only, which likely explains their preoccupation with earthly wealth and power. People consumed with accruing money and influence in this life often demonstrate that they do not truly believe in the afterlife.

How could these rigorous enforcers of biblical law deny a resurrection? The Old Testament clearly teaches life after death. Psalm 49:15 says, “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.” Daniel 12:2 states, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” The Sadducees, however, were selective biblicists. They enforced only those parts of Scripture that allowed them to maintain their status, and they rejected texts that taught things they didn’t like. In particular, they prioritized the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, as the only truly authoritative Scripture. The rest of the Old Testament was, to them, just fallible commentary.

This led them to their denial of the resurrection. They argued that there is no chapter-and-verse proof text for the resurrection in the Pentateuch, and if there is no explicit proof text, then there is no resurrection. This was the doctrine they chose to try to trip Jesus up and prove that he was theologically unsound. They knew Jesus believed in and taught the resurrection (Luke 14:14), so they saw the perfect issue to demonstrate that he was a teacher who believed something with no scriptural support. To do this, they used a question they had no doubt used before to stump others, one designed to mock the very idea of a resurrection as absurd.

Since they believed only in the Pentateuch, they raised an issue from Moses’s teaching regarding levirate marriage in Deuteronomy 25:5: “If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.”

On the basis of this teaching, the Sadducees raised a hypothetical situation. Suppose there are seven brothers who, because each of them dies in turn without an heir, are all married to the same woman. Then the woman dies. With a haughty grin, they ask the trick question: “In the resurrection, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.” These men considered themselves very clever. They were sure Jesus would have to give an absurd answer, and they would have him trapped.

The Master’s Reply: Correcting the Premise

Jesus’s answer, however, was brilliant. First, he revealed that they had no understanding of the nature of the resurrection in the first place. Their question was based on the false assumption that there will be marriage after the resurrection. Jesus corrected them: there will be no need for marriage, because those who are resurrected cannot die anymore. We will be immortal, like the angels.

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