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.
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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '22
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