Killing History by Robert M. Price

Author:Robert M. Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2014-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

KINKY RESURRECTION

One of the most fascinating exchanges between Jesus and the Jewish authorities (Mark 12:18–27) pits him against not the Pharisees, the usual gospel whipping boys, but the Sadducees. O’Reilly and Dugard characterize them as some sort of philosophical demythologizers of Judaism, having absorbed too much influence from the Hellenistic world around them.18 This, supposedly, was why they could be said to reject beliefs such as the end-time resurrection of the dead, like Modernist Protestants.19 The Sadducees were the Jerusalem nobility and dominated the Sanhedrin and the Temple priesthood. Their name comes from the word Syndikoi, Greek for “Syndics,” meaning “councilmen.”20 They were probably arch-traditionalists who rejected as theological innovations the doctrines of the Pharisees and the Essenes, who had borrowed a great deal from the Zoroastrian religion of Persia. These beliefs included angelology, a virgin-born end-times Savior, an apocalyptic end to history, the resurrection of the dead, and the idea of an evil anti-God. The Sadducees scoffed at these ideas as foreign corruptions of Judaism, and thus they dubbed the partisans of these notions “Pharisees,” denoting “Parsees,” “Persians,” in other words, Zoroastrians.21 Sadducees viewed the Jewish adoption of the resurrection doctrine as traditionalist Christians regard suggestions that reincarnation be worked into Christian theology.22

So the Sadducees are depicted as posing a hypothetical question to Jesus that they had probably also asked the Pharisees. Given the law of Levirate marriage, if a man dies without an heir, his brother must try to impregnate his widow. If successful, the son would be considered the dead man's son and heir. Well, suppose such a husband dies, and his widow marries her brother-in-law, but he dies, too, without impregnating her. He had a lot of brothers, but, between them, they had a lot of bad luck. She marries each of them, one after the other, but each husband proves sterile and dies. Finally, she's had it and joins them in the grave. When the trumpet sounds on Resurrection Morning and they are all united in a joyous reunion, uh, which one of the brothers is she going to be married to? Judaism tolerated polygyny, usually when a man's original wife proved infertile, but there was no way Jews were allowing polyandry, one woman with a harem of husbands, though some cultures do. If they had, there would have been no problem. But they didn't.

How is Jesus, himself a believer in the doctrine of resurrection, supposed to get out of this one? He does some fast thinking and says that all earthly marriage bonds will be dissolved in the age to come. Sex will be a thing of the past, because inheritance will be a thing of the past because death will be a thing of the past. Not a bad answer. But, as Morton Smith put it, “That the resurrected are not married is not a legal principle, but an ad hoc revelation.”23 Again, we cannot picture anyone not already believing Jesus is a divine revealer taking this bit of “information” seriously. Not even O’Reilly and Dugard make this a win for Jesus, and it is thus no surprise that they skip it.

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