Replies

SR: "...the context for this statement is not that of disembodied souls, waiting fro the resurrection, but those who have actually been raised."

MD: Jesus speaks directly, specifically, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by name. Are you saying they had been bodily raised?

Are you saying Paul is wrong to speak of the dead in Christ?

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
(1 Thessalonians 4:16)

Because these passages don't cancel each other out. Both must be true, agreed?

And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye therefore do greatly err.
(Mark 12:26-27)

The truth is, this resolves very easily. In each of the parallel passages, what is the question being addressed?

"And as touching the dead, that they rise:"

Jesus is not addressing some other question. For example, if they had asked, "what do people do up there before they are raised from the dead," then Jesus had given His "God of the living" answer, you would have a case. But that's not what happened. When I write a legal memorandum, I have to lock down the subject matter which I am about to address, so I put a "Question Presented" section at the top, and everything that follows is understood to be tied to that question. In this passage, the "question presented" is whether the dead rise.

The setting for this question, as I am sure you are aware, is that there were some, the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, because they claimed it wasn't taught in the Pentateuch (Moses' five books), and in their minds, nothing outside the Pentateuch was binding, effectively no more than commentary on the law. The Pharisees, OTOH, who believed in the resurrection, had this one right, sort of, although they also had some wrong ideas about it too, such as the belief you were raised in pretty much exactly the physical state you died. But the real fly in the ointment was the Pharisees hadn't ever come up with a good argument for the resurrection from the Pentateuch. The Sadducees, by rejecting everything outside the Pentateuch as mere commentary on the law, were able to evade the force of passages such as the one in Daniel that makes a direct case for the resurrection, giving them license to live without regard to an afterlife.

So they brought this hot-button question to Jesus, probably thinking they could stump Him too, which would discredit Him. It didn't work, as usual, because He addressed it, with a text from the Pentateuch, that made a case neither side could dispute. No doubt this answer confounded both parties. It despoiled the safe little world the Sadducees had created for themselves by deleting so much of God's inspired word from their de facto canon, and it refuted the bizarre misconceptions the Pharisees had built up around the resurrection by adding to the word of God.

Bottom line, when you finally get to how Jesus answered this specific question, it is clear He is addressing the truth that God does raise the dead. This is what I said in my first post. The fact that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are mentioned by name only confirms one fact with respect to the question presented, that God Himself, speaking in the burning bush, was seeing past their present state of death and looking at them in terms of their resurrection life, therefore it is proper to believe in the resurrection. This does not discredit Paul's teaching, in which Paul is addressing the reality that even Christian people must deal with death for a short while, but that this condition is temporary, and will give way to the resurrection, just as God implies in the burning bush.

Peace,

SR