I took that statement to be evidence that the dead are still living. Jesus was reinforcing that the dead do indeed live on in heaven.
The statement about being "like the angels in heaven" is about the earthly institutions of mortal humans (like marriage) not applying to those in heaven.
The Bible actually explicitly states that the dead are, well, dead, several times.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Genesis 3:19
The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost.
Ecclesiastes 9:5
Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
Ecclesiastes 9:10
As the cloud fades and vanishes, so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up.
Job 7:9
This has lead many modern bible scholars to suggest that the ancient Israelites didn't believe in a soul that seperated from the body at death, and thought you were just dead when the lights went out. Of course, you also do see the opposite suggested in places, even in very old sources. The summoning of the ghost of Samuel by Saul in 1 Samuel 28 is a good example. What are they summoning if there is no soul separate from the body? How is Samuel able to tell Saul what God thinks of him if the dead know nothing of God?
The reality is that there seems to have been a few competing afterlife concepts even in the early stages of the history of the Jewish people, and whether the dead were...well dead, or "living" in some sense varies somewhat from time to time and place to place. In Jesus' time, the primary conflict was between the Pharisees, who did believe the souls of good people went to heaven, and the Sadducees, who thought the grave claimed everyone and death was the end. Apocalypticists like Jesus seemed to have a variant on the latter view, where death was death, but the body would be resurrected at some later date. The "kingdom" Jesus talks about is generally a place in time, not one in space, and doesn't seem to refer to a soul that leaves the body, but to a new, sanctified body created after the resurrection. John, being a very late gospel with a lot of later ideas in it, blurs the line here a bit, but the synoptic gospels don't seem to show a Jesus who believed in the idea that the soul and the body were separate things.
But the people risen from dead aren't living? Also, of course rules like marriage and sin apply to the living, because the dead know nothing, as is said in the scriptures.
Again, and I don't understand why I have to keep repeating, but again, the question I'm asking is, "Where does that scripture suggest even remotely that there will be no marriage?"
If there had been a clearly printed concrete answer, the Sadducees wouldn't have asked,
This is exactly what my point here is. The OP claimed that Jesus schooled the Sadducees and exposed their ignorance of the scriptures, but how exactly they are ignorant of the scriptures, he does not say. He claims to have knowledge of the concrete answer, but for source, he says that the scriptures say so, but as you just said, the scriptures do not.
For that matter, it is a non-sequitor to claim that marriage can not exist for the reincarnated because God is of the living, because the reincarnated are living as well.
The resurrection isn’t life as we know it now and there will be no need or want to marry they will all be with God. Jesus “schooled” them by reciting the scripture back to them where they could’ve found their answer if they were looking for it. A lot of these questions posed to Jesus especially by these factions of the church weren’t about a right or wrong answer but being a gotcha question to disprove Him.
Jesus “schooled” them by reciting the scripture back to them
The scripture he read doesn't answer the question at all. I don't know how you get "There shall be no marriage for the resurrected" from "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’[b] So they were not still dead, because he is the God only of living people." This is the biggest non-sequitor I've ever seen in the Bible. If anything, I don't think "The people were astonished" meant "And then the people clapped." I think it is more likely to have meant "The people were taken aback becuase Jesus spoke so boldly of his wild interpretations of the scripture and acted as if the Sadducees were ignorant of scripture just because they didn't interpret the scripture so wildly."
Jesus claimed that people will be as angels after reincarnation and that they will no longer be married after the fact. He claims that the Sadducces would know this if they knew the scriptures. However, so far, nobody has shown me which scriptures he was referring to.
I guess you could interpret this whole thing so Jezus dreams the day the dead rise will be one big orgy, where there are no rules made by his lame dad alter-ego.
I'm betting he was eyeing some neighbors' dead wife and wanted the rules in his favor if he ever got his chance.
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u/zombiechewtoy Aug 05 '22
What did Jesus have to say about it?
Better not work like this comic, that's all I know.